Steve Jobs was a visionary leader, who preferred a centralized command structure in order to execute his visions. He rallied people around his vision, getting a high degree of buy-in, and in the process was able to build a leading consumer products company. He founded Apple and guided it to early success. After his ouster, the company lost its way, but when Jobs came back into the company, he was able to guide the company to incredible success, leaving it as the largest company in the world by market cap. This paper examines Jobs the entrepreneur, and visionary leader who was able to transform the way that people interact with their technology.
Steve Jobs has long been a compelling figure in American business. He was raised in California by his adoptive parents. After high school, Jobs attended Reed College in Oregon, but dropped out shortly thereafter. After this time, he visited India to spend time in an ashram, and stayed for several months. On returning to the U.S., he met Steve Wozniak, while Jobs was still in high school. Wozniak and Jobs would later be two of Apple's three founders. Wozniak had designed the first two Apple computers himself, and Jobs' role in the company was to sell the computers.
Jobs had recruited Pepsi CEO John Sculley to run Apple, and it was the power struggle between the two that led to Jobs leaving Apple. He would later return over the Sculley tenure ended, and Jobs was the CEO of the company from that point until his death. While Apple was a revolutionary company in the early 1980s, it was the company's renaissance under Jobs that would be his ultimate legacy.
Jobs' success came on the basis of his business acumen. It was his vision that drove his success, in addition to his perfectionism. Wozniak developed the first Apple computers, but it was Jobs that had the vision for that to not only be a computer, but for the personal computer to be the way of the future for society. That was the vision that drove the early success at Apple, and which was repeated with later hit products like the iPhone and iPad.
Jobs was also successful with Pixar, the venture he helped start in between time at Apple. After a series of hit movies, Pixar was purchased by collaborator Disney, and was ultimately the source of much of Jobs' wealth. He sat on the Board at Disney and was considered to be an influential figure there.
Management Style
Jobs' successes are public knowledge, with numerous biographies written about his childhood, who his parents were and all that David Copperfield sort of nonsense. The key to Jobs' success was that he was able to combine vision and dedication with his perfectionism. There are many highly-intelligent, perfectionist CEOs. What distinguished Jobs was his vision, wanting to always anticipate the trends in the world, an then lead the world to his vision. When he did this with personal computers with the early Macs, it entrenched his reputation as a visionary and allowed his company to buy into his vision, completely
Westley and Mintzberg (1989) outlined five different archetypes of the visionary leader -- the creator, the proselytizer, the idealist, the bricoleur and the diviner. Among these archetypes, they specifically named Jobs as the quintessential proselytizer, characterized by "foresight, imagination, holistics, entrepreneurial" among other traits, and having a market focus. He did not create his products, but was the visionary behind their design features, and understood before they had been created exactly how they would be used in the marketplace. The authors describe him as evangelical in his wanting to show people the potential of the product.
Westley and Mintzberg (1989) also point out that Jobs' leadership style was challenging for many at Apple, even though the company was successful. His perfectionist nature rubbed a lot of good people the wrong way, and there was reportedly trouble with morale. In part, people were forced to buy into the product and the vision because they could not buy into Jobs personally, at least not if they had met him in person, the authors anecdotally note.
Influencing the view of Jobs' role as leader is the question of whether his technologies were disruptive, or if he just did a great job of conveying the vision for them. Tellis (2006) argues that vision is usually the driving force behind disruptive technology, but even technology that is not particularly innovative can prove disruptive with sufficient vision behind it. In a sense, that it...
It was this success that gave Jobs the veneer of visionary among the general public -- he sold them products by telling them what those products could do for them, and then delivered.
Jobs was also an entrepreneur at heart. An entrepreneur is someone who cuts their own path, and wishes to be unbound by the rules of others. Jobs made this a part of his famous commencement speech at Stanford: "don't be trapped by dogma -- which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other people's opinions drown out your inner voice." (Jobs, 2005).
Implementing Leadership
In addition to Jobs' personal leadership traits, there is also the matter of how Jobs' leadership was operationalized at Apple. He wanted to maintain the entrepreneurial spirit of the company and ensure that his vision was the driving force. So Apple had a centralized organizational structure. The company maintained a large campus where all senior people were congregated, which allowed Jobs to maintain close oversight of the operations, either himself or through his lieutenants. The failure of Apple without Jobs was a lesson for many within the company of the importance of buy-in, because others without the vision had not been able to make the company work. His centralized command allowed the company to overhaul its entire product line as soon as he rejoined the company, making decisions quickly and leaving the rest of the organization to implement the decrees, such that Apple became almost entirely of Jobs' vision.
Being centralized in Silicon Valley allowed Apple to have access to the best people, and working with a proven success and visionary allowed many people to buy into the corporate culture and follow along with Apple's vision (Heracleous, 2013). This centralization also made it possible for Apple to be an extension of Jobs and his vision, which is a trait normally only found in entrepreneurial companies, and seldom ones as large as Apple had become. He brought on very talented people who shared his vision, and guided them through the process of making that vision a reality (Bougon, 1992). The relative leanness of the organizational structure belied Apple's size, but ensured that the decision-making was high. This was never a company that wanted to produce good products -- it wanted to produce products that would change the world and so its power structure was designed differently, with more entrepreneurial emphasis, than normally would have been the case in a company that size.
Motivation was based on the vision, and some would argue fear. But the vision is more important. When people went to work at Apple, it was because it was a leading innovator, and they bought into Jobs' vision. Wanting to develop the products that would genuinely change the way that people interacted with the world is a key motivator at Apple, and part of the firm's brand identity. This is reportedly the pitch that Jobs made to get John Sculley to run the company in the early 1980s. So as long as people believed in what they were doing, they were willing to work at Apple. The importance of this buy-in cannot be understated because the work conditions have traditionally been demanding. Many found that Jobs was personally cold at best and there was a high amount of fear about him within Apple.
Fear, historically, will motivate people to do just enough not to incur wrath. Even when the person giving the wrath is a perfectionist, fear is not going to be a motivator that brings out the best in people, because talented people will simply leave for a company where they will not face that sort of environment. It was always the vision and the dream of changing the world that allowed Apple to recruit and retain the best people, people who were essential to creating the company's string of hit products.
His communication technique was, not surprisingly, blunt. Jobs was not known for his tact, but was known for being forthright in his opinions. Whether this permeated throughout the organization or was particular to Steve Jobs is less known. Doubtless the organization has come to appreciate honesty, but without the formal and informal authority vested in Jobs, it is unlikely that many others within the organization would have been able to communicate in this manner. But with…
