Is Steve Jobs Obsolete?
It’s heretical to Apple’s loyalists even to ask aloud whether Jobs could be replaced: In our times, no company has operated on a cult of personality more than Steve Jobs’ Apple. Jobs’ charisma and genius are commonly cited as the reasons for the company’s enviable success. And Apple seems like the closest thing that the real world has given us to a controlled scientific experiment of the Great Man Theory: We’ve seen what’s happened to Apple with him and without him (during his dozen years away, 1985-1997, after he had been pushed out of the company he co-founded). As I wrote in my book The Second Coming of Steve Jobs: “During Steve’s long exile, Apple lost almost all of the qualities that had made it an astonishing success during his heyday there.” Apple’s software, which had stood out as innovative, original, and uncommonly easy to use, hadn’t improved much during Jobs’ long absence, which gave Microsoft time to imitate it. And Apple’s brand image of creativity and nonconformity was “deteriorating badly.” Apple lost $1 billion in 1996 and $708 million in the first three months of 1997, and was in a vicious death spiral. The stock price was less than $4 a share (adjusting for subsequent splits) before the board of directors ousted the CEO and Steve Jobs seized power in the summer of 1997.
A more interesting question for me: How do you replace his obsessive focus and his propensity for extraordinary risk-taking and his persistence, tenacity, and resilience. Every great business leader needs to be ruthlessly focused on what’s most important for the company. For Apple it has been about design and originality above all else. True originality—“Think Different”—means that Apple’s CEO must take really big risks, and Jobs has done it again and again: When Jobs returned to Apple in the late ‘90s, all the research in the PC business said that consumers wouldn’t buy “all-in-one” designs that put the computer and the monitor in the same case. Jobs ignored that, bet big entirely on his own instinct with the sleek iMac, a huge hit that helped to revive the foundering company. When Apple was creating iTunes and the iPod, everyone seemed to be downloading music for free, but Jobs bet that they would pay for songs if the prices were low, the experience was easy, and the gadgetry was cool. He was right. And he came out with the iPhone with just a touch screen rather than a physical keypad, another big bet that has paid off terrifically.
No one, not even Jobs, is right all the time when they take real risks. As I point out in Walk the Walk, my upcoming book about leadership, Jobs has hatched as many flops as hits over the past four decades. The Apple I was a small seller, but the Apple II was a sensation. The Lisa computer bombed, but the Macintosh became an enduring success. During his long exile from Apple, Jobs nearly lost his entire personal fortune betting tens of millions of dollars on two startup companies that struggled for a decade: NeXT Computer, a high-profile failure, and Pixar, which ultimately made him a billionaire and revolutionized the field of motion-picture animation. During his second tenure at Apple, Jobs had some conspicuous nonstarters (does anyone remember the Mac Cube or Apple TV?) along with his blockbusters (the iMac, iPod, iTunes, and iPhone).
