Steve Jobs's Law: Why Founders Make the Best Leaders
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Founders care about the company. Ultimately their focus is "what can I do for my company".
Everyone else cares about themselves (stock options, positions/titles, image/power, etc). Ultimately their focus is "what can the company do for me".
For a founder, the company is their life's blood. For a new CEO, it's just another job. It's the difference between raising your own kid, and babysitting someone else's.
Just kidding. I don't think he would be very interested in Cook's position. However, I'd love to see him back guiding the electronic design of Apple products and, being a founder, the guardian of the company's soul. Current Macs have PC hearts. That's not the genius we saw with the Apple II or the IWM.
Seriously, if Apple can be boiled down to an idea, it's the marriage of art and clever engineering. Jobs brought the art and Wozniak, the engineering.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1108/25/pmt.01.html (starts just after half way down)
He mentions he's still on the payroll just so he can say he's been Apple's longest serving employee. Which is sort of in the same ballpark as being the soul of the company.
I have serious doubts whether Wozniak could lead the design of a lighter, more powerful and more energy efficient iPad.
Have you ever seen an Apple II?
You should read up on what Woz did to improve/perfect the design and efficiency of the Apple II.
(Also: You shouldn't read anything into my statements that I did not say. The Apple II is absolutely awesome, brilliant and amazing. That doesn't mean that knowing how to design it makes one fit for designing radically different stuff several decades later. To just assume that is absurd to the highest degree.)
Yes. Why do you think it doesn't?
Everyone knows the x86 architecture is inelegant. The 1990's saw a number of new CPU architectures being introduced and marketed to replace it, but none of them could keep up with the performance of x86. Apple fought that battle for the longest, up until PPC petered out. When they gave up and adopted x86, Macs became that much more useful for their ability to dual-boot Windows, or to run Windows in a VM. Apple was able to ignore some of the rougher parts of the PC architecture by avoiding BIOS and MBR.
In the past, I could never really understand the affection between a newborn and her parents, till I became a father recently. Having seen my son right from the time of delivery I know it better than the other relatives what works and what doesn't, since I have seen it in person many times.
It is this involvement from the start, the familiarity, and attention to all the small little things, which lead to affection towards the child, or in this case towards the company which literally is the founder's child.
If you look closely, the successful founder CEOs had a strong ops person by their side helping them scale. Understanding yourself and your weaknesses earlier on and enlisting people that would complement you is the key. Otherwise, even your passion, vision and right incentives won't help you be a great leader.