Steve Jobs is not like you and me.

But this problem is much larger than just the business world. In my other readings and observations, I've noticed a similar trend. According to Rashid's "Taliban," the Taliban succeeded despite themselves. Their culture is so caught up in ego that they are pretty much incapacitated without a strong leader to hold it all together, consequently they are constantly splitting and fighting with each other. We also saw this in the leadership vacuum left by deposing Saddam, and is partially why it has taken so much work to get an Iraqi army going.

In general, I see this in most non western cultures, at least that I know of, so I suspect it is a common aspect of human nature: principle based leadership outperforms ego based leadership. This is reinforced by another book I read, "Why the Rest Hate the West." The enlightenment marked a very important shift in social structure: from societies based on relationships to principle based societies, such as law, strict national boundaries, a common language and currencies - the American constitution being the epitome of this approach.

However, I qualified this as being more general to western culture, since the Greeks, and then the Romans, took a similar view of law and culture. For example, see Sophocles' "Orestes" or Virgil's "Aenaed." I guess the Enlightenment more marks a truly rigorous and global application of this idea. If you want a more contemporary example, just look at what kind of culture perpetuates the ghettos vs the culture that perpetuates the more successful segments of America. At any rate, I'm pretty convinced that cultures based on principle vs personality are much more successful.

So, all that is to give credence to the idea that ego driven companies are an evolutionary dead end, and give myself a link that I can refer to for future discussions.