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Comment by reustle | Hacker News Reader

> for a non-Steve Jobs CEO

What does that even mean?

Just that Jobs turned a company from the brink of failure to the most successful tech company pretty quickly. But since Apple is an outlier, I was interested in hearing about any other examples of CEOs who have caused big improvements in short amounts of time.

Have a look at Good to Great[0]. It's basically breaking down the qualities that make for the best CEO's, and the results are as research based as they could get, and also deliver some interesting conclusions.

[0] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Good-To-Great-Jim-Collins/dp/0712676...

If you're going to read that book, I'd suggest you read "The Halo Effect" as well. It talks about how questionable the "retrospective" research from these books is.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Halo-Effect-Business-Delusions/dp/...

Then you gotta read this

Some of the companies listed went from good to great to below average to completely gone.

http://freakonomics.com/2008/07/28/from-good-to-great-to-bel...

As the author points out in the above link

"The future is always hard to predict, and understanding the past is valuable; on the other hand, the implicit message of these business books is that the principles that these companies use not only have made them good in the past, but position them for continued success."

Another example that comes to mind is Ron Johnson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Johnson_(businessman)

He did great at Target and then at Apple but almost brought down JC Pennny

Jobs rejoined Apple in 1997. OSX and the iPod came out in 2001.

So, Jobs was an outlier. But the eulogizing is starting to get out of hand.

It took Jobs a while to turn Apple around. He was brought back on in 1997 and profits were relatively minimal for almost a decade. It wasn't until the release of the iPhone that they really started to soar.

I can think of a few faster turnarounds: Lee Iacocca at Chrysler or Gerstner at IBM. Howard Schulz is another example of a founder returning to the company to turn it around.

Some of these have done a better job than others of lasting through the turnaround CEO (and others it's too soon to tell).

I'd say he "turned it around" quite quickly by killing off a bunch of products and shipping the iMac.

Apple didn't takeoff until the iPod was available for Windows, and then they went into the stratosphere with the iPhone.

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