Steve Jobs: An American Hero, An Entrepreneur for All Seasons

Steve Jobs holding a white iphone  4 

Late in August this year, Apple announced that Steve Jobs was stepping down as CEO and would remain as Chairman. The reason cited was ill health. He had a liver transplant back in 2009 and was suffering from an incurable rare cancer. (It was clear then that his days were limited...)

Almost immediately, there began an outpouring of articles about Steve--most of them were laudatory assuring him a place in the pantheon of business greats.

Here is a sampling of comments from a few of the articles.

 From Joe Nocera's What Makes Steve Jobs Great (NYT, Aug. 27):  Jobs "violated every rule of management. He was not a consensus-builder but a dictator who listened mainly to his own intuition. He was a maniacal micromanager. He had an astonishing aesthetic sense, which businesspeople almost always lack. He could be absolutely brutal in meetings:  I watched him eviscerate staff members for their bozo ideas."

The extraordinary personality of Jobs is captured by Michael Malone in Steve Jobs and the Death of the Personal Computer (WSJ, 8/31):  "Every generation produces a few individuals whose will to restructure the world in their own image is so powerful that they seem to distort reality itself. They change the world, not always for the better and that in the U.S. they often choose to pursue entrepreneurship and industry rather than politics is one of the uncelebrated blessings of American capitalism. Mr. Jobs--who emerged from an uncertain childhood brilliant, charismatic and charged with an ambition that would make most mortals blush--is one of those figures, a fact recognized before he reached adulthood."

Jason Pontin wrote the following in Apple Without its Genius Will be Less Lovable (FT, August 31):  "He does not care about the computer industry for itself, which is why he as been able to expand Apple's business beyond computers to music players, phones and tablets. Instead he wants people to do things they couldn't do before: create documents on laptops with fonts that only professional printers once used; listen to music on phones; read books, play games and watch movies on slim, crystalline screens. The paradox of all preoccupation with delighting people is that he disdains questioning customers....In short, he really is that overused word: a visionary."

In Conflicting Clues from Iconic CEO Departures, Sree Vidya Bhaktvatsalam and Christopher Condon of Bloomberg News (8/30) report that the year after Bill Gates departed as CEO of Microsoft in June 2006, the stock rose 38 percent; however, General Electric Co. stock plummeted 16 percent after Jeff Immelt replaced Jack Welch ten years ago. As a post script to this article, Apple stock is up about 40 points; Just last week ending October 14, it rose 14% closing at a record 422!

Finally in Apple gives new CEO Cook $28 billion cash for acquisitions, Danielle Kucera and Rita Nazareth (Bloomberg News 8/28) we read: "Even without a single billion-dollar acquisition, Apple's value under Jobs increased by more than $300 billion in the past 10 years. Jobs has also doubled Apple's net income every two years since the company reported its last annual loss in 2001."

As of this past Friday, Apple is now worth $391 Billion; Exxon Mobil comes in second at $380 Billion. Quite an amazing feat for Steve Jobs who left such a strong imprint of success on his company!
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