Steve Jobs: Visionary Leadership and Apple's Success

Introduction: Jobs the Entrepreneur and Visionary

Steve Jobs was a visionary leader who preferred a centralized command structure in order to execute his visions. He rallied people around his vision, achieving a high degree of buy-in, and in the process was able to build a leading consumer products company. He founded Apple and guided it to early success. After his ouster, the company lost its way, but when Jobs returned he was able to guide the company to incredible success, leaving it as the largest company in the world by market capitalization. This paper examines Jobs the entrepreneur and visionary leader who was able to transform the way that people interact with their technology.

Steve Jobs has long been a compelling figure in American business. He was raised in California by his adoptive parents. After high school, Jobs attended Reed College in Oregon, but dropped out shortly thereafter. He then visited India to spend time in an ashram, staying for several months. On returning to the United States, he connected with Steve Wozniak, and the two would later become two of Apple's three founders. Wozniak designed the first two Apple computers himself, while Jobs' role in the company was to sell them.

Jobs had recruited Pepsi CEO John Sculley to run Apple, and it was the power struggle between the two that led to Jobs leaving the company. He would later return after the Sculley tenure ended, serving as CEO from that point until his death. While Apple was a revolutionary company in the early 1980s, it was the company's renaissance under Jobs that would prove to be his ultimate legacy.

Jobs' success rested on his business acumen and his perfectionism. Wozniak developed the first Apple computers, but it was Jobs who had the vision for the personal computer to become the way of the future for society. That vision drove Apple's early success and was repeated with later hit products like the iPhone and iPad.

Jobs was also successful with Pixar, the venture he helped start during his time away from Apple. After a series of hit films, Pixar was purchased by Disney, and ultimately became a significant source of Jobs' personal wealth. He sat on Disney's board and was considered an influential figure there.

Management Style

Jobs' successes are well documented, with numerous biographies written about his life and career. The key to his success was his ability to combine vision and dedication with perfectionism. There are many highly intelligent, perfectionist CEOs, but what distinguished Jobs was his desire to always anticipate trends and then lead the world toward his vision. When he accomplished this with personal computers through the early Macs, it entrenched his reputation as a visionary and allowed people within his company to buy into that vision completely.

Westley and Mintzberg (1989) outlined five different archetypes of the visionary leader: the creator, the proselytizer, the idealist, the bricoleur, and the diviner. Among these archetypes, they specifically named Jobs as the quintessential proselytizer, characterized by "foresight, imagination, holistics, entrepreneurial" traits, among others, and by a strong market focus. He did not create his products himself, but was the visionary behind their design, and understood before they had even been built exactly how they would be used in the marketplace. The authors describe him as evangelical in his desire to show people the potential of each product.

Westley and Mintzberg (1989) also point out that Jobs' leadership style was challenging for many at Apple, even though the company was successful. His perfectionist nature rubbed many talented people the wrong way, and there was reportedly significant trouble with morale. In part, people were forced to buy into the product and the vision because they could not always buy into Jobs personally—at least not those who had encountered him directly, as the authors anecdotally note.

Also relevant to understanding Jobs' role as a leader is the question of whether his technologies were genuinely disruptive, or whether he simply excelled at conveying the vision for them. Tellis (2006) argues that vision is usually the driving force behind disruptive technology, but that even technology that is not particularly innovative can prove disruptive with sufficient vision behind it. In a sense, that is precisely what Jobs brought to Apple: he guided the company to develop products based on existing technologies, but streamlined them and transformed them into something he could sell to mainstream audiences. This success gave Jobs the reputation of a visionary among the general public—he sold people products by telling them what those products could do for them, and then delivered on that promise.

Jobs was also an entrepreneur at heart. An entrepreneur is someone who cuts their own path and resists being bound by others' rules. Jobs made this philosophy central to his famous commencement speech at Stanford: "Don't be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other people's opinions drown out your inner voice" (Jobs, 2005).

Implementing Leadership

In addition to Jobs' personal leadership traits, there is also the matter of how his leadership was operationalized at Apple. He wanted to maintain the entrepreneurial spirit of the company and ensure that his vision remained the driving force. Apple therefore maintained a centralized organizational structure. The company operated from a large campus where all senior personnel were congregated, which allowed Jobs to maintain close oversight of operations—either himself or through his lieutenants. The failure of Apple without Jobs served as a lesson for many within the company about the importance of buy-in, because other leaders without his vision had not been able to sustain the company's momentum. His centralized command allowed Apple to overhaul its entire product line as soon as he rejoined, making decisions quickly and leaving the rest of the organization to implement them, such that Apple became almost entirely an expression of Jobs' vision.

Being centralized in Silicon Valley allowed Apple to attract the best talent, and working alongside a proven visionary led many people to embrace the corporate culture and follow Apple's direction (Heracleous, 2013). This centralization also made it possible for Apple to function as an extension of Jobs and his vision—a trait normally found only in entrepreneurial startups, and rarely in companies as large as Apple had become. He recruited very talented people who shared his vision and guided them through the process of making that vision a reality (Bougon, 1992). The relative leanness of the organizational structure belied Apple's size, but ensured that decision-making remained sharp. This was never a company content to produce merely good products; it aimed to produce products that would change the world, and its power structure was designed accordingly—with more entrepreneurial emphasis than would normally be found in a company of that scale.

References

Bougon, M. (1992). Congregate cognitive maps: A unified dynamic theory of organization and strategy. Journal of Management Studies, 29(3), 369–387.

Heracleous, L. (2013). Quantum strategy at Apple Inc. Organizational Dynamics, 42(2013), 92–99.

Jobs, S. (2005). Stay hungry, stay foolish. Commencement speech, Stanford University.

Tellis, G. (2006). Disruptive technology or visionary leadership. Journal of Product Innovation, 23(2006), 34–38.

Westley, F., & Mintzberg, H. (1989). Visionary leadership and strategic management. Strategic Management Journal, 10(1989), 17–32.