Steve Jobs – Not Just a Visionary

By now, even people living in caves know that Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, died of cancer. Few men in our time have left as large an impact on the commercial or technological world. The iPod forever changed the way we listen to music, the iPhone changed the way we communicate, and the iPad is yet another innovation in portable computing. All this is on top of the MacOS, which defined the way we interact with personal computers.

A few months back, some of my colleagues and I were sitting around waiting for a plane, and I posed the question: “Can you think of another single person who is so single-handedly responsible for their company’s success?” We were, of course, talking about major companies of $1B or more. A few names came up; Henry Ford, John Rockefeller, Bill Gates... but not a many. Larry Ellison is flamboyant and arrogant, but he’s not really an innovator. Richard Branson is adventuresome and eclectic, but also not an innovator.

Every eulogy we read about Jobs centers around the word ‘Innovation’, and nobody can deny this. But Jobs’ greatest skill was not his vision or creativity. Truth be told, the world - and especially the Silicon Valley – are full of good ideas. Billions of venture capitalists’ dollars go to entrepreneurs with great ideas. Few reach the kind of success Apple has, but not because their ideas are bad. The ability to turn a good idea into reality on a global scale is a far rarer gift than creativity. For many innovators, arrogance is their Achilles heel. Once they get a few million dollars, they morph from hungry innovators to the wealthy upper class they have idolized for so long. Maybe the most common flaw many founders face is the failure to recognize their own limitations. The skills needed to earn a company its first $10M are rarely the same as those needed to get to $200M, and those are different still from the skills required to manage $1B. Great ideas are nice. The ability to turn them into reality is a rare gift indeed.