[phil]

All armchair commentators would do well to consider this one:

Q: There’s a lot of symbolism to your return. Is that going to be enough to reinvigorate the company with a sense of magic?

“You’re missing it. This is not a one-man show. What’s reinvigorating this company is two things: One, there’s a lot of really talented people in this company who listened to the world tell them they were losers for a couple of years, and some of them were on the verge of starting to believe it themselves. But they’re not losers. What they didn’t have was a good set of coaches, a good plan. A good senior management team. But they have that now.” [BusinessWeek, May 25, 1998]

[jballanc]

To continue on this thread, I once heard Steve describe it this way:

"When I returned to Apple, I went to every engineering team and fired all the managers. Then, I went to the smartest engineer on each team and told them they were going to be the new manager. Of course, being the smartest engineers, they all immediately said, 'No'! So I told them, 'Look, either you're going to be the new manager, or I'll go hire someone like your old manager.' After that, every one of them agreed to take the position."

[ajays]

Do you have a reference for this? I'd like to send it out to a few people, but "I read it on HN" doesn't seem to have the same cache' (yet.. ;) ).

[jballanc]

Unfortunately, this was from a talk Steve gave when I was working at Apple, so I'm quoting from memory...

[vacri]

That's one thing that seems to be missing in general, is the appreciation that while Jobs is a pretty awesome person and has engendered a powerful culture at Apple, it takes more than one person to come up with quality goods at that scale.