[ryanlchan]

The way the question is phrased makes it sound like you assume that being 'hard' is required to be a transformative CEO. I don't think this is true. A great CEO has many tools in his repertoire to motivate and influence people; cut-throat rudeness is only one of them.

One successful CEO described it to me as such: "If you're Steve Jobs, and you have that talent, you can be an asshole. For the rest of us though, you can't be an asshole, because no one wants to work with an asshole. People just want to do business with a good guy."