[DirtyCalvinist]

It seems to me that being dictatorial and downright mean only works if you are right about whatever you've decided to be dictatorial about. So when Jobs dropped that iPod prototype in water to prove that it could be smaller still, this helped the iPod's success largely because Jobs was right about the smallness, not because he berated his engineers. That ability to be right about what people wanted, not his apparently capricious and unpleasant demeanor, is why we still talk about him a year after his death.

Incidentally, it is also the difficult to reproduce part of his success.

[mrich]

Well said. Let's not produce more abusive bosses who, when their "brilliant strategy" doesn't work, just think they have to berate their employees harder.