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by cmiles74 6 days ago
Is Steve Jobs even a good example of "the type of person I want to hire as CEO"? I think he probably is not.

He was a demonstrably bad CEO, so much so that the Apple board fired him. He then went on to get better at the job through running another two companies until, eventually, Apple purchased one of these companies (it was very much unsuccessful, BTW). Then he became CEO and the company and was, finally, phenomenally successful.
3 comments
Cthulhu_ 6 days ago
The question remains whether that was all him or a combination of Wozniak and Ive, on top of being at the right place(s) at the right time(s) (iMac, iPod, iPhone).

Also he died 15 years ago, but Apple's success (measured in market cap at least) went up more than 10x since he died (from 300-400B to 3-4T), under Tim Cook. That's arguably from the groundwork and reputation the company laid down 15 years ago, but still - few companies manage to keep growing on stuff they did 15 years ago. Oil industry notwithstanding.

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matwood 6 days ago
I don't think anyone has ever claimed Apple was all SJ. But Woz would have likely stayed at HP without the prodding by SJ.

And since we're talking about CEOs, top-level personnel decisions are one of the biggest impacts a CEO can make. SJ promoted Ive to director of design, he also hired and eventually promoted Cook to COO.

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ApolloFortyNine 6 days ago
You can still find articles lambasting the iphone for having a small screen, 'who would want to surf the web on their phone'.

The CEO is in large part responsible for picking what products have hope to grow the company. The iphone was far from a slam dunk, many thought it would fail. Now it's responsible for over half their revenue and they're one of the largest companies in the world.

>Then he became CEO and the company and was, finally, phenomenally successful.

I'm totally confused by your post, so you admit he became a good CEO then?

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cmiles74 6 days ago
Yes, my opinion is that after being the CEO of Next and Pixar he became the CEO we associate with Apple's success in the 2000s.
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NDizzle 6 days ago
Man, everyone is demonstrably bad - until they aren't. Some things, like being CEO, are much more rare in the "try, try, try again" space, but it does seem to work like most things. My son was a terrible, demonstrably bad hitter for ~2 years. Then, all of a sudden, he was not, nor will he ever be again.
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cmiles74 6 days ago
Agreed. I was thinking more along the lines of what does it mean to say "I want to hire the next Steve Jobs as our CEO"?
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