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Steve Jobs Leadership

In: Business and Management

Submitted By adawy88
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But it was his sheer genius combined with his ability to articulate his vision and bring staff, investors and customers along on the journey - plus the lessons learned in a major career setback - that made it work. The results: indisputable.

A 'visionary' is how he is most often described in relation to Apple, the company he founded with high school buddy Steve Wozniak in 1976, was effectively fired from in 1985, and then returned to in 1997 with a renewed sense of purpose.

And what a triumphant return it was. According the LA Times, the market value of Apple's shares has grown from about $US5 billion in 2000 to $US351 billion today making it one of the biggest publicly listed companies in the US, up there with the likes of Exxon Mobil.

Dr Brent Coker from the University of Melbourne's management and marketing faculty describes Jobs as “one of the greatest business strategists of all times”.

“There are a lot of people out there claiming to be futurists,” Dr Coker said.

“Most of them are keynote speakers or public speakers - it is rare to have a futurist that demonstrated his ability to almost predict the future in a real live business setting.”

But Jobs's rise to the top was hardly textbook perfect. A university dropout, he worked at Atari and travelled through India before seeing a commercial opportunity in the computer (the original Apple I) Wozniak had built to impress some friends.

They started the company with an investment of $US1300 of their own money, making it into the Fortune 500 list by 1983. That year Jobs recruited former Pepsi executive John Sculley to take the chief executive position, only to be stripped of all his power by him in 1985. According to author Steven Levy, this was prompted by the Macintosh computer not selling as well as expected, as well as Jobs's demanding management style.

As Harry McCracken writes in Time

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