Steve Jobs: The iLeader

Wired has an article on its April issue titled How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong. It tells the story of Apple’s management style, how while in Silicon Valley management is going for the open route, being empowering and comforting to its employees, Apple is going the opposite route. Its corporate culture values extreme secrecy, empowerment is a dirty word at the company and micromanagement is on the menu everyday.

At the top of it all is Steve Jobs, founder of Apple and fearless leader of the company. Colleagues and employees describe him as “totally in the zone”, he inspires both zeal and  fear in every employee. Jobs oversees every aspect of the company and of every product. If the curves of a letter in the iPhone’s font weren’t to his liking it had to be changed.

This old-school management style is reminiscent of a communist dictator, the fearless leader. A former senior executive at apple even likened Apple’s internal management to a terrorist cell scheme. Yet it works, against all common sense of today’s management practices, Apple’s management works and it has propelled it to the top of the tech market.

But for how long? Steve Jobs may indeed be a genius and its true he is rarely wrong but Apple isn’t Steve Jobs. What happens when the genius is no more? Is Apple so dependant on Jobs’ magic touch that it would collapse in his absence? That’s exactly what happened when Jobs left apple in 1985. Great management should serve the company, not the other way around. Is your company under the rule of a fearless leader? Is it ready for the future?