Steve Jobs: Picasso 2.0

On sick leave since January, the founder of Apple has handed over the reins of the group he founded in 1976 to his Chief Operating Officer. Apple must now go on without its symbolic boss.

Steve Jobs has announced that he is leaving Apple’s management. In the minutes following the announcement, Apple’s stock market value dropped by more than fifteen billion dollars. It is hardly surprising, because in the business world, the iPhone and iPad manufacturer is now the success of the moment and even the absolute benchmark.

The company is the most valuable in the world alongside the oil giant Exxon. While its sales were already at $65 billion last year, it was expected to grow by 60 percent this year. The company is a giant that is growing as quickly as a baby. There has simply never been anything like this in economic history. This phenomenal success was based on one man: Steve Jobs.

Last May, the U.S. magazine Fortune published a very detailed exposé on Apple; they interviewed dozens of senior members and outlined the organizational structure of the company and its hierarchy. A company’s hierarchy normally looks like a form of rake with a boss, deputy heads and deputies to the deputy heads. But in this case, it is a daisy wheel with Steve Jobs at the center.

Jobs’ secret is simple: He is an entrepreneur, not a manager. The difference is that a classically good CEO is Rembrandt or Renoir; an entrepreneur is Leonardo de Vinci or Picasso. He is an inventor — someone who not only runs a group of people and motivates them, but above all someone who has a vision, and who shares this vision that makes us see the world differently.

In 1983, when Jobs recruited John Sculley — an executive at Pepsi who turned out to be a very special agent until he fired him two years later — Jobs knew how to convince him with a sentence that is still well-known to this day: “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and change the world?” Jobs wanted to change the world. And he did.

Here is the proof in three very different examples.

In the 1980s, Jobs asked his troops to design a good computer. It was as if his designers had come from another planet. For them, it was as if they were asked to make a sweet or sexy, or Malagasy computer — anything. Today, the design is a major selling point in information technology.

Second example: before the iPod, everyone was convinced that the music industry was condemned to death — killed by free music and piracy on the Internet. With the iPod and the opportunity to buy cheap music online, young people started to pay again. Jobs reinvented the business model of music.

The third example is more to do with the business side: For twenty years now, experts of all kinds and investors have been explaining to business leaders that they need to specialize. The French supermarket Carrefour needs to part ways with real estate because its job is to sell soup and yoghurt. The French hotel chain Accor has split its group in two with the hotels on one side and ticket restaurants on the other. Apple is doing the exact opposite.

The company used to only sell computers. Today it sells cell phones and music; it takes a commission on software that is sold on its iPhones and it is opening stores at a time when online sales are booming. It is also creating new markets in value and work. Apple is blowing a massive raspberry to the rest of the world. Jobs means work, but in the plural.