Geoff's blog

A contradictory leader

Geoff Mulgan - 14.10.2011

Steve Jobs was unique for combining high aspirations and a love of beautiful design with an acute business brain. It's marvellous, and surprisingly rare, to see an innovator honoured and mourned. But like any truly great changemaker Steve was contradictory.

He rode the wave of a technology subculture that valued openness over everything else, but created platforms that his company could tightly control, excluding a fair amount of uncomfortable content.  His rhetoric was West Coast counterculture ('stay hungry, stay foolish'), but his management style was autocratic. He was seen, rightly, as a force for good, but showed little interest in either philanthropy or the environment (which Apple was forced to take more seriously by campaigns like 'Green my apple').  He enthused his customers like no one else but wasn't persuaded to give them any say over his designs.

Listening again to his wonderful commencement address at Stanford, I'm left with two questions. Do all great leaders straddle contradictions rather than resolving them? And would Steve Jobs have achieved more, or less if he had not been so single-minded? 

I wonder if everyone should try to find the one thing they're really good at, and avoid all distractions.  My guess is that Jobs succeeded because he was so focused. But it's intriguing to speculate whether,  a century from now, Bill Gates with his duller technology but more inspiring philanthropy will be remembered more (like the Carnegies and Rockefellers whose names survive in vast foundations). I doubt there's any easy answer.

Read Geoff's earlier blog on the passing of Steve Jobs