now
good
The Steve Jobs effect
Like many, we have tried to understand what makes a company tick. Why some companies
become so great, while most become so bloated. We have found a fairly different explanation:
!What is normally expected from a CEO/President is wrong.

!!A little history

The first large organizations were the armies. So many war movies have been created, but one
very important fact is often left aside. You have 10,000 men walking to meet the enemy. They
have been walking all day. And now, you have 10,000 men shouting.

>I am hungry!

How does this work ? How did that worked centuries ago when there were no trucks, no technology and
no easy communication like today. This can't be improvised.

Clearly, a hierarchy model was used. Different roles were assigned. High level orders were flowing from top to bottom. Information
was flowing from the bottom to the top. And so on. And the doers (cooks, suppliers) had some autonomy.

As companies are growing, we are forced into this hierarchy, slowly but surely. While the company is
growing, the CEO is told that, well, "you can't be involved in the details, you have to look at the big
picture.” And more important, "you have to learn to delegate.”

This is how it works. This is how it has to work. This makes sense.

So while companies are growing, they often ask for help. Consultants get on board and start to explain
the obvious.

*A CEO has to look at the big picture.
*Proper information must be gathered and organized so the CEO can act on it.
*Micromanagement is bad.

So the CEO becomes the general of an army. A general who has less and less memory of what is
a battle field. A general who is more and more forgotten by the troops.

So you listen to consultants preaching the proper way a CEO has to behave. You listen to the end of their speech. And then
you ask:
! What about Steve Jobs ?

A long silence. Some attempts at speaking. No real word getting out.

! What about Steve Jobs ?

Silence.

!!Steve Jobs

There is an interesting story about Mr. Jobs. He was Apple CEO back in the 1980s. He had personally
helped create the first
!Mac
with a small team. But after the release, he became convinced that the future
was
!Unix, but with a nice UI.
Peoples at Apple were not interested. So he left to create a new company to do exactly that. It was called
!Next
(
?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT
). While their first product was considered great (see
?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT_Computer
), it had little commercial success.

The time passed and Apple had less and less success. In early 2000, Mr. Jobs came back to Apple. And he did
exactly what he wanted to do 15 years before. He replaced the aging Apple OS with a Unix like operating system and put
a nice UI on top of it.

All of a sudden, Apple was back to life. Mr. Jobs became involved in various details such as the roundness of the
first iPhone and the type of glass it was made.

Call it the way you want, this looks a lot like the things a
!CEO should not do
.

!! The big question

How can this scale ?

Is it possible that Mr. Jobs was so intelligent that his own wisdom was "enlighting" thousands and thousands of people. How
is it possible ?
!It's not.

It works the other way around.

>Because a boss clearly understands, workers are upping their play.

Because the boss understands the values and the risks of a new idea, people are eager to create and go outside the box.
Most projects do not work on the first try. A normal
!disconnected
boss will immediately shut the project down after the first failure. So employees simply stop pushing for new ideas.

!! CEO and details

Clearly, the CEO of one of the most successful company in the world was paying a lot of attention to details.

COO have to make sure everyone is getting feed, like in the army. There are two parts in management: Control and orientation. COO controls. CEO
orients. More on this later.