Steve Jobs, the CEO as auteur

While much of the world continues to lust for his creations, Steve Jobs, the founding visionary and CEO of Apple died on October 6th. He was just 56. A kaleidoscope of images flashed through my mind when I heard this.

The TV ad film that launched the first Macintosh, the unveiling of the iPod in 2001 that inaugurated the era of gadgets connected to the internet, the 2007 launch of the iPhone instantly obsoleting all other mobile phones, most of all, Steve’s speech at Stanford in 2005. ‘My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption,’ he had said, describing the painful situation of his birth.

The declaration of the arrival of the Information Age for many of us was the Macintosh computer and the TV commercial that launched it. The Macintosh would liberate the world from the tyrannical and centralized world that George Orwell had prophesized. Steve’s resignation and now death has prompted many eulogies, with many aptly calling him America’s greatest industrialist ranked right up there with the likes of Henry Ford and Carnegie. But many also made references to his ‘micro-managing’.

These are the reports that make me sad. I believe what Steve will be remembered for most is for his alleged micro-managing. It showed that he was the first ‘auteur’ CEO of a major company. The term auteur, French for ‘author’, is from film theory and it holds that a film reflects its director's personal creative vision.

Steve’s place in management history is assured for being the role model CEO who spent most of his waking hours obsessing about making their products ‘insanely great’. His auteur touch was evident when the iPhone debuted in 2007.

A new reality had appeared. The auteur CEO Steve Jobs (just as those other ‘micro-managers’ Hitchcock and Bergman had done for film), had lifted the modern firm out of the Industrial Age and brought it into the Information Age.

AJIT BALAKRISHNAN, , Founder Chairman & CEO, Rediff
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