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Steve Jobs as Leader
Introduction In the early 1980s, Apple's Steve Jobs had a silicon chip that was intriguing but he knew of no practical use for it. He created one. As a "typical" entrepreneur, Steve Jobs was and still is known as an innovative visionary (Jung and Sosik 2006), but he brought no particular management or leadership skills to the new company that would grow around that first chip no one knew quite what to do with. Background Steve Jobs also insisted on maintaining absolute control over his creation, so as Microsoft, Intel and an array of PC manufacturers were creating machinery and operating systems for them, a host of third-party software developers were creating thousands of applications. In the early 1990s, Apple computers were known among business users for their excellence in gaming and desktop publishing, but PCs were the "work" computers. Apple made inroads with education by giving thousands of Apple computers to schools and collaborating with non-PC corporations to make Apple computers available to countless more schools. Apple did finally agree to collaborate with a select few outsiders in recent years to develop software compatible with both Apple's Mac lines and standard PCs, but the decision was more than two decades in the making. Sales of desktop computers of all kinds have been virtually flat since the passage of the Y2K scare, as industry analysts predicted they would be. As the PC industry consolidated to see Compaq be acquired by Hewlett Packard and IBM sell off its PC business to a Chinese company, Apple set off in new directions.
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Those new directions we