Steve Jobs – Perhaps Apple Could Have Done Without Him

“Steve Jobs – the man was fallible” is what I wrote in October 2011. I guess it seems pretty innocent now – although there may some remnants of people who still feel offended by it – but, believe it or not, one year ago it actually triggered a small barrage of hate mail.

Since then, I have read or heard others describe him as a terrorist, an asshole, and a psychopath (which, given that many US presidents have been shown to have had psychopathic tendencies may not even be unlikely). Hey, all I said was that he was “fallible”!

But all these people, in the wake of calling him a terrorist, an asshole, or a psychopath, without exception, also described him as a genius. And a person who built the greatest company on earth, changing all of our daily lives in the process.

But, in fact, I am not so sure of that either…

I don’t mean this as some lame attempt at a final insult – suggesting that he wasn’t even responsible for building this great company – but as a genuine question: Would Apple have been equally great today if it hadn’t been for Steve Jobs? And, honestly, I think that is not impossible. And that is because I am a Tolstoy fan.

Tolstoy, in War and Peace, using Napoleon as an example, had a very clear opinion of leadership. A leader “is just a banner, they hold aloft in the wind”. “Napoleon thinks he commands a 100,000 men, but in reality, he follows them”. Tolstoy thought that what drove the French into Russia was not the act of a single man – Napoleon – but the result of much greater, collective human forces. Those forces needed a spearhead, and that became Napoleon. But if it hadn’t been him, someone else would have emerged to follow those forces as their leader. Because “The course of earthly happenings … depends on the combined volition of all who participate in those events, and … the influence of a Napoleon on the course of those events is purely superficial and imaginary”.

Would Apple have become great without Steve Jobs, or would someone else have surfaced to spearhead and personify the combined volition of the people working in that area in that company at that point time? I think the answer might be yes.

But who knows? And I know I will never know. But I also know that pretty much every person who reads this piece thinks he or she knows that the answer is “no”. “No, Apple would never have been this great without Steve Jobs”. And nothing will ever change that. Because what Steve Jobs has going on Napoleon, is that he is dead. Or better, that he died before Apple’s demise. Napoleon lived to see his armies defeated by the Russians, and by the forces commanded by the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo. People started to realize he wasn’t such a superhuman genius as they once thought he was.

When Apple’s performance will start to plunge (and I mean “when” and not “if”) the Great Man Steve will not be there to blame.

And of course Apple will, one day, start to underperform. One day, it will be outcompeted by its rivals, and even lose their shareholders’ money in the process (if alone for the simple reason that if it continues its current growth rate for another decade it will be more valuable than the rest of planet Earth combined, eyeing up dominance of the solar system next). It will fall. But then people will simply say that it wouldn’t have happened had Steve Jobs still been around. Because he’s their banner; their banner they hold aloft in the wind.