Posts Tagged ‘Apple’

 Strange juxtaposition. While I was away in Europe for two weeks, I read the Walter Issacson book on Steve Jobs. It was truly captivating and compelling. I finished it on my flight home from London and was intrigued from the first word to the last. The book is written in the style of Apple which is that it is simply written, elegant in its prose, effortless, intelligent, and intuitive as you learn how his early thoughts translated into his future work. Like Jobs’ overall thinking, the book, like his computers, could be for anyone, techologist or not, male or female.

When I got home Friday night, I sorted through some of the magazines that had arrived. New York magazine’s cover story was about the rise of Ms. magazine and had Gloria Steinem on the cover. It was commemorating the feminist movement at its start in 1971 and as an insert in New York. The opening lines were a stark reminder that women have come far.  In the 1970s, women had trouble getting credit cards without a man’s signature. Almost impossible to believe, right?

The two reads — the Jobs book and the magazine commemorative article — made me ponder. While reading the story of Steve Jobs, I mentioned to one of my traveling partners that I was disappointed that women figured so small in Jobs’ life.  The book is full of men he loved and loved working with.  There was little mention of his mother, Clara, and few women populated his life at Apple except for two or three. The preponderance of characters in Jobs’ life were men who had technology, engineering or design backgrounds and helped build the wonder that is Apple.  There were indeed insights about his daughters, his wife, his former girlfriends and his sister but the ratio of men and their achievements and contributions at Apple, Pixar and NeXT far outweighed the women’s.

I am not sure what to think about the lack of women in high places in Jobs’ hierarchy but I would have been curious to know what he really thought of the second sex and technology.  I understand the relevance of Adam but where’s Eve’s place in the story? The reputation of women in the techology world, in Silicon Valley and in digital today is a question that begs exploring. I imagine that someone else will notice and clarify for me. And I imagine that someone is writing a book proposal about Steve Jobs and the women in his working life.

“Do CEOs Matter?” asked Harris Collingwood in The Atlantic. The article begins with a discussion about the anticipated return of Steve Jobs to Apple in June and the impact on Apple’s share price during the past year’s ups and downs regarding his health prospects. Steve Job’s mortality raises the timely question about the value of CEOs in today’s world. Do they matter at all? Collingwood refers to several academic studies and concludes that CEOs do not matter as much as we think and can have as large a negative effect on business performance as a positive one.

Since I have spent quite a while in the CEO reputation area and authored a book, CEO Capital,  on how CEOs build reputation to achieve business success, I have seen equal proportions of studies that downplay the CEO’s impact on financial performance as those that show a sizeable return on a company’s destiny. As the article rightly points out…not all industries are the same — the CEO effect is marginal in some industries where strong government regulation prevails. Does that say alot for all those TARP-supported companies we are now watching. All in all, I firmly believe that CEOs can play a profound role in a company’s future by making the right decisions that shape its long-term growth. We are certainly seeing our new president shape the reputation and future horizon of America Inc.

The article highlights a quote from GE’s CEO Jeff Immelt and apparently confirmed by his predecessor Jack Welch.  Immelt told a gathering sponsored by the Financial Times that in the 1990s, “anyone could have run GE and done well…Not only could anyone have run GE in the 1990s, [a] dog could have run GE. A German shepherd could have run GE.”  Somehow I don’t quite think that is the case but they must know. CEOs may have indeed mattered less in the 90s but there is no doubt in my mind that they matter more now as our world has turned more global, more complex, more imitable, and more transparent. We are being short-sighted if we do not think that the right leader can make a difference most of the time. Not everyone is Steve Jobs but I would not want to work in a world led by mediocre business leaders.