There’s something else about Jobs that has to be noted:
Jobs didn’t settle. Time and again in his career, engineers came to him and said “I can deliver X.”
Jobs would say “That’s nice, but that’s not all I wanted. I told you I wanted X+Y, and you’re not delivering Y. Go back and give me Y.”
And Jobs would then set some very aggressive time schedule to focus people’s minds on a product deadline. Time and again, Apple’s engineers would deliver on what Jobs asked.
There’s darn few managers, much less senior managers, in the tech industry who really do that. Most CEO’s don’t like talking to engineers, they don’t give engineers the time of day and increasingly (thanks to the idiot professors at business schools), senior managers just shrug their shoulders, call up some VC and say “I want technology ABC - what do you have that’s like that? And how much will it cost to buy into it?”
And then they go out and acquire some company for absurd valuations to gain a technology that could have been invented in-house.
Jobs wasn’t one much for going the “growth by acquisition” model that is so popular with idiots in senior management today. He told his engineers “I want Y. You *will* give me Y. And you *will* do it PDQ.”
And lo, his engineers would do just that.
That’s a leader.
Hammer + Nail