

Steve Jobs's Law: Why Founders Make the Best Leaders - coatta
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/09/steve-jobss-law-why-founders-make-better-leaders/244439/?google_editors_picks=true

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powertower
IMO, it's even simpler...

Founders care about the company. Ultimately their focus is "what can I do for
my company".

Everyone else cares about themselves (stock options, positions/titles,
image/power, etc). Ultimately their focus is "what can the company do for me".

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jinushaun
I agree.

For a founder, the company is their life's blood. For a new CEO, it's just
another job. It's the difference between raising your own kid, and babysitting
someone else's.

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rbanffy
I always say Wozniak should lead Apple after Jobs leaves.

Just kidding. I don't think he would be very interested in Cook's position.
However, I'd love to see him back guiding the electronic design of Apple
products and, being a founder, the guardian of the company's soul. Current
Macs have PC hearts. That's not the genius we saw with the Apple II or the
IWM.

Seriously, if Apple can be boiled down to an idea, it's the marriage of art
and clever engineering. Jobs brought the art and Wozniak, the engineering.

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philwelch
I don't think Woz has done that kind of work since the 1980's at the latest.

Everyone knows the x86 architecture is inelegant. The 1990's saw a number of
new CPU architectures being introduced and marketed to replace it, but none of
them could keep up with the performance of x86. Apple fought that battle for
the longest, up until PPC petered out. When they gave up and adopted x86, Macs
became that much more useful for their ability to dual-boot Windows, or to run
Windows in a VM. Apple was able to ignore some of the rougher parts of the PC
architecture by avoiding BIOS and MBR.

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culturestate
Does anyone here know what Woz does, technically, at Fusion I/O? He may be
more involved in modern engineering than we give him credit for.

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sharmajai
I can very well relate to this.

In the past, I could never really understand the affection between a newborn
and her parents, till I became a father recently. Having seen my son right
from the time of delivery I know it better than the other relatives what works
and what doesn't, since I have seen it in person many times.

It is this involvement from the start, the familiarity, and attention to all
the small little things, which lead to affection towards the child, or in this
case towards the company which literally is the founder's child.

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shawndumas
print version: [http://www.theatlantic.com/business/print/2011/09/steve-
jobs...](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/print/2011/09/steve-jobss-law-
why-founders-make-the-best-leaders/244439/)

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smithbits
How much of this is that the company was hugely influenced by the founder?
Steve Jobs was famous for making sure all the machines at the NeXT factory
were painted the same color and that no third party logs were displayed. A
certain kind of OCD employee is attracted to that attention to detail and will
succeed and advance within the company. Jeff Bezos is famous for the door desk
at Amazon and creating a frugal company culture. Both companies are wildly
successful but it seems like Bezos would make a horrible Apple CEO and I
suspect that a building full of door desks would be amazingly crass to Steve
Jobs. Neither is one is better, they are both successful, but I think they
attract and utilize different talents. I've often wondered if Balmer's time at
the top of Microsoft has been hampered by not being a coder.

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americandesi333
One thing that makes great leaders is to understand your value in an
organization. Some founders are better suited to run an agile below 100
startups but dont have the capacity to deal with the ops complexities that
come with scaling a business.

If you look closely, the successful founder CEOs had a strong ops person by
their side helping them scale. Understanding yourself and your weaknesses
earlier on and enlisting people that would complement you is the key.
Otherwise, even your passion, vision and right incentives won't help you be a
great leader.

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kavehgolabi
I think that the ideal situation is having a CEO/Founder but one who realizes
what his deficiencies are and can accept bringing in someone to help the
company...but not necessarily have the ultimate word. There is a lot to be
said about keeping the originator whose vision proved to be successful be in
charge of future ideas and directions or at least have the final say on them.
At the same time often a founder's organizational skills arent up to par for
managing scale.

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sreitshamer
Founder control of the board makes the best companies, avoiding that "adult
supervision needed" syndrome.

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TechnoFou
There's no better leader then the one who created the path on the first place.

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pavanred
It's perhaps because founders give a shit.

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Hyena
In line with what I've been saying here in every CEO discussion.

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riverlaw
I have not read the article but RIM jumps out at me as not following this...

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fatalerrorx3
I have to agree with that

