Steve Jobs's Law: Why Founders Make the Best Leaders

IMO, it's even simpler...<p>Founders care about the company. Ultimately their focus is "what can I do for my company".<p>Everyone else cares about themselves (stock options, positions/titles, image/power, etc). Ultimately their focus is "what can the company do for me".

I always say Wozniak should lead Apple after Jobs leaves.<p>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.<p>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.

I can very well relate to this.<p>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.<p>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.

print version: <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/business/print/2011/09/steve-jobss-law-why-founders-make-the-best-leaders/244439/" rel="nofollow">http://www.theatlantic.com/business/print/2011/09/steve-jobs...</a>

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.

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.<p>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.

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.

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

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

It's perhaps because founders give a shit.

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

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