Apple

http://blogs.hbr.org/davenport/2011/10/was_steve_jobs_a_good_decision.html
Was Steve Jobs a Good Decision Maker?
by Tom Davenport  |   9:58 AM October 13, 2011
* -------------------------------------------------
Comments (11)
* -------------------------------------------------
       
* -------------------------------------------------

| | |
| | | |
| | | |
|| | |
| |
The world continues to honor  and mourn  Steve Jobs a week after his death, and there is plenty to praise. His legacy lives on  in today's iCloud and iOS 5 availability, and in the new iPhone 4S being praised by several prominent technology reviewers. David Pogue , my favorite technology writer, is so enthusiastic as to call the new phone's features almost magical.
I've longadmired Apple products, too. By my count there are six Macbooks, two iPads, and three iPhones—not to mention a few iPods—in my family's possession. If you judge only by the product outcomes or by Apple's market value, Jobs seems the best decision-maker in the history of consumer products.
But of course, like every other human, his decisions weren't all great. In the 1980s he hired John Sculley tosucceed himself as CEO of Apple, and Sculley presided over a period of slow growth and product missteps in the ensuing years. Jobs commented about Sculley : ""What can I say? I hired the wrong guy. He destroyed everything I spent 10 years working for, starting with me." Jobs' major startup during his hiatus from Apple, Next Computer , was largely unsuccessful—at least in the hardware business. Hisdecision to sell all of his Apple stock when Sculley pushed him out cost him billions. And when he came back as CEO, he allowed the backdating of stock options .
In terms of decision processes and style, Jobs was famous for being a tough micro-manager, at least where product design decisions are concerned. As a Fortune magazine article  on Apple's culture put it:
He's a corporate dictator whomakes every critical decision—and oodles of seemingly noncritical calls too, from the design of the shuttle buses that ferry employees to and from San Francisco to what food will be served in the cafeteria.

He also didn't believe in analytical decisions based on extensive market research. From The New York Times' obituary:
Mr. Jobs's own research and intuition, not focus groups, were his guide.When asked what market research went into the iPad, Mr. Jobs replied: "None. It's not the consumers' job to know what they want."
Based on the evidence, I will grant that he made some fantastic design decisions, but not that he was an expert on effective decision processes.
Granted, there is some evidence that even Jobs came to realize the shortcomings of one man's intuition as the only sourceof decision wisdom. In a summary of a 1997 interview, a New York Times article  published earlier this year noted:
In his early years at Apple, before he was forced out in 1985, Mr. Jobs was notoriously hands-on, meddling with details and berating colleagues. But later, first at Pixar, the computer-animation studio he co-founded, and in his second stint at Apple, he relied more on others,listening more and trusting members of his design and business teams.

Another account from a Jobs interview with the Wall Street Journal technology writer Walt Mossberg suggests that he could also let others win sometimes:
Jobs: What I do all day is meet with teams of people and work on ideas and solve problems to make new products, to make new marketing programs, whatever it is.
Mossberg: And arepeople willing to tell you you're wrong?
Jobs: (laughs) Yeah.
Mossberg: I mean, other than snarky journalists, I mean people that work for...
Jobs: Oh, yeah, no we have wonderful arguments.
Mossberg: And do you win them all?
Jobs: Oh no I wish I did. No, you see you can't. If you want to hire great people and have them stay working for you, you have to let them make a lot of decisions and you...