Giving More Corporate Chiefs the Steve Jobs Treatment
I admired the film’s effort to capture both the complexities of Mr. Jobs’s personality and the relationship between his professional and private lives.
There are very few books like this written, and I think it has an effect on the way business leaders manage their enterprises. Most observers attribute a chief executive’s short-term orientation to the pressures of capital markets or the lure of market-based incentive compensation, and I agree these are powerful forces.
But there are also quieter, inner-directed, psychological forces that play a role in C.E.O.s’ managerial myopia. I believe the outside world’s limited interest in making long-term evaluations of business leaders’ legacies is one factor that leads them to prioritize the here and now over the long term.
Like political leaders, every business leader thinks about — and should think about — his or her legacy
.. Business leaders can take no such comfort, because in their world this re-examination rarely happens. Once they leave office, even the best-known business leaders are quickly forgotten. Last year in my commencement address, I had planned to refer to Lee Iacocca, who wrote a best-selling memoir of the turnaround he led at Chrysler in the early 1980s. My staff talked me out of it: They argued that today, more than 20 years after his retirement, many M.B.A. students may have no idea who Mr. Iacocca is.
.. Today many of the brightest M.B.A.s may know little of Thomas Watson or even Andrew Carnegie.
Against this backdrop, it’s only natural for business leaders to want to manage in a way that allows them to enjoy the fruits of their efforts during their time in the job — and to make decisions that cause the company to be successful now, while they’re leading it, instead of tomorrow, when hardly anyone will remember that they led it.