Steve Jobs makes me think twice about the importance of a CEO

On this Blog and elsewhere, I have often decried what I call "the cult of the CEO." No one has been more critical than me of the steep rise in CEO compensation, particularly in America. Though ours is clearly a superpower in decline, we continue to be a world-beater when it comes to the compensation packages our boards vote for corporate CEOs. As much as anyone, I have repeatedly argued that the organization is the sum of its parts and it is patently unfair for chief execs to take home a porcine portion of the profit pie.

On the other hand (and with lawyers there is always another hand; just ask the client who once wished for a one-armed lawyer), I have always been fascinated by World War II. If any conflict was a Battle of the Titans, it was WWII. Would Germany have started a second global conflict or conducted a Holocaust, if Hitler had died in the trenches in WWI? Would England have weathered the storm, if Churchill had died when he was hit by a car in New York City a few years before the outbreak of hostilities? It's hard to imagine that history would have unfolded the way it did, if either of those two giants had been removed from the game board. FDR and Stalin were almost just as epic.

So... just how important is the role of a single person of heroic stature to the course of events... in a nation or a company? It seems to me that I must concede the significance of Hitler and Churchill to their nation's destinies.

And, now, I feel that I must make the same concession to Steve Jobs. A more neatly controlled experiment in the role of individual leadership can hardly be imagined: Jobs builds Apple. It blossoms. Jobs is forced out. It rots. Jobs is brought back. It blooms anew. As with Churchill and Hitler, it's hard to deny the significance of the man to the fate of the organization.

The fourth part of this great experiment will now be conducted. I think that Jobs's greatest gift was his ability to envision "the next big thing." His successor as CEO was characterized by someone on "The Nightly Business Report" last night as an outstanding manager. Will Jobs's departure leave Apple short on imagination? Only time, as the cliche goes, will tell us the answer.

Meanwhile, I can only join the many who wish him well with the current phase of his long battle with cancer. He deserves a good outcome.
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