Steve Jobs and the Cult of the CEO
Like Da Vinci or the Dalai Lama—only better |
Sure, Apple is a massively successful company. But what exactly did Steve Jobs make? To many technology experts, the answer is not much. |
But to Jobs’ admirers, his lack of technological breakthroughs was only further proof of his genius, his role as somewhat mystical futurist. |
The Internet era did not invent the idea of the benevolent CEO or the idealistic corporation, but Steve Jobs nonetheless embodied the notion that a boss can be controlling, punitive—yet also somehow liberating |
Even before his death, Jobs was cast ( Newsweek, 9/5/11) as a “wholly authentic” hero, “a supercool billionaire, the dropout son of the early ’70s counterculture whose seminal text is The Whole Earth Catalog.” |
One of Apple’s core innovations—if one wants to call it that—was that it pursued a closed system approach to a computing industry that had often prized openness. |
Apple, like the vast majority of the electronics industry, skirts labor laws by subcontracting all its manufacturing to companies like Foxconn, a firm made infamous for suicides at its plants, a worker dying after working a 34-hour shift, widespread beatings, and a willingness to do whatever it takes to meet high quotas set by tech companies like Apple. |
Perhaps it was no surprise to learn that Jobs’ actual politics did not always sound as if they were guided by any countercultural notions. Read more at www.fair.org |
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