It was the 1980s, relatively early in his career, and Steve Jobs was travelling in Japan. In a hotel lobby, a gaggle of girls came up and asked for his autograph.
Jobs guarded the smallest details of his private life
Jay Elliot was an Apple executive at the time, travelling with Jobs. “I was thinking, wow, how many CEOs have girls coming up and asking them for autographs?” Elliot says now.
Over the next few decades, Jobs’ fame only increased, of course, and exponentially.
By the time he died on Wednesday, after years of medical problems, Jobs had appeared on some 100 magazine covers and had numerous books written about him, not to mention an off-Broadway play, an HBO movie, even a South Park episode.
He wasn’t the first celebrity CEO, and he won’t be the last. But he may have been the first in modern times to transcend the business world and become a veritable pop culture giant.
And yet Jobs, who seemingly enjoyed the access his celebrity brought, also appeared deeply conflicted about his fame, zealously guarding the smallest details of his private life. And though he appeared smiling on countless magazine covers, he had a prickly relationship with the media and those who sought to write about him.
“Steve had a love-hate relationship with his own fame,” says Alan Deutschman, author of The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, an unauthorised biography. “He wanted it both ways. He clearly enjoyed the celebrity and the access it gave him, but he wanted total control over his image.”
And he largely got it. “Steve was masterful,” Deutschman says. “No one has come close to Steve in his ability to control and manipulate the media and get what he wants.”
Where does Jobs fit in the pantheon of celebrity CEOs? Analysts struggle to find apt comparisons in the business world.
“He’s on another plane,” says Robert Sutton, a professor of management science at Stanford University. “He reached a level in the public consciousness that’s beyond that of anyone in modern times. I mean, my mother doesn’t know the name of (former General Electric CEO) Jack Welch.”
Sutton and others find that they have to reach back into history for comparisons: to Henry Ford, for example, who revolutionised transport with the Model T automobile, or to Thomas Edison, the master inventor who similarly transformed the way we live. Or to Walt Disney, with his vast influence in entertainment.
It’s Edison’s name that pops up the most often, partly because he wasn’t only a visionary but, as Sutton says, “He could really sell. He was very good at his external image.”
Like Jobs, whose name is well known to children as young as six or seven, Edison was emulated by young children of his time, says Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at the Yale School of Management.
Sonnenfeld, who studies business leaders, compares Jobs – and his fame – to other “folk heroes” who’ve emerged in various fields at times of great change in our history, be it politics, culture, or, in this case, technology.
“What heroes do is personify complex change,” Sonnenfeld says. “It’s a shorthand that we use. It reduces things to the level of an individual.” Jobs’ ability to channel technology into products people didn’t even know they wanted – but then had to have – is “almost unfathomable,” he says.
Unfathomable, uncanny, otherworldly – such adjectives have frequently been used to describe Jobs. But there’s another side to it all. Can being a celebrity be detrimental to one’s performance as a CEO?
“It’s a huge problem when the boss becomes the brand,” Sonnenfeld says. “The upside is, it gives the brand human terms. The downside is that none of us are immortal. These branded bosses often start to believe in their own immortality.”
Sonnenfeld, like some others, believes that Jobs should have stepped down as CEO earlier than he did because of his health.
On the other hand, one could argue that no rules or generalisations apply to Jobs and Apple.
Sutton, at Stanford, wrote years ago that there was evidence that the more famous CEOs were distracted by all that public scrutiny, to the detriment of their companies. But, he says, “Jobs clearly doesn’t fit into that category.”