Steve Jobs - The Last Apostle of Creative Business Leadership?
Thursday, October 6, 2011 at 11:22AM 
This may be the first ever non-automotive post on Automobiliac, but the passing of Steve Jobs is an occasion for much reflection. Although I don't own any Apple products (I may be the only industrial designer on Earth who can claim this), I always had the deepest respect for the creative vision that Steve Jobs wrought, and the way he interwove technical innovation with artistry in the tradition of the great thinkers of the 20th century like Ettore Bugatti, or even Frank Lloyd Wright. To me, he belongs in the same Pantheon of visionary innovators, who realized that beauty is a complete symbiosis between form and function, between performance and aesthetics. And that quality, finish, materiality, and presentation matter just as much as concept, novelty, or profitability. Jobs was not an engineer per se, nor was he a designer, but he had an inherent sympathy for both disclipines, allied with a charismatic and compelling persona and astute business mind. In short, he embodied my ideal of what a well-rounded creative business leader should be--the type of person so sorely missing from the American business landscape of today.
"Innovation" and "design thinking" have become hollow buzzwords bandied about a lot by business types and peddled by B-Schools trying to attract students, but in today's age of process-dictated, profit-obsessed business thinking, it makes me wonder if America will ever again have an individualistic standard-bearer like Steve Jobs to be proud of. In this era of social media and crowd sourcing, creativity is abdicated to the reactionary spasms of the interlinked masses, and wealth is created by the Zuckerbergs of the world, who figure out how to harness and control new platforms of information transfer while creating nothing that is real, lasting, or true themselves. Jobs seemed to be the last businessman to embody the idea that true innovation is special work for special people, to crafted by artists and visionaries and then shared, in promethian manner, with an appreciative audience for the betterment of their lives. With Jobs' passing I wonder if we have witnessed the end of the last great 20th century American innovator.
Apple, Steve Jobs in Obituaries
Reader Comments (2)
The wild, adventurous side of American business became obsolete once people realized they could make more money selling shovels to the '49ers than they could actually panning for gold...what I mean to say is, there's always another sign that the American sense of innovation and daring has passed. It's not hard to see things from a Frederick Jackson Turner perspective, but the Frontier, so to speak, has never really closed.
Things have changed with the internet, but so long as there's money floating around, Americans will still know how to make a buck in surprising, innovative, beautiful ways.
An excellent and apt appreciation.