“Jobs is fundamenatally mission-driven, not product-driven,” says David Wertheimer, CEO of the Entertainment Technology Center at the University of Southern California. “His great gift is to inspire this almost messianic sense of purpose that he is going to change the world.”
This breeds a culture of a great drive to innovate and look around the next corner. “He is perhaps singular in his ability to know what people want before they even know they want it,” adds Mr. Wertheimer, who worked with Jobs in the 1980s when the Apple founder was writing the operating-system code that now drives Apple’s most popular products.
Yet Apple, post-Jobs, might not be as impoverished as some reports might suggest. In spite of the public perception that the company rises and falls on the fortunes of its founder, “one thing you need to know about Apple is they have a very strong bench,” says Don Mayer, CEO of Small Dog Electronics, the third largest Apple retailer in the country.
After nearly two decades of working with Jobs, Mr. Mayer says that while it is true that Jobs is the visionary behind the company’s products, “visionaries spawn other visionaries.”
The public mystique around Jobs is strong, adds Wertheimer, but it is important to note the depth of creativity and innovation surrounding the wide array of products coming from Apple – and what that depth says about the company. “There is no possible way Steve Jobs had enough time to touch every aspect of every product. So the fact that those products have so many great subtle differentiators shows there is a great group of innovative people doing work that is largely attributed to Jobs, because he inspires it,” he says.