Mario Moussa and Derek Newberry writing over at Entrepreneur:
Essentially, the Apple co-founder’s effectiveness boiled down to this: He was able to push his people when he needed to because he had done the hard preparatory work of creating “pull.” He inspired team members first so that they were driven to live up to his exacting standards when the situation called for it.
Worth considering these points on how Jobs was able to generate such a strong “reality distortion field” and draw so much out of talented people. Also, I look at the products and software coming out (or not) of Cupertino these days and I wonder if, for all his obvious operational and business acumen, Tim Cook just can’t “pull” the same level of performance from Apple employees.