Steve Jobs: Transformational Leadership

Steve Jobs was an unconventional leader. His management style is not an exact theory that you would be able to find a lot about in university textbooks. Many describes him as a transformational leader who provided Apple with a vision and a sense of mission. He had high expectations for his employees in developing new technologies that by the time he gave the assignment seemed impossible. As a transformational leader, I see Steve Jobs as a man who was capable of creating inspiring visons, motivate people to buy into and deliver the vision, manage delivery of the vision and build ever-stronger, trust-based relationships with his people. As a leader, he was setting aside time and space for his personal development in new innovational projects.

After his exit from Apple in 1985, he would not give up but went to start a new company called NeXT which Apple subsequently started a partnership with in 1996 and acquired in 1997. Apple was due to a bad financial statement close to sell out to IBM in the middle 1990s. However, after Steve Jobs return in Apple during 1997 everything changed. The Rolling Stone magazine interviewed Steve Jobs in 1996. In the interview, he stated that Innovation was the only way out of the crisis that Apple had found themselves in for quite some time. Steve Jobs gradually began to change the bad financial situation in 1998 when he regularly liquidated projects he did not find sustainable. In the same period, rumors among the employees occurred, after a couple of incidents in the elevator where Steve Jobs had liquidated projects and fired people based on a talk about them and the project they were working on. For Steve Jobs it was all about dropping costly and pointless projects, which Apple had assumed under changing directors, and instead focusing on the innovative and visionary. I would classify this kind of leadership as authoritarian. Steve Jobs dictated the policies and procedures, decided what goals to be achieved, and directed and controlled the activities. However, the authoritarian leadership style does not include meaningful participation by the employees so this leadership style does not fit Steve Jobs

The story is describing a scenario where the developers of the iPod comes to Steve Jobs office with the final prototype proud about its progression. Steve Jobs shortly inspects the iPod and then throws it into his aquarium to great frustration for the developers. Steve Jobs and the developers looks at the prototype in the aquarium and watches small air bubbles coming out from the iPod. Air bubbles should not come out of the iPod Steve Jobs said. If any air bubbles are coming out of it, then it is possible for the iPod to be smaller. Go back and