"Yeah, I think that his great creation was not any one product but a company in which creativity was connected to great engineering. And that will survive at least while the current people who trained under Steve are there"
About this Quote
The sly power here is in the downgrade: Steve Jobs's "great creation" wasn’t the iPhone or the Mac, Isaacson argues, but the institutional machine that could keep making those miracles. It’s a neat biographer’s move, shifting worship from the object to the system, and it also flatters a certain managerial fantasy: genius can be operationalized. "Creativity was connected to great engineering" sounds simple, almost inevitable, but it’s really a diagnosis of a rare cultural merger. Most companies segregate dreamers and builders, then wonder why the dream ships late, bloated, or broken. Isaacson frames Apple’s advantage as a marriage between taste and execution, held together by process, standards, and a shared language.
The second sentence is where the admiration turns into a warning shot. "That will survive at least while..". is an intentionally hedged legacy claim, less hymn than expiration date. Isaacson is quietly rejecting the idea of corporate immortality: cultures degrade, incentives shift, and "trained under Steve" implies a kind of apostolic succession that eventually runs out of apostles. It’s also a comment on how charisma scales poorly. Jobs’s intensity functioned as a forcing mechanism, keeping the creative-engineering link taut. Without the original gravitational force, the company’s future hinges on whether the link is embedded in habits and structures, or merely in people still haunted by the founder’s voice.
Context matters: Isaacson, writing in the afterglow of Jobs’s death, is translating myth into governance. He’s asking investors and fans to stop looking for the next product and start watching the human pipeline.
The second sentence is where the admiration turns into a warning shot. "That will survive at least while..". is an intentionally hedged legacy claim, less hymn than expiration date. Isaacson is quietly rejecting the idea of corporate immortality: cultures degrade, incentives shift, and "trained under Steve" implies a kind of apostolic succession that eventually runs out of apostles. It’s also a comment on how charisma scales poorly. Jobs’s intensity functioned as a forcing mechanism, keeping the creative-engineering link taut. Without the original gravitational force, the company’s future hinges on whether the link is embedded in habits and structures, or merely in people still haunted by the founder’s voice.
Context matters: Isaacson, writing in the afterglow of Jobs’s death, is translating myth into governance. He’s asking investors and fans to stop looking for the next product and start watching the human pipeline.
Quote Details
| Topic | Vision & Strategy |
|---|
More Quotes by Walter
Add to List
