The Myth of the Genius Tech Inventor

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Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos are respected for their technical imagination but also their supremacy in business strategy, marketing or ability to unite people behind a shared mission. I’ve been thinking of this because I started reading my colleague Tripp Mickle’s new book, which explores the tensions between Apple’s head and its heart in the decade since Jobs died. There were similar gripes about Microsoft under its former chief executive, Steve Ballmer, and we hear that at times now about Google led by Sundar Pichai and Uber after its founder, Travis Kalanick, was pressured to resign in 2017. A belief that ingenuity was the most important ability of these tech icons “obscured the core skill set that made these people extraordinary,” said Margaret O’Mara, a University of Washington professor who researches the history of technology companies. But at the risk of sounding woo-woo, it also requires a curiosity about the complexity of people and the world, an ability to navigate institutional and human inertia, and the persuasion skills to summon the collective will to pursue a brighter future.

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