The late Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, and Microsoft’s Steve Ballme

QUESTION

The late Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, and Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer present two different pictures of leaders.

Jobs was a visionary and a “techie,” a micromanager and a big-picture person. Ballmer is a good manager, although not a techie, and observers contend that he has been distracted lately from the company vision by litigation. How do these two men NOT fit the classic definition of top managers?
What will be an ideal response?

ANSWER

Answer: Apple’s Jobs was more technical than most top managers and was a micromanager, which is unusual and often not a good quality in top managers. Ballmer is less technical, but he is having difficulty focusing on the vision and mission of the company because of the litigation and product problems of recent years. He finds himself one step behind other companies over and over again.
Explanation: Top managers usually have more conceptual skills than technical skills, yet Jobs appears to have had both. Although top management doesn’t need a lot of technical skills, in a tech industry and in a company with 90 percent of the market, it would seem that Microsoft lost the technical expertise with the departure of Bill Gates.