We idolize founders with brilliant ideas, but triumph often results from business savvy combined with imagination.
Jobs was a capable technologist but mostly a brilliant pitchman and brand genius. Elon Musk is a great inventor, but his SpaceX is a great company partly because he works with operations experts including Gwynne Shotwell. “The lone genius is a powerful myth because it has a grain of truth,” she said, but it also ignores other skills and the collaboration necessary to bring any idea to life. Tripp’s book makes it clear that Apple as we know it today would not exist without Cook and other technocrats. It’s also becoming clearer that the skills necessary for technology-enabled transformations are changing.