Steve Jobs returned to Apple demonstrated the irreplaceable value of a company's founder.

In some ways, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were opposites.

Jobs was an artist, preferred closed systems, and spent his time thinking about great products above all else.

Gates was a businessman, kept his products open, and wanted to run the world.

But both pushed the companies they started to achievements that nobody else would have been able to match.

A college dropout who walked around barefoot and refused to shower.

Jobs was also the insider of his own personality cult. He could act charismatic or crazy.

All this eccentricity backfired on him in 1985.

Apple's board effectively kicked jobs out of his own company when he clashed with the

professional CEO brought in to provide adult supervision. Jobs returned to Apple 12

years later shows how the most important task in business, the creation of new value,

cannot be reduced to a formula and applied by professionals.

When he was hired as interim CEO of Apple in 1997, the impeccably credentialed executives who

proceeded him had steered the company nearly to bankruptcy.

That year Michael Dell famously said of Apple, what would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to shareholders.

Instead, Jobs introduced the iPod, then the iPhone, and then the iPad before he had to resign in 2011 because of poor health.

By the following year, Apple was the single most valuable company in the world. Apple's value crucially depended on the singular vision of a particular person.

This hints at the strange ways in which the companies that create new technology often resemble monarchies rather than

organizations that are supposedly more modern. A unique founder can make authoritative decisions, inspire strong personal loyalty, and plan ahead for decades.

Paradoxically, impersonal bureaucracies, staffed by trained professionals can last longer than any lifetime, but they usually act with

short time horizons.

The lesson for business is that we need founders.

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