Steve Jobs: He Wasn't John The Baptist

With the recent passing of Apple CEO Steve Jobs, the financial press has gone into paroxysms of religious fervor in writing about this refreshing and iconoclastic business leader.  The blogosphere is flooded with Tweets of ecstatic reverie, calling him a "prophet."  Here is the ridiculous, pandering headine from the online Wall Street Journal:

"Steve Jobs turned Eve's apple, the symbol of fallen humankind, into a religious icon for true believers in technology. But can salvation be downloaded?" (Wall Street Journal)

The analogy with the apple in the Genesis story is sophomoric, and more fitting for the Onion than the Journal. "No," he is not a religious icon, and "No" salvation can't be downloaded.  As long as we're entertaining outlandish theories, what if the apple in Apple comes from Magritte's "Son of Man" painting that figures in "The Thomas Crown Affair?" 

A couple of things to note.  In Rakesh Khurana's book on corporate leadership, he notes that the most frequently occurring post-graduate credential among CEO's has been the MBA from the Harvard Business School.  Against that background, the story of Mr. Jobs dropping out of Reed College and taking the path less travelled to corporate leadership of an iconic company is refreshing and worthy of study. 

Talk about a diverse background!  Steve Jobs describes taking a course in calligraphy as giving him the eye and the insight to realize the importance of unique typefaces to the first Mac.  I suspect an interest in Zen informed a lot of his insights.  He helped create, was defeated by, and ultimately remade the culture of Apple, defining it through his unique, personal lens. It gives anyone interested in business a lot to think about, but it's business not messianism.