In my mind, and having worked with a number of entrepreneurs and innovators, my intuition is that there is probably more than a casual relationship between this type of behavior and the creation of a company as large, successful, and wealthy as Apple is. I think that if we looked closely at other self-made billionaires, we would find a similar focus on perfection at any costs, including the sacrifice of everything, including health and family, in pursuit of their vision. I don’t think that type of wealth creation or company success is possible without being that kind of relentless. See also, Steve Jobs died early of a disease that is linked to stress.

I’m not really making a case to justify his behavior, in fact, quite the opposite. David, I support your challenge. My only intent by writing is that to truly emulate Steve Jobs is to embrace the sort of imbalanced life focus, orders of magnitude outside the norm, in order to achieve results that are similarly imbalanced (becoming a billionaire).

To achieve those sorts of innovations, costs must be paid, and the question that I ask myself is what costs are we as entrepreneurs willing to pay? I’m personally in it for the balance of my life and living it. But I suspect that for many, including Steve Jobs, his balance was his success on the terms he defined and then asked everyone around him to live up to. I suspect that he was harder on himself than he was of anyone he worked with.

To think that Jobs was a saint is naive. You need to think of him as a celebrity. Try making some of the most beautiful and wanted objects in the world and remain a normal person humbly bumbling along when you know that your actions will be judged by millions. Add on to that the fact that he got fired from his own company and his valuable ideas were stolen right from under him. I certainly would not be acting like a saint. I would be pissed and bloodthirsty.

As for the CSR thing, philanthropy is not a scale that weighs people’s character, despite what the car bumpers and ribbons of hope have to say.

Jobs most likely was an asshole, but I owe him quite a bit of who I am now. He’s not a sinner or a saint. Nothing to cry about, nothing to rejoice about. He is just another face in history that changed things up a bit.

I completely agree with your challenge to the future business leaders. We can and will be better.