I dunno. There was never a www.shitjobssaid.com, but there is a www.shitelonsays.com.
Which happened first: Jobs sold a lifestyle, or the innovative products demonstrated their ability to integrate into people’s lifestyle and reshape them, and Jobs spun the heck out of that to serve his company? Yes, it has centered around iPods and iPhones, but he is still the face of an inflection point in social behavior.
If Teslas get a much bigger share, Musk can be even more out front as a CEO Idol. If Echo becomes a social-behavior-shaping platform for a broad swath of people, Bezos could step out even more.
Too late to add: Worshipped CEOs typically represent some trend or type of performance that is held up as The Way to Do Things for that era.
- The In Search of Excellence Companies
- The Good to Great companies
- In the 90’s it was Business Process Reengineering gurus, followed by the Dot-Com pioneers.
- In the 00’s it was Social Media and companies who could offshore parts of their Ops to save big money
- Now it seems to be Gig Economy Enablers and Lifestyle Influencers
Right now, a Jack Welch, who was idolized in a previous era, wouldn’t have currency as a CEO idol the way Travis Kalanik (sp??) of Uber does.
Thinking out loud.
Largely, yes, although a guy like Jack Welch wasn’t to my knowledge a billionaire.
If that CEO/company are really adding value to society, I’m all for it.
Too often, however, it’s the clickbait of its era. You know, Cosmo will always have sex tips and weight loss tips on the cover, and Men’s Health is going to have “Get abz of titanium in 5 days!” Doesn’t matter if it’s 1988 or 2008. Wash rinse repeat.
And Forbes (when it was just a shitty magazine and not yet a shitty website) had to have its own cover wank material, so it was CEO worship and the same personal finance tips and the latest stock picks or whatever. Over and over.
Need content! Need content! Need content! Same old story, literally.
Given that Iron Man first appeared in the comic books in 1963, I don’t see how Musk could have inspired anything.
Not to make this a Steve Jobs discussion, but what happened is that when Jobs came back, Apple repositioned themselves (internally anyway) as a “cool” company, and started selling cute looking iMacs that … GASP!.. came in different pretty colors, while your bog-standard Windows/Intel PC of the era was either a black box with a couple of LEDs, or a putty-colored box with a couple of LEDs, and similarly colored unsexy peripherals. The iMacs weren’t any cheaper, more powerful or anything else than the earlier un-sexy Macintoshes, or for that matter, than a PC of the era. But they were pretty, and they were cool.
That started the whole lifestyle status positioning of Apple’s products as more of a lifestyle status item, as opposed to something (the PC) with a design ethos that was practically military in its relentless championing of function over form.
They continued that up through the present day with the Justin Long Mac vs. PC ads, the dancing silhouette iPod ads, and all the various nifty iPhone ads. Which, if you’ll note, have VERY little actual discussion about any technical superiority, perceived or otherwise, but focus on how cool it is to take your iPad to the mountains, or on your bike ride, or at the museum, or whatever. Their competitors have started doing the same, but for the most part, the people susceptible to that sort of thing are already in the Apple camp.
And to change the topic a bit, I think **WordMan **is onto something, except that a lot of the ideas of the past were more approachable, or at least conceptually less strange to the average layman. Taking a company from “good” to “great” makes some intuitive sense to most everyone regardless of socio-economic strata or age, and there’s an assumption that there’s some serious business jiu-jitsu involved.
But stuff like “enabling the gig economy” or being “lifestyle influencers” sounds to most anyone over 35, or not super-tight into the modern urban lifestyle, like some spacey bullshit that dumb-ass millenials would be involved in, and that either won’t last, or that won’t really change much of anything in the real world. So the CEOs known for that kind of thing aren’t idolized, but are actually viewed with some suspicion, or at least a cocked eye.
The Marvel movie Iron Man, not the comic Iron Man.
In the case of Alan Mulally, I’d say a lot of people are aware of him due mostly to the bankrupcy hearings. Although he never presented himself as the “savior” of Ford Motor Co.
IMO if you asked me who actually saved Ford, I’d say Don LeClair.
Good insights!
Combine that with the market crashes, and people probably think, “What’s the latest scam?” instead of, “What’s the latest world-changing innovation?”