# Who's the biggest driver of the success of a company?  Employees or CEO?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whos-the-biggest-driver-of-the-success-of-a-company-employees-or-ceo/751777>\
**Category:** Great Debates\
**Created:** [April 10, 2016, 5:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whos-the-biggest-driver-of-the-success-of-a-company-employees-or-ceo/751777 "2016-04-10T05:23:50Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 4

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**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\
**Post date:** [April 15, 2016, 6:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whos-the-biggest-driver-of-the-success-of-a-company-employees-or-ceo/751777/61 "2016-04-15T18:24:57Z")

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> [@msmith537](#):
>
> You act as if Apple existed before Steve Jobs.
> 
> Or as if the CEO has no say or influence in the quality of the people who work for him.

Sure, but isn’t that true of any company?

My point was that the really neat stuff Apple produced/produces wasn’t ever directly invented by Jobs. Even the early stuff was mostly Wozniak.

Jobs was from a shareholder perspective, a good CEO. He DID do the sort of “turning the supertanker” kind of change that Apple needed to stay relevant.

But he didn’t actually invent the products- his excellent engineering staff did that.

So maybe we can say that you need both to be amazingly successful; it’s as likely that without Jobs, some wonk at Apple would have come up with a proto-iPod or proto-iPhone, and the non-Jobs CEO would have done much like Kodak did with the digital camera- either actively suppressed it, or ignored it as “outside the core business” of making Macs. And we know that without Jobs, Apple was already struggling.

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