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Title: Decoding Leadership: How Steve Jobs Transformed Apple to Spearhead a Technological Informal Economy

Authors: Howard H. Yu

Addresses: Author address listing can be found in the "About the Authors" section at the end of the article.

Abstract: The number of obituaries and tributes that poured in following the death of Steve Jobs in 2011 is in stark contrast to the general public cynicism toward corporate America. Jobs was lauded as a technologist, designer, thinker, and even a visionary. This paper seeks to clarify the kind of innovation that Apple exemplifies - as a controlled platform that drastically reduces entry barriers for small hardware and software firms. The paper also investigates, from Apple's perspective, the change process by which the company transformed itself by identifying what Jobs did at different times and juxtaposing those actions with theories found in the literature in order to decode his leadership style.

Keywords: Steve Jobs; leadership; technological innovation; Apple transformation; informal economy.

DOI: 10.1504/JBM.2013.141204

Journal of Business and Management, 2013 Vol.19 No.1, pp.33 - 44

Published online: 05 Sep 2024 *