I haven't read that but perhaps I should. Either way I think selling the puts is good. But if I'm wrong that Apple can't function nearly as well without him, I shouldn't reverse positions after.
To save you a read, the gist is that the leaders of ego driven companies do not have an interest in making sure the company succeeds when they leave. In fact, it is the opposite, since a spectacular failure shows they were indeed geniuses in being able to hold it all together. Likewise for giving others the important decisions they need to learn to be leaders.
But this problem is much larger than just the business world. In my other readings and observations, I've noticed a similar trend. According to Rashid's "Taliban," the Taliban succeeded despite themselves. Their culture is so caught up in ego that they are pretty much incapacitated without a strong leader to hold it all together, consequently they are constantly splitting and fighting with each other. We also saw this in the leadership vacuum left by deposing Saddam, and is partially why it has taken so much work to get an Iraqi army going.
In general, I see this in most non western cultures, at least that I know of, so I suspect it is a common aspect of human nature: principle based leadership outperforms ego based leadership. This is reinforced by another book I read, "Why the Rest Hate the West." The enlightenment marked a very important shift in social structure: from societies based on relationships to principle based societies, such as law, strict national boundaries, a common language and currencies - the American constitution being the epitome of this approach.
However, I qualified this as being more general to western culture, since the Greeks, and then the Romans, took a similar view of law and culture. For example, see Sophocles' "Orestes" or Virgil's "Aenaed." I guess the Enlightenment more marks a truly rigorous and global application of this idea. If you want a more contemporary example, just look at what kind of culture perpetuates the ghettos vs the culture that perpetuates the more successful segments of America. At any rate, I'm pretty convinced that cultures based on principle vs personality are much more successful.
So, all that is to give credence to the idea that ego driven companies are an evolutionary dead end, and give myself a link that I can refer to for future discussions.
If your whole society is formed by a bunch of ego driven leaders who don't accept change because it threatens their power, then you're going to grow up a pretty frustrated person, anxious to do anything that will fix things - even if it is really more of the same problem.
Yes, I guess I am showing off. But, for most of the books, the only reason I've read them is because I had too, not because I'm some kind of autodidact, and not that the list is particularly impressive anyways.
