Healthcare Matters

Today marks the one-year anniversary of the death of Steve Jobs. “Steve’s passing one year ago today was a sad and difficult time for all of us. I hope that today everyone will reflect on his extraordinary life and the many ways he made the world a better place,” wrote CEO Tim Cook.

Jobs’ passion and brilliance certainly defines his legacy, but let’s not forget a few other instructive characteristics of the man who is inarguably responsible for building the world’s most powerful technology company. “Ruthless” rarely denotes something positive, but in Jobs case, hundreds of millions of consumers would allow the exception. He was said to have built Apple with “brute force” and anyone who knew him clearly understood that he did not suffer fools.

It’s a reminder, at least to me, that Jobs was the quintessential capitalist. Thomas McCraw, a past winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History, has written a new biography, Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction.

Schumpeter introduced the term “creative destruction” and championed the role of the entrepreneur in both start-ups and in established companies. Although he never achieved the level of success of Jobs, he was considered a thought leader and articulated the need for disruptive technologies in the 30’s. He described the need for entrepreneurs in a free economy to be “relentless in their creative destruction.”

“In a free economy, they never stop—never.” Schumpeter wrote that all firms must try, all the time, “to keep on their feet, on ground that is slipping away from under them. So, no serious businessperson can ever completely relax. Whatever has been built is going to be destroyed by a better product or a better method or a better organization or a better strategy.” Schumpeter would have loved Apple. Putting Jobs and Schumpeter in the same room would have been rich.

—Tom Finn