I've spent a few hours reading the history of Pixar (it's controversial as to what role Jobs had, particularly around the "founding" - which he really wasn't) - and while I've come to the conclusion that Steve Jobs had very little (if any) role in actually running Pixar, he appears to have had some "catalyzing" effect - Issacson never really dived into that aspect of Job's personality - it might be his negotiating skill (which was epic), or his reality distortion field (which I think even Jobs fell under the influence of) - but from the very start of Apple, he just believed in a series of realities, and did whatever he could to change things so they came true.

Now, he didn't always win (most memorably in his ejection from Apple by the board), and sometimes this egomania had catastrophic effects - from his personal life, and most likely to his own health, where he refused to accept other people's opinion of what the best course of action was. You can argue and shape some people minds, but ultimately you can't win an argument with nature.

It may very well have been the case, that without the bad, there could never have been the good - they were inexorably linked.

> It may very well have been the case, that without the bad, there could never have been the good - they were inexorably linked.

I think there's something important to this notion. I once read a biography of Churchill that suggested Churchill's distrust of Hitler in the 1930's partly sprang from Churchill being the kind of egomaniac who could recognize an egomaniac. I'm sure I've done neither Churchill nor the book justice in this description, but I think there's support for the notion that personality doesn't simply or easily decompose into good parts and bad parts.

[1] 'The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone, 1932-1940', William Manchester

Churchill's an interesting example to bring up in what has become a thread about hero worship. The man was revered during the war and in all the gosh-wasn't-it-a-romantic-age reminiscences since; so much so that they gloss over things like his having proposed the Battle of Gallipoli and being sacked from the cabinet for that; his being the first person to push using gas on the Kurds (beating Saddam to it by quite a few years); and him being the only wartime leader to be ousted by a landslide majority before the war ended (and thus getting himself chucked out of cabinet in both world wars -- I don't think anyone else managed to do that either).

It does rather support the idea that hero worship is a really bad waste of time at best, and downright dangerous at worst...

From what I've read Jobs wanted a completely different future for Pixar (something like 3D rendering software for the masses) than what Lasseter, Catmull, and others wanted. It was their pushing for the future they saw and desired that's the reason behind the success of Pixar as we know it today. Jobs was supposedly looking to sell off Pixar and viewed it as a failure until Disney showed up.

Putting Pixar's success on Jobs alone is a huge disservice to the true believers that actually built Pixar.