A few weeks ago, the NYT
carried an article which asked an intriguing question: “If Steve Jobs were alive today, should he be in jail?” It seems the iconic
entrepreneur was involved in some clearly illegal activities: a conspiracy to
stop other companies from poaching Apple employees, a scheme aimed at boosting
the value of his stock options, etc. Why did he do it? Jobs’s biographer, Walter
Isaacson, says he “always believed that the rules that applied to
ordinary people didn’t apply to him. … He believed he could bend
the laws of physics and distort reality. That allowed him to do some amazing
things, but also led him to push the envelope.” And this was his
modus operandi in general: “Over and over, people referred to his reality distortion
field. The rules just didn’t apply to him, whether he was getting a
license plate that let him use handicapped parking or building products that
people said weren’t possible. Most of the time he was right, and he got away
with it.”
Am I the only one who sees an odd parallel here? Except that Rumsfeld wasn’t
right about Iraq, and still got away with it – and remains in denial.
