That's a pretty weird view, like arguing that a Dean of a science department ultimately gets credit for any important scientific advances his professors make, because he's ultimately responsible for the department's success as a scientific research institution, staffing, funding, construction of buildings, intellectual climate, promotion and compensation policies, etc., all of which are necessary for the research to take place and influence what kind of research is done.

CEOs, and Deans, do of course have influence on success, but I don't think a blanket, "all credit goes to the man on the top" makes any sense. One needs to investigate the extent to which different people actually contributed, i.e. whose contributions were minor, moderate, necessary, etc. Some executives of successful companies deserve a lot of the credit; others don't; depending on why the company succeeded, and what they or other people did.

And if you want to take a real capitalist-agency view, the CEO is merely another employee, and ultimately the owners are responsible for success or failure.

I think the comparison to a dean is superficial, if not disingenuous. How many deans involve themselves in so many details of product creation and strategy? I see very little commonality between the roles beyond sitting at the top of a hierarchy.

I was responding there to the much more general claim krav made that CEOs deserve ultimate credit for the success of successful companies, as opposed to the narrower claim that Jobs in particular does. I wouldn't give Jobs as much credit as most people, but I do agree he is much more hands-on, and thus deserves a lot more credit, than the average CEO (I still wouldn't call him a "builder and hacker", though).

I do think that many CEOs are approximately as involved in day-to-day operations as Deans are, with primary responsibility for the financial/governmental/organizational side of things (budgets, personnel, lobbying), and very little involvement in anything technical. Due to lots of family working in it, I have a decent impression of how much credit CEOs in the oil industry deserve for the success of their companies, and how much knowledge they have of petroleum engineering in even its high-level aspects; the answer in both cases is, not much.

There's a big difference between responsibility and deserving the credit.

I can't speak for academia - it's an island I have no wish to ever visit again.

Great companies or teams aren't happy accidents. They require leadership, vision, and execution. I wouldn't want to work with Jobs - but I admire what he's done. Apple would not be here without his vision and leadership.

On leadership, yeah, I do believe that ultimately, a leader is responsible and accountable. Whether it's the leader of a fire-team in Iraq, the leader of a country, or a four-man startup in Mountain View.

My very personal view: we'd be better off as a society if leaders were held responsible for success and failure. I see too many leaders / ceos / politicians taking credit for success and pointing to anybody but them for failures.

What bothers me about the tone of his statement is that it puts down anybody who doesn't make something "great". Great being narrowly defined as "making a metric ass load of money".

Additionally, he's presuming credit for the work Apple's engineers and designers have done. There is no doubt that Jobs guidance, and decision making has pulled Apple from the ashes. But he's not personally writing up engineering documents or slinging code.

My wife made some meatloaf today for the very first time. I thought it was pretty "great". Does that mean Jobs thinks that she's worth his consideration now? Or only if she puts the recipe out and made a metric ass load of money? I gave her the recipe, should I just take all the credit?

By defining "make" in a way that implies Jobs' participation in the process beyond those normally assigned to a CEO, and conflating credit and accountability with the process of actually "making" something, implies that he gets the credit for the late nights up writing code, testing out production designs, and all the other things that Jobs most certainly did not do is wrong.

If the world worked that way, with people taking credit for other's work, it would make for a pretty shitty place.

I think you are stretching a little here. Jobs (to make sure we are talking about the same "he") never once brought in any mention of money. His point is a fairly common viewpoint: it's easy to tear things apart but much harder to build them; before tearing other people's things apart, try building something yourself first.

I, obviously, can't say what Jobs would consider great. I think that question is meaningless, though. If somebody asked me the same question Jobs asked, the definition of great would be my own.

I took it as an allusion to the phrase "insanely great" for which only one thing fits -- Jobs' own, massively profitable, creations.

You can say the same about Goldman Sachs