I was thinking 4 quadrant. Horizontal axis is competence, vertical axis is professional vs. auteur.
Steve Jobs was something of an auteur who eventually began to really piss off the people he had once successfully led and inspired. After his return to Apple, he had clearly gained some more permanent teamwork and leadership skills, which is good, but was still pretty dogmatic about his vision and hard to argue with.
The most competent end of the professional quadrant probably includes people more like Jamie Dimon, Jack Welch, or Mitt Romney. Professional CEOs who you could trust to administrate anything, who topped their classes (at least in Romney’s case), but who don’t necessarily stand for any big idea.
This classification also corresponds to Foxes and Hedgehogs—Many Small Ideas vs. One Big Idea / Holistic vs. Grand Framework thinking.
But it is not a true binary; people who have an obsessing vision can learn to play nice with others. People who naturally like to conform and administrate can learn to assert a bold vision. If Stanley Kubrick is the film example of an Auteur—an aggravating genius—and J.J. Abrams is the professional—reliable and talented but mercenary and flexible, there are still people like Martin Scorsese who people love to work with and who define new trends in their art.
So maybe junction is a good way to think of it, but there are extraordinarily talented and important people who seem to have avoided learning from the other side too.
I was thinking 4 quadrant. Horizontal axis is competence, vertical axis is professional vs. auteur.
Steve Jobs was something of an auteur who eventually began to really piss off the people he had once successfully led and inspired. After his return to Apple, he had clearly gained some more permanent teamwork and leadership skills, which is good, but was still pretty dogmatic about his vision and hard to argue with.
The most competent end of the professional quadrant probably includes people more like Jamie Dimon, Jack Welch, or Mitt Romney. Professional CEOs who you could trust to administrate anything, who topped their classes (at least in Romney’s case), but who don’t necessarily stand for any big idea.
This classification also corresponds to Foxes and Hedgehogs—Many Small Ideas vs. One Big Idea / Holistic vs. Grand Framework thinking.
But it is not a true binary; people who have an obsessing vision can learn to play nice with others. People who naturally like to conform and administrate can learn to assert a bold vision. If Stanley Kubrick is the film example of an Auteur—an aggravating genius—and J.J. Abrams is the professional—reliable and talented but mercenary and flexible, there are still people like Martin Scorsese who people love to work with and who define new trends in their art.
So maybe junction is a good way to think of it, but there are extraordinarily talented and important people who seem to have avoided learning from the other side too.