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To say that a manager is extremely talented at running a company is practically an insult in Silicon Valley. Inventors, not great managers, are often the ones celebrated in technology.

We imagine mad scientists bringing their visions of the first personal computers, the software that organized all the websites in the world, and cool electric cars to life. Turning an idea into a viable and permanent business is tedious by comparison.

It’s a constant fear among technologists that companies will give more power to businessmen rather than inventors. The concern is understandable. Innovation is now necessary and difficult to sustain as technology is such a huge industry.

But an individual’s obsession with creativity above all other talents is a selective memory in the history of technology. Victory is often the result of imagination combined with an obsessive business sense. Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos are respected for their technical imagination, as well as their prowess in business strategy, marketing, or their ability to unite people around a common mission.

Great ideas are almost never enough on their own. Strong leaders also need pragmatism and other skills beyond imagination. and this way technology surpasses everything Now it means that the legend of the genius tech inventor stands on the way to progress.

I was thinking about this because I started reading my colleague Tripp Mickle’s new book. explores tensions Between Apple’s head and heart in the decade after Jobs’ death.

Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, is a leader in manufacturing details. Jony Ive was the design genius who helped Jobs make computers fun and shape the modern smartphone. i have Stopped working full-time at Apple In 2019, and in Tripp’s words, he complained that technocrats and “accountants” were sucking up Apple’s soul.

This is a retain he is opens Periodically among technologists and investors who say Apple is losing its touch on product invention and creativity. had similar problems About Microsoft under former CEO Steve Ballmer and we hear this from time to time Google Led by Sundar Pichai and Uber after that Founder Travis Kalanick pressured him to resign in 2017. The fear is that corporate bureaucrats gain technical skills and hearts.

Some of these are natural concerns about companies as they grow. Some of the sentiment probably reflects nostalgia for a time when inventing technology was everything. Apart from that, there is a selective reading of the history of technology.

Famous Silicon Valley inventors are often both heart and head. Jobs was a gifted technologist, but for the most part he was a brilliant craftsman and brand genius. Amazon is a reflection of Bezos’ creative ideas and financial wizardry. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg were hypercompetitive business strategists rather than software coding masterminds. Elon Musk is a great inventor, but SpaceX is partly because it’s a big company he works with. operations specialists including Gwynne Shotwell.

A belief that mastery is the most important talent of these tech icons “hides the core skill set that makes these people extraordinary,” he said. Margaret O’MaraA University of Washington professor who studies the history of tech companies.

“Just genius is a powerful myth because there is a grain of truth,” he said, but also neglecting the other skills and collaboration required to bring any idea to life. “Even Thomas Edison had a lot of people in his lab,” O’Mara said.

Tripp’s book makes it clear that Apple as we know it today would not exist without Cook and other technocrats. Developing the iPhone was a once-in-a-lifetime feat, but it took obsessive geeks like Cook to ensure Apple could make hundreds of millions of perfect copies each year and not break.

It is also becoming increasingly clear that the skills required for technology-enabled transformations are changing.

Technology is no longer limited to brilliant Ive inventions in a cardboard box. It has become an opportunity to redesign systems such as healthcare, manufacturing, and transportation.

Of course, this requires a creative thinker who can come up with artificial intelligence code, virtual worlds, or satellites that beam internet service to Earth. But at the risk of sounding woo-woo, it also requires a curiosity about the complexity of humans and the world, the ability to navigate corporate and human inertia, and persuasion skills to summon the collective will to pursue a brighter future. The power to invent is necessary, but not sufficient.

Before you go …

• A dramatic day for Lyft and Uber: My Colleague Kellen Browning Wrote He said Lyft had disappointed investors with its passenger numbers announcements, and warned that the company was having trouble attracting enough on-demand drivers. Uber said it didn’t experience any of these issues, but the stock prices of both companies fell today. We will continue to monitor what happens.

• A crypto manager was not who he said he was. My Colleague Ron Lieber unraveled the truth It’s about an executive at ZenLedger, a software company, who misrepresents his academic and professional background and investment background.

• They truly believe in Black Market Birkin bags: Cut Writer It’s about a group of people on Reddit who can buy luxury goods but are committed to buying fake versions. The RepLadies group was “stamped with a kind of sarcasm towards real goods and the belief that buying replicas is a way to overturn the system and stick it to man.” (Subscription may be required.)

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Actresses Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin compare the number of professional awardsand it’s nice how much fun they have with each other.

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