I wrote last week of the Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs. Its a great story, well written and extraordinarily timely. Get a copy. You will enjoy it.
One of the many thoughts it provoked for me was to reinforce the EOS notion that every company needs a great Integrator.
In some companies, both roles exist in a single person; although he/she is probably more comfortable in one of those seats than the other. Steve Jobs for much of his 2nd coming at Apple was both Visionary and Integrator. To the extent that the leader of the company is almost completely a Visionary, then that company needs an Integrator. By temperament at least that was true for Jobs. Jobs appointed Tim Cook as COO in 2007.
A Visionary can run the company but it is not in her DNA to do so; she will get bored. An Integrator is not good at “seeing around corners”, but rather excels at meshing all the moving parts of a company. I explained in a post back in May the distinction between, and the personal characteristics of, a Visionary and an Integrator. You can read the whole post here.
Here is a list of Visionary/Integrator pairs that come to mind,-
- Steve Jobs and Tim Cook (As CEO now, Cook probably now needs to find a Visionary partner)
- Larry Ellison and Ray Layne (earlier days; Layne left to become a VC; Mark Hurd is now President)
- Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer
- Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger
- Brian Roberts and Steve Burke
- Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg
Graphic credit: oddsock
