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Was Henry Ford a bad CEO? I have more faith in a CEO that's involved to a degree and understands the engineering side as opposed to some out of touch MBA.



Henry Ford was a good CEO in that he handed the reigns over to his son pretty early on. Henry did his best to hamstring the company until his death.


This is not historically accurate.


I think people like Ford, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, are the exception that proves the rule. It is astronomically rare for a CEO to be that involved at a micro-level and be successful.


Steve Jobs definitely wasn't proposing technical solutions in any version of events I've read.


Having been a bit closer to the action (through secondhand reports from colleagues), it was not at all uncommon for Steve to propose detailed technical solutions, but (1) many of them were no good (2) his teams got pretty good at working around him on such matters and (3) I think over time he developed the good sense to trust his lieutenants on matters like this instead of being overly insistent on seeing his bad ideas implemented.

In contrast, in UX/Design, Steve generally had very astute insights, knew so, and it was much harder to get him to change his mind.

For a publicly documented example of a bad technical decision by young Steve that the team simply worked around for a while until he changed his mind, see: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...


he was however heavily involved in UX and design.




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