For a founder, the company is their life's blood. For a new CEO, it's just another job. It's the difference between raising your own kid, and babysitting someone else's.
I always say Wozniak should lead Apple after Jobs leaves.
Just kidding. I don't think he would be very interested in Cook's position. However, I'd love to see him back guiding the electronic design of Apple products and, being a founder, the guardian of the company's soul. Current Macs have PC hearts. That's not the genius we saw with the Apple II or the IWM.
Seriously, if Apple can be boiled down to an idea, it's the marriage of art and clever engineering. Jobs brought the art and Wozniak, the engineering.
I don't think Woz has done that kind of work since the 1980's at the latest.
Everyone knows the x86 architecture is inelegant. The 1990's saw a number of new CPU architectures being introduced and marketed to replace it, but none of them could keep up with the performance of x86. Apple fought that battle for the longest, up until PPC petered out. When they gave up and adopted x86, Macs became that much more useful for their ability to dual-boot Windows, or to run Windows in a VM. Apple was able to ignore some of the rougher parts of the PC architecture by avoiding BIOS and MBR.
He mentions he's still on the payroll just so he can say he's been Apple's longest serving employee. Which is sort of in the same ballpark as being the soul of the company.
Do you really believe that the skillset that qualifies one to design the Apple II similarily qualifies one to design iPads and iPhones? I find that rather hard to believe.
(Also: You shouldn't read anything into my statements that I did not say. The Apple II is absolutely awesome, brilliant and amazing. That doesn't mean that knowing how to design it makes one fit for designing radically different stuff several decades later. To just assume that is absurd to the highest degree.)
In the past, I could never really understand the affection between a newborn and her parents, till I became a father recently. Having seen my son right from the time of delivery I know it better than the other relatives what works and what doesn't, since I have seen it in person many times.
It is this involvement from the start, the familiarity, and attention to all the small little things, which lead to affection towards the child, or in this case towards the company which literally is the founder's child.
How much of this is that the company was hugely influenced by the founder? Steve Jobs was famous for making sure all the machines at the NeXT factory were painted the same color and that no third party logs were displayed. A certain kind of OCD employee is attracted to that attention to detail and will succeed and advance within the company. Jeff Bezos is famous for the door desk at Amazon and creating a frugal company culture. Both companies are wildly successful but it seems like Bezos would make a horrible Apple CEO and I suspect that a building full of door desks would be amazingly crass to Steve Jobs. Neither is one is better, they are both successful, but I think they attract and utilize different talents. I've often wondered if Balmer's time at the top of Microsoft has been hampered by not being a coder.
One thing that makes great leaders is to understand your value in an organization. Some founders are better suited to run an agile below 100 startups but dont have the capacity to deal with the ops complexities that come with scaling a business.
If you look closely, the successful founder CEOs had a strong ops person by their side helping them scale. Understanding yourself and your weaknesses earlier on and enlisting people that would complement you is the key. Otherwise, even your passion, vision and right incentives won't help you be a great leader.
I think that the ideal situation is having a CEO/Founder but one who realizes what his deficiencies are and can accept bringing in someone to help the company...but not necessarily have the ultimate word. There is a lot to be said about keeping the originator whose vision proved to be successful be in charge of future ideas and directions or at least have the final say on them. At the same time often a founder's organizational skills arent up to par for managing scale.
Founders care about the company. Ultimately their focus is "what can I do for my company".
Everyone else cares about themselves (stock options, positions/titles, image/power, etc). Ultimately their focus is "what can the company do for me".