At first, I thought of Steve Jobs as a high-variance person: difficult personality, very high creative output. Since I'm the same way, I always held him in high

At first, I thought of Steve Jobs as a high-variance person: difficult personality, very high creative output. Since I'm the same way, I always held him in high regard. Unlike most CEOs (low-variance, reliably mediocre types) he had the courage to be different. I really liked the idea of a CEO who had a genuine personality (even a difficult one) over the typical corporate social climber. The more that comes out about Jobs, the more I think of him as not only slimy, but toxic. He seems to have set the template for a thousand talentless hacks who use his success as an excuse to be unethical. Mr. Jobs’s conduct is a reminder that the difference between genius and potentially criminal behavior can be a fine line. This makes no sense. I'm one of those high-amplitude individuals. It comes with great difficulty. Most highly creative people have some kind of (possibly mild) mental illness: bipolar's a common one. That's not an excuse to be unethical, and to break laws for one's own benefit at others' expense. (It's one thing to break rules to make everyone win; the wage-fixing scandal is not a case of that.) That argument (fine line between genius and insanity) might excuse spending a whole weekend building a side project, and falling asleep in the Monday afternoon meeting. It doesn't excuse conspiring to suppress wages and wreck careers.