I was under the impression that Jobs replaced a lot of the Apple senior management with his people from NeXT. To the point where there were jokes that it was NeXT taking over Apple, not the other way round.

Part of a CEOs contribution is to install the right management team, and if that is what he did, it was something the previous line of CEOs did not do.

I don't like to use Apple as a evidence for anything. Steve and Apple are such outliers that using them as evidence supporting any conjecture is extremely problematic. About the best you can say is that they are proof that every rule has an exception.

The CEO decides what problems to solve an in general how to solve them. It's like a general on the battlefield - and military history shows how extraordinarily dependent an army is on the decisions of its generals.

Consider how Microsoft has rather dramatically changed course with the ascension of Nadella, with an equally dramatic effect on the stock price. This is very clearly a result of the CEO changing direction.

Company culture as well flows down from the top, this becomes clear if you've worked for different corporations.

If the CEO doesn't matter, I wonder who would risk $billions in corporate valuation installing some random guy off the street rather than a carefully selected person.

Walter I am not disagreeing that the CEO matters, just that Apple and Steve are not good models for anything. I have seen far too much obnoxious behaviour explained off as “Steve did x and Apple was a success so I will do it too”.