The thing I admired about both of them goes beyond what I have seen in the recent stream of acco­lades that has issued forth since last week’s news of Jobs’ passing.

Jobs, and Dis­ney before him, had an amaz­ing abil­ity to know what it was we wanted before we knew it our­selves. It wasn’t busi­ness or tech­ni­cal acu­men, although both men had it in spades. It was the uncanny abil­ity to ride on the edge of rea­son and intu­ition while plac­ing bets on the future, get­ting it right more often than wrong.

If I knew more about them, I sus­pect I’d add Henry Ford and Thomas Edi­son to the list, but the fruit of their labors pre­dates me, so I don’t have the same appre­ci­a­tion for what they did in their lifetimes.

Yes, Jobs (and Dis­ney) shaped huge parts of the world we know today. Yes, our lives have been changed thanks to the mor­tal time they spent with us. Yes, they had pas­sion. But more than any­thing, they could reach deep inside them­selves, draw a spark of intu­ition and from it, start a fire in our hearts. That gift comes one in a gen­er­a­tion, if we’re lucky. In my life­time, I’ve only seen it twice.

As smart as Jobs was, he had many con­tem­po­rary coun­ter­parts in the IQ depart­ment. Bill Gates and Larry Elli­son are no slouches when it comes to men­tal acu­ity. More recently, Mark Zuckerberg’s intel­lect has been lauded on cel­lu­loid, no less. And any­one who seems to cross Larry Page’s path is awed by the ham­mer­ing inten­sity of his engi­neer­ing brilliance.

But the genius of Dis­ney and Jobs was of a dif­fer­ent sort. It came from being able to take our col­lec­tive pulse, and some­how know­ing what would make it quicken. They could pluck unre­al­ized dreams and trans­form them into the trea­sured stuff of our lives.  It was more art than sci­ence, more love than logic, more pas­sion than profit. It was, from our awed view­point, magic. It seems to me that Bill Gates and Larry Page have lit­tle time for magic.

There have cer­tainly been more finan­cially suc­cess­ful com­pa­nies. Dis­ney was on the edge of the bank­ruptcy for much of its his­tory. And when Walt did hit a home run, he quickly ploughed his prof­its back into his next long shot.

Apple wouldn’t be around today if Microsoft hadn’t come to the res­cue in 1997 with a $150 mil­lion dol­lar bail out. That amount seems minis­cule today next to Apple’s  $370 bil­lion mar­ket cap, mak­ing it the most valu­able tech com­pany in the world (iron­i­cally, worth more than half again as much as Microsoft’s $227 billion.)

Jobs and Dis­ney had the abil­ity to cre­ate entirely new cat­e­gories of con­sumer demand: full length ani­mated fea­tures, theme parks, per­sonal com­put­ers, com­puter ani­mated movies, per­sonal music devices, smart phones and tablet com­put­ers. Each of these inno­va­tions owed much to the per­sonal vision of the leader.

I’m not sure what Apple’s path will be in the future. I sus­pect they will bear an eerie sim­i­lar­ity to Dis­ney after Walt’s untimely depar­ture in 1966, where man­age­ment asked the same ques­tion about every deci­sion – “What would Walt do?” I have no doubt that the words “What would Steve do?” will be heard often in Cuper­tino. I’m also sure that it will be some time before we see the likes of another Steve Jobs or Walt Disney.

The gift they had is not often given. I’m just thank­ful that they both chose to share it.

Orig­i­nally pub­lished in Mediapost’s Search Insider October 13, 2011


Biography / Resume : Gord Hotchkiss is the founder and senior vice president of Enquiro, now part of Mediative. He is renowned in the industry for his expertise when it comes to understanding online user and search behaviour. He and the Enquiro team have built a solid reputation for being the leading experts when it comes to understanding what happens on a search portal and why. Before Enquiro, Gord was chairman and director of SEMPO (The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization), he worked as a columnist for MediaPost and Search Engine Land, and he was a regular speaker at industry conferences and events. Gord is also the author of The BuyerSphere Project: How Business Buys from Business in a digital marketplace.