Two nights ago I finished reading, Inside Steve’s Brain by Leander Kahney and last night started reading the updated version of The Little Kingdom: The Private Story of Apple Computer by uber VC, Michael Mortiz, who a long time ago was a fabulous writer/reporter. The two books have enough anecdotes to point to the fact that working for Apple’s (s AAPL) Steve Jobs is nothing short of climbing a glass wall.
Despite that, Apple employees think he is awesome. According to a survey by Glassdoor.com, a Sausalito, Calif.-based company that that tracks employee satisfaction, Jobs is the #1 CEO, ahead of Google’s (S GOOG) Eric Schmidt, Adobe Systems’ (a ADBE) Shantanu Narayen and Netflix’s (s NFLX) Reed Hastings. (Full list below the fold.)
In sharp contrast to Jobs, Dell CEO Michael Dell was ranked 23 with 44 percent approval, while Steve Ballmer had 41 percent approval rating from his employees. eBay’s (s EBAY) John Donahoe had an approval rating of 20 percent.
| Company | CEO | Approval Rating as of Oct. 09 |
|---|---|---|
| Apple | Steve Jobs | 90% |
| Eric E. Schmidt | 87% | |
| Adobe | Shantanu Narayen | 78% |
| Netflix | Reed Hastings | 76% |
| salesforce.com | Marc Benioff | 73% |
| Citrix Systems | Mark B. Templeton | 72% |
| Rackspace | A. Lanham Napier | 72% |
| QUALCOMM | Paul E. Jacobs | 69% |
| NVIDIA | Jen-Hsun Huang | 68% |
| Intuit | Brad D. Smith | 68% |
| Oracle | Larry Ellison | 62% |
| Intel Corporation | Paul S. Otellini | 62% |
| EMC | Joe Tucci | 60% |
| SAP America | Bill McDermott | 58% |
| Nokia | Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo | 56% |
| Novell | Ron Hovsepian | 56% |
| Texas Instruments | Rich Templeton | 54% |
| Yahoo! | Carol Bartz | 54% |
Good book. I think people like and respect who is obsessed by making their product or company better all the time and above the others.
Intelligent people don’t care if their leader is a pain in the ass as long as he/she does it for the right reasons, with respect and has competence in the matter.
Totally agree!