The analysis overlooked the obvious answer – that neither Apple's success nor its failure had much to do with Mr Sculley, an able corporate bureaucrat who rode the roller-coaster of high technology. Our desire to see history through the lives of great men blinds us to the real complexity of politics, business and finance, and leads us to find intentionality and design where there are only chance and improvisation. The philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre, put it acerbically: “When imputed organisational skill and power are deployed and the desired effect follows, all that we have witnessed is the same kind of sequence as that to be observed when a clergyman is fortunate enough to pray for rain just before the unpredicted end of a drought!” He also said: “One key reason why the presidents of large corporations do not, as some radical critics believe, control the US is that they do not even succeed controlling their own corporations.” That was the experience of Chuck Prince, former Citigroup chief, and Stan O'Neal, former head of Merrill Lynch.
By describing Napoleon's Russian campaign through the eyes of individual participants, Tolstoy rejected the notion of history as the lives of great men. Of the battle of Borodino, he wrote: “It was not Napoleon who directed the course of the battle, for none of his orders was carried out and during the battle he did not know what was going on.”
The hapless chief executives of big financial institutions and the world financial leaders gathered last weekend in Beijing share the experience of the French emperor. “It only seemed to Napoleon that it all took place by his will.” This mistaken inference is routinely shared by journalists and historians. “The profoundest and most excellent dispositions and orders seem very bad, and every learned militarist criticises them with looks of importance, when they relate to a battle that has been lost, and the very worst dispositions and orders seem very good and serious people fill whole volumes and demonstrate their merits, when they relate to a battle that has been won.”