Paging St. Paul …

… Bryan Appleyard — Steve Jobs: The Making of the Myth. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

In the wilderness, it was not his own company that taught him a new way of management but the one into which he bought soon after leaving Apple. This was Pixar, which would go on to make Toy Story, Finding Nemo and so on. Led by Ed Catmull and John Lasseter, Pixar seems to have been an object lesson in how to manage the talented and often rather strange people drawn to making cartoons. Uncharacteristically, Jobs did not interfere: he watched and learnt. And what he learnt was that sometimes it is best “to forgo micromanagement and give good, talented people the room they need to succeed”.