NYTimes.com: "Suppose Mr. Jobs had not left in 1985. Suppose he had convinced the Apple board to oust his nemesis, John Sculley, then chief executive and president. Under Mr. Jobs’s uninterrupted direction, would Apple have arrived at the pinnacle it has reached today, but 12 years earlier? It’s hard to see how anything like that would have transpired. The Steve Jobs who returned to Apple was a much more capable leader — precisely because he had been badly banged up. He had spent 12 tumultuous, painful years failing to find a way to make the new company [NeXT] profitable. 'I am convinced that he would not have been as successful after his return at Apple if he hadn’t gone through his wilderness experience at NeXT,' said Tim Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies, a technology consulting company. ..."
