Malcom Gladwell published an article titled “The tweaker: The real genius of Steve Jobs” in the  New Yorker (Nov. 2011).  He marshalled several examples from Isaacson’s book on Jobs to make the point that Jobs was more of a tweaker than grand inventor. Gladwell is close to the mark in saying that “Jobs’s sensibility was editorial, not inventive. His gift lay in taking what was in front of him—the tablet with stylus—and ruthlessly refining it.”  But Gladwell’s own paper needs a tweak in the form of a concept which gets to the heart of Steve Jobs as innovator: As I argued in a post in August, Steve Jobs, like most innovative knowledge workers, had particularly developed motive generators.
Continue reading Motive Generators in Major Innovators and Tweakers