By the time of his second spell at Apple, Jobs was undoubtedly a wiser company leader than when he had left. This was a result of the lessons he had learned at NeXT but perhaps even more so from his Pixar experience. There, with the nitty-gritty of computer animation not his forte, he knew he had people with unparalleled skills in the art form on whom he could rely, and for the first time he learned how to manage without interfering. To put it another way, he discovered he was capable of trusting others to deliver.

Jobs also demonstrated a more mature attitude to his professional relationships, even if the odd tantrum still erupted. When he imposed a raft of redundancies at Apple after his return, for instance, he undertook the process with a deal more finesse and compassion than had been evident during a similar process at Pixar five years earlier.

But Jobs always saw his businesses as collaborative efforts and would dispense high praise when he considered it deserved. In his days in charge of the Mac project, he had acknowledged that his handpicked team of technicians and designers was the driving force behind the machine. His job, he considered, was to create a space for them, insulating them from the demands of corporate life so that they could focus on the creative process.

All he asked in return was that everyone felt a duty to the team to do their best work, aware that no one individual could do it alone. He highlighted the Beatles as a good model for a collaborative company: Jobs saw the Fab Four as a group of people who kept in check each other’s negative aspects and produced work greater than the sum of their parts. This was, in brief, his dream for Apple.

‘Steve Jobs was the greatest inventor since Thomas Edison. He put the world at our fingertips.’

STEVEN SPIELBERG