DeGaulle was right

The New York Times has a column by Steve Lohr on the Jobs situation:

Indispensable? No one is, we’re told. Times change, people move on and the notion of the irreplaceable individual is a myth. That is irrefutable, at least in the cosmic sense of Charles de Gaulle’s grim reminder: “The cemeteries of the world are full of indispensable men.” Yet there are moments in history, or institutions, that are so shaped by the extraordinary contributions of a single person that it is hard to imagine one without the other. So the indispensable-man debate was fueled anew last week, when Steve Jobs said he was taking a leave of absence from Apple until July because his health problems were “more complicated” than he first thought.
Since he returned to Apple in late 1996, Mr. Jobs has been the product team leader, taste arbiter, and public face of a company that has been a stylish breath of fresh air in the personal computer business. With the introduction of the iPod, iTunes, and the iPhone, Apple has shaken up the music and cellphone industries as well.
What is it, then, that makes someone a candidate for the cloak of indispensability? In fields of individual endeavor, in the arts or sciences, the case for the irreplaceable individual is a strong one. There are no substitutes or fill-ins for Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Mozart, Einstein, or da Vinci. In other undertakings, though, context is often crucial. In May 1940, when he became Britain’s prime minister, Winston Churchill was indispensable, contends Richard S. Tedlow, a historian at the Harvard Business School. “He had a mongoose-and-cobra understanding of Hitler and the evil of Nazism,” Mr. Tedlow said. “And he had the unique eloquence in speeches the next few days, promising Britain only ‘blood, toil, tears, and sweat,’ to rally his countrymen to the effort of uncommon self-sacrifice that the war was going to require.”
Similarly, Abraham Lincoln, a gifted writer and communicator, was ideally suited to explain the need and purpose of the Civil War to the citizens of the Northern states. “Looking back, it’s hard to imagine anyone but Lincoln doing what he did,” said John Steele Gordon, a historian and author.
Yet indispensability is often a matter of timing. Churchill, for example, spent the 1930s in the political wilderness. “In 1935, no one said Winston Churchill was indispensable,” Mr. Tedlow observed. The indispensable individual rises at certain turning points in the history of a country or company. Sometimes, they step back from the stage shortly afterward, though few move with the speed or self-effacing equanimity of Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, a statesman-farmer who returned to his plow within a few weeks of being appointed dictator of Rome in 457 B.C., after he conquered the neighboring Aequians.
“Nobody is indispensable indefinitely,” said John Kao, a jazz musician and innovation consultant to corporations and governments. “The ‘great man’ theory does hold water, but mainly at times of transition when a charismatic leader lends what psychologists would call an individual’s ego strengths to the organization or country as a whole, to allow it to regroup and move forward.”
Institutions often thrive after visionary leaders, once seen as irreplaceable, make their exit. In the mid-1980s, Sam Walton was seen as the personification of Wal-Mart Stores, a chain he founded three decades earlier. He was Mr. Sam to employees, known for personally patrolling stores and attending to the smallest details, lionized on magazine covers and studied in business schools. But after he retired in 1988, Wal-Mart did not miss a step, growing faster than ever.
At one time, Bill Gates was as much the face of Microsoft as Mr. Jobs is of Apple today. Yet Mr. Gates consciously and gradually stepped back in recent years. He handed off the chief executive job to his longtime partner, Steven A. Ballmer, in 2000, and last year left day-to-day responsibilities at Microsoft to become a philanthropist full time. Any company bears less of the imprint of a single individual as it gets bigger. And at $60 billion a year in sales, Microsoft is a very large company indeed, about twice the size of Apple. Beyond that, the product culture at Microsoft is very different from Apple’s. Microsoft products are mainly useful and necessary tools of business for writing documents, calculating spreadsheets, and making presentations. Apple products are cool, elegant, and easy to use, and Mr. Jobs is seen as the tastemaker-in-chief guiding design decisions.
Apple itself has grown dramatically, in a striking corporate revival led by Mr. Jobs over the last decade, to become a company with sales of $32 billion a year and 32,000 employees. “The real test of exemplary leadership is not making yourself an irreplaceable icon, but developing a deep, talented bench who, when their turn comes, can unite a company and unleash creativity in their own way,” said Warren Bennis, a professor at the University of Southern California.
Apple, according to students of the company, is far from a one-man show, and Mr. Jobs is taking a leave from a company in good shape. “As special as Steve is, I think of Apple as like a great jazz orchestra,” said Michael Hawley, a professional pianist and a computer scientist who once worked for Mr. Jobs. “Steve did a superb job of recruiting a broad and deep talent base. When a group gets to be that size, the conductor’s job is pretty nominal — mainly attracting new talent and helping maintain the tempo, adding bits of energy here and there.”

Rico says he was employee 7667, and it's hard to imagine what the current employee number might be...