And at the same time, you have to train fundamentals of team functionality - just like passing, dribbling and shooting in basketball. The fundamentals of innovation and ideation are enhancing and expanding the core skills of listening, seeing, constructing, storytelling and imagining. For an innovator, listening and seeing deeper opens into the skill of observing people interacting emotionally with your products and services. In a way that lets you to uncover tacit and unarticulated needs and requirements. Likewise, constructing has to do with the skill of rapidly and skillfully creating visualizations and prototypes for your subjects to play with and imagine with. Mastering story is key, as it encapsulates the vision for the team. These are the skills of artists, except instead of painters using egg tempera or filmmakers using silver nitrate, innovators are the sculptors of ideas and architects of experience. Once you have the bases covered, and training is effective, you should be able to execute on your ideas.

Now, everything I've just said makes perfect sense. The only problem is that when you actually apply these terrific sounding rules in the field, with living and breathing creative people, who tend to be a bit emotional, all sorts of unpredictable chemical reactions start happening. Teams are made of people, and even if you cover the skill bases to insure that you have the bases covered... the reality is that the project is only as strong as your weakest link. Human beings have foibles and frailties, which forms the number one cause of project failure: the inevitable ability of humans to eventually screw things up and rock bands to crash and burn.

This is why Steve Jobs said, "My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other's kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That's how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they're done by a team of people."

In other words, it's the management of negative tendencies that's critical. Even if every member of your team is a bonafide genius, the odds are that the band will still implode due to clashing egos and complex 'team-destructive' interpersonal issues. So once you've assembled a great team, you should be spending the majority of your focus on how to manage those team-destructive interpersonal issues. Putting together a successful rock band is actually a pretty difficult task to accomplish... but putting together another Beatles is an extremely difficult task.

Here's a concrete example: suppose you have a really creative engineer who has whipped up a terrific demo for you for virtually no cash. However, he's never really shipped anything before, because he has what I call "success anxiety", and chokes whenever its crunch time. However, he's really good at hiding this little fact because, well, he's really smart... plus he's your best friend's girlfriend's kid brother, yada yada yada. Oh, and then throw in the key factor that he's been hiding the fact, even from his closest friends whom you called for a reference check, that he's closet alcoholic since high school. Trust me, it doesn't matter how brilliant your venture's vision is or how much ethnographic data you've accumulated or how many strategic partners you've signed up - if you make him your project lead, your project is doomed.

This is the reason that Steve Jobs did not suffer fools, and had zero tolerance for anything but world class talent. There was no gray scale for Jobs - either you were A Team material, or you were a complete bozo who deserved have his skull stuck on a stick in the reception area, to prevent future bozos from applying at Apple. Allowing a few bad apples would be like opening a crack in a dam, Jobs reasoned. Soon the whole place would be flooded with crappy staff, especially in high growth mode. Therefore, Job's approach to dealing with clashing egos and complex team-destructive interpersonal issues, was to have the biggest ego in the building and to crush all team-destructive tendencies with emotional abuse, and by vehemently firing people at the first sign of failure. In other words, Steve Jobs was a world class asshole.

The stories about 'bad Steve' have become legend. We've heard them all - stuff like he'd regularly bring his subordinates to tears. He'd bully people during interviews, asking when they lost their virginity or last dropped acid. He once tried to fire the Xerox repairman, for not looking like he was motivated enough. When MobileMe launched in the summer of 2008, it was plagued with problems. People had trouble synching to the cloud, so Jobs gathered the development team in Apple's auditorium and fired the project lead publicly. So how bad was he? This was the kind of guy who drove his Mercedes around without a license plate so he could park in handicapped spots.

Jobs' best friend Jonathan Ive shared his thoughts about bad Steve: "I think honestly, when he's very frustrated, and his way to achieve catharsis is to hurt somebody. And I think he feels he has a liberty and license to do that. The normal rules of social engagement, he feels, don't apply to him. Because of how very sensitive he is, he knows exactly how to efficiently and effectively hurt someone."

And what did Jobs have to say about his bad behavior? "Part of my responsibility is to be a yardstick of quality," Jobs told BusinessWeek in an interview. "Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected. My job is not to be easy on people. My jobs is to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better."

The greatest danger of the canonization of Steve Jobs is that it will give asshole bosses free rein to become even bigger assholes. And potential assholes are pointing to Steve Jobs as living proof that being an asshole is not only okay, but integral to building a great company.

Okay, let's get down to it - the key issue that the life of Steve Jobs is supposed to teach us - do you really need to be an asshole to succeed in business?

The answer is an absolute no. Let's put this idea to rest - Steve Jobs didn't succeed because he was an asshole. Steve Jobs succeeded because he was Steve Jobs. He had a sixth sense about what consumers wanted, an unmatched ability to adapt existing technology and turn it into something that fulfilled unarticulated desires, and a commitment to quality that is second to none. Steve Jobs was successful in spite of being an asshole, because his genius was so complete. If you are tempted to let your asshole tendencies reign, just make sure you're as brilliant as Steve Jobs, because if you aren't, this strategy will backfire on you.

To illustrate why being an asshole is a sub-optimal strategy, let's consider an easier example of management style - film directing. Let's contrast two famous directors, James Cameron and Clint Eastwood.

First, let's look at the directing style of James Cameron. Just like Steve Jobs, he is notorious on set for his uncompromising and dictatorial manner, as well as a flaming temper. He's generally considered an arrogant, ruthless, a terrorizer of his subordinates... and all in the pursuit of excellence. Stories of Cameron's toughness on his crews are legendary. When you wrap a film on his set, you get a commemorative T-shirt that says, "You can't scare me - I worked for James Cameron."