Publication Type
Magazine Article
Version
acceptedVersion
Publication Date
6-2018
Abstract
When Apple CEO Steve Jobs approached AT&T about partnering on a new kind of mobile phone — a touchscreen computer that would fit in your pocket — Apple had no expertise in the mobile market. Yet AT&T executives quickly came to believe so strongly in Job’s vision that they skipped internal process protocols to land the deal. Randall Stephenson, then CEO of AT&T, famously said, “I told people you weren’t betting on a device. You were betting on Steve Jobs.” Apple went on to secure massive commitments from AT&T’s suppliers, who spent hundreds of millions to build factories for iPhone-specific parts.
Keywords
leadership, confidence, overconfidence
Discipline
Leadership Studies | Strategic Management Policy
Research Areas
Finance
Publication
Harvard Business Review
Publisher
Harvard University
Embargo Period
11-5-2019
Citation
PHUA, Kenny; THAM, T. Mandy; and WEI, Chi Shen.
Can Being Overconfident Make You a Better Leader?. (2018). Harvard Business Review.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research/6414
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://hbr.org/2018/06/can-being-overconfident-make-you-a-better-leader