Sales and marketing are vital functions for most businesses, but one of the greatest CEOs of all time believed that they should be kept in check.
Steve Jobs had a lifelong belief that product excellence was the foundation of everything, and that the moment companies lost sight of that, they were on a slow road to irrelevance. “So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies and the product. People get driven out of the decision-making forums. The companies forget what it means to make great products,” he once explained in an interview.
For Jobs, this was not an abstract theory. He had lived it. He had watched it happen at Apple after he was pushed out in 1985, and he had witnessed it at other tech giants who had once been at the forefront of innovation but slowly lost their edge. The consequence, in his view, was a kind of institutional amnesia — companies forgot what had made them great in the first place.
“It’s sort of the product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position that gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product versus a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that’s required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product, and they really have no feeling in their hearts usually about wanting to really help the customers,” he said.
Elsewhere, Jobs spoke at length about the immense effort required to turn a good idea into a great product — describing it as holding thousands of concepts in your head simultaneously and fitting them together in new ways every single day. That kind of deep, obsessive craftsmanship is precisely what he believed sales-led leadership was incapable of appreciating, let alone nurturing.
Jobs then turned to what he considered a defining example:
“So that’s what happened at Xerox. The people at Xerox PARC used to call the people that ran Xerox ‘toner heads,’ and these toner heads would come out to Xerox PARC and they just had no clue about what they were seeing.”
Xerox PARC, the company’s legendary research division, had developed the graphical user interface, the mouse, Ethernet, and a host of other technologies that would go on to define modern computing. And yet Xerox, run by executives whose fortunes were built on selling photocopiers and toner, failed to commercialise any of it meaningfully. It was Jobs himself who visited Xerox PARC in 1979 and immediately grasped the transformative potential of what he saw — potential that the people running Xerox simply could not perceive, because their frame of reference was entirely different.
The implications of Jobs’s observations extend well beyond the companies he named. His argument is, at its core, about what happens when the people who are rewarded and promoted within an organisation are no longer the ones who understand the product most deeply. In competitive markets, product-focused leaders are indispensable — but once a company achieves dominance, the pressure to maintain market share can quietly shift power toward those who are better at defending existing turf than breaking new ground. It is a pattern that has played out repeatedly across the technology industry.
IBM, which Jobs also referenced in the broader interview this quote was drawn from, offers a parallel case. Once the dominant force in personal computing, it ceded the field as its culture became more focused on sales and services than on building products people loved. More recently, observers have pointed out that Apple itself — the very company Jobs rescued and rebuilt around product obsession — appeared to be caught off guard by the AI revolution, suggesting that even the institutions Jobs shaped are not immune to the forces he described. Nokia and BlackBerry are further examples of companies that once held commanding market positions and lost them, in part because their leadership failed to foresee or respond to what truly better products could look like.
Jobs’s broader philosophy on this was consistent throughout his life. He believed deeply that trust — and by extension, brand strength — was built through the quality of the product, not through marketing campaigns. Companies that spent more energy on their messaging than on their products, in his view, had fundamentally misunderstood what made customers loyal. The “toner heads” at Xerox were not villains; they were simply people optimising for the wrong thing. And in doing so, they let one of the greatest collections of technological innovation in history slip through their fingers.
The lesson Jobs left behind is not that sales and marketing are unimportant — they are not. It is that when they become the dominant culture of a company, rather than a support function for great products, the product genius that built the company in the first place tends to quietly disappear. And once it is gone, it is very hard to get back.