John Sculley was chief executive of Apple from 1983 to 1993. He gave an extended account of his experiences to Fortune magazine, which posed the question: “Sculley – chump or champ?” Mr Sculley’s tenure included a period of great success – Apple’s graphical user interface brought the present computer within the capabilities of everyone; and a period of serious failure – Microsoft achieved almost complete dominance of the industry. How could one man have been both so right and so wrong?

The analysis overlooked the obvious answer – that neither Apple’s success nor its failure had much to do with Mr Sculley, an able corporate bureaucrat who rode the roller-coaster of high technology. Our desire to see history through the lives of great men blinds us to the real complexity of politics, business and finance, and leads us to find intentionality and design where there are only chance and improvisation. The philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre, put it acerbically: “When imputed organisational skill and power are deployed and the desired effect follows, all that we have witnessed is the same kind of sequence as that to be observed when a clergyman is fortunate enough to pray for rain just before the unpredicted end of a drought!” He also said: “One key reason why the presidents of large corporations do not, as some radical critics believe, control the US is that they do not even succeed controlling their own corporations.” That was the experience of Chuck Prince, former Citigroup chief, and Stan O’Neal, former head of Merrill Lynch.