I moderately disagree with Gladwell's conclusions, and fear he is trying to 'tweak' his own theories about 'tweakers' to fit Jobs.
Jobs had faults and long-term insights. He liked what was beautiful. And he was really good at tweaking (and insisted on it until a kind of perfection).
But the other thing he had was imagination, insight into what was important in the long run, and really good engineers who were attracted by his insistence on excellence. It's not just about insistence on tweaking.
It's about NeXT and Pixar and excellence. Insistence on tweaking a design perfectly is correlated with excellence in imagination. They are not so different. You don't insist on tweaking something past all points of normal behavior -- unless you have that vision.
Remember that Jobs bought Pixar because he thought the hardware that Pixar designed and sold had potential.
It wasn't until Lasseter's work in doing shorts (to show off the software) and commercials (to pay the bills) started taking off that the possibility of a feature movie came about. That's more like a "pivot".
Jobs had faults and long-term insights. He liked what was beautiful. And he was really good at tweaking (and insisted on it until a kind of perfection).
But the other thing he had was imagination, insight into what was important in the long run, and really good engineers who were attracted by his insistence on excellence. It's not just about insistence on tweaking.
It's about NeXT and Pixar and excellence. Insistence on tweaking a design perfectly is correlated with excellence in imagination. They are not so different. You don't insist on tweaking something past all points of normal behavior -- unless you have that vision.