“Did Leonardo have a guy off to the side that was thinking five years into the future about what he would paint or the technology he would use to paint it? Of course not. Leonardo was the artist, but he also mixed his own paints. He also was a fairly good chemist. Knew about pigments. Knew about human anatomy.”

Jobs uses Da Vinci to argue that combining art and science, thinking and doing, in one person is what produces exceptional work.

“It’s very easy for someone to say ‘I thought of this three years ago.’ But usually when you dig a little deeper you find that the people who really did it were also the people who worked through the hard intellectual problems.”

On why the thinker/doer split is a myth — pure 'thinkers' often retroactively claim credit.

Combining all of those skills together—the art and the science, the thinking and the doing—is what results in the exceptional result. There is no difference in the tech industry: the people who made the real contributions were the thinkers AND the doers.

Beware of organizational structures that separate strategists from builders. The hard intellectual problems get solved in the doing, not in a room upstream of it.