Mr. Jobs’s legacy will be ‘the blending of technology and poetry. It’s not about design per se; it’s the poetic aspect of the entire enterprise.’

James B. Stewart today writes about Steve Jobs’s passion for great design in a long article in the Business Day section of the NYTimes. If you want to know what I mean when I use the term “creative economy,” this article captures the meaning better than most of what I’ve read about the creative economy. It’s not about “the arts”—it’s about a way of seeing the world through the dual lens of ideas and emotion and doing things that haven’t been done or haven’t been done better up to now. Read the article here, and get the NYT if you want more.

“Most people underestimate his grandeur and his greatness,” Gadi Amit, founder and principal designer of New Deal Design in San Francisco, told me. “They think it’s about design. It’s beyond design. It’s completely holistic, and it’s dogmatic. Things need to be high quality; they have to have poetry and culture in each step. Steve was cut from completely different cloth from most business leaders. He was not a number-crunching guy; he was not a technologist. He was a cultural leader, and he drove Apple from that perspective. He started with culture; then followed with technology and design. No one seems to get that.”