When Jobs rejoined Apple there were huge layoffs and a cleaning up of projects. But it was never permanent, he struck hard and it was clean. After that the company could focus on innovating and not fear politics of stack ranking. Can you imagine if he kept that system in play, would Apple have been as successful?

Keep in mind that the whole office still had the fear of Steve Ranking, i.e. the fact that Steve Jobs was a dictatorial asshole who just so happened to also have good design sense. More importantly it's very dangerous to start generalizing from Apple to the whole technology industry, considering that you'll probably convince a number of otherwise underperforming companies that their best bet is to have an asshole CEO.