Do Leaders of Great Companies have to be Dictators?

As I've been watching the world of entrepreneurship around me, I'm always looking for patterns and trends.  One I particularly focus on is leadership. As I've looked at some of the greatest companies and business leaders in the world, I've noticed that most of them have exceptionally strong personalities and dominate their company.  I don't have all the answers, so instead today I'd like to explore the patterns I've found and I look forward to hearing all of your thoughts on this.

Do Leaders of Great Companies have to be Dictators?

So let's start of by how I reached this conclusion. Recently, we've all been inundated with Steve Jobs thanks to the iPhone 4 "antennagate" and Mark Zuckerberg thanks to Facebook privacy issues and the upcoming "Social Network" movie.  In both cases, these guys have reputations for very strong personalities that very strongly lead from the top at their companies.  It got me thinking and led to me identifying quite a number of other past and present CEOs of major companies who are doing the same:

• Bill Gates:  He used to be notorious for ripping his developers when he found errors in their code and having exceptional expectations. His charity work notwithstanding, he had a pretty ruthless reputation at Microsoft before he started giving those Billions away. 
• Jack Welch: Maybe he was more benevolent than others, but there are entire books about his no "BS" policies and how he wrangled GE into shape and really forced his doctrine onto the company.
• Elon Musk: founder of a space company, Tesla motors and major shareholder in PayPal. He's known for being a bit of an egomaniac that will accept nothing less than perfection. He just successfully IPO'd Tesla last week.

I'm sure there are others, but if you know these people as well, but I think you get the idea.  

So why do I think you might need to be a dictator to succeed? 

1. Motivating Your Employees

When you have hundreds of employees, I imagine it can be very difficult to reach, inspire, motivate and bring to action all of them. With a strong personality with a slight touch of passionate dictatorship, you're more likely to hold everyone in line.

2. Fulfilling Your Vision 

When you found a company you have to have a strong vision for where the company is going and you need to have your employees understand it.  Unfortunately, this can be really challenging and much like motivating your employees is difficult, getting them to buy into your vision is just as important.  Without a rock solid vision you impose on the company (regardless of where it came from) how does a great company not falter?

3. Being a Pioneer Isn't Easy

All of these companies I've mentioned have been pioneers in their industries. To lead people to the front lines of changing markets takes strength and perhaps the dictator-like personality is the one required to lead them there. Part of being a pioneer means seeing what no one else sees. If that's the case then you have to show unwavering strength and confidence to keep your "troops" (employees) believing in you and working hard on your behalf.

So I'm still thinking a lot about this question, and I definitely wonder if there are elements you can take from these without being maniacal, but I also think there's a strong argument for why these people had to be this way and that the media lens certainly magnifies (and celebrates?) these qualities.

So do you think Leaders of Great Companies have to be Dictators?