(FORTUNE Magazine) – Well into the conversation with FORTUNE that you're about to read, Steve Jobs, the once and interim CEO of Apple Computer, professes to feel, at the wizened age of 43, no different from when he was a frisky 17-year-old. True to form, he contradicts himself a little later, confessing to be "an old man now." Those comments reveal as much about why Jobs has been able to pull off his prestidigital revival of Apple--his first and still greatest creation--as do his observations on his business strategies and actions of the past year. Here's why. Jobs is most effective as a businessman and leader when he invokes the pathos and gestalt of his generation. He is, after all, a child of the 1960s--you're still likely to find him barefoot in the office, and for breakfast he eats granola doused in apple juice. Yet Jobs is also a mature baby-boomer, with an impressive if offbeat store of business experience, plus the typical worries that go with...