No in my scenario Henry was just below average. In my opinion being clinically diagnosed with some type of disorder simply means you are at a point where you meet the criteria of that disorder and you can absolutely have some aspects of the disorder without meeting the criteria of that disorder. John simply was able to hire smart people to work for him and make him a profit. In the end his fateful and talented employees and his personal relationships with the clients and investors allowed him to make up for any blunders he made.
I think that there's some heavy "woe is me" focus for, um, "Henry". It's very common, and there are a host of ways that it can manifest itself. But there are a couple of things to consider.
First, as others have pointed out, neither John's nor Henry's skills are very valuable in and of themselves. John applied his skills in such a way that he was able to be very successful. Henry did not. John (from the sound of things) couldn't design a good product to save his life. So he hired people who could, and then used his interpersonal skills to make that good product a commercial success, and he reaped the rewards of that success.
Henry doesn't do a good job of managing employees, making sales, or handling the customer service line, but he can make an awesome product. Why can he not hire people to compensate for his weaker areas, like John did? There's no reason he couldn't pitch his idea to investors and get a business partner who could handle those things for him. Another John, perhaps. Instead, despite "making all the right moves", Henry arbitrarily fails for no particular reason. His employee retention is poor-- why? And why is that enough to cripple his company despite his awesome product? Why is he (apparently) handling his own sales, when by any outside reasoning (and, I would assume, Henry's own introspective prowess) he is so terrible at doing so?
People will work with other people, even if those other people have poor social skills, if there's money at the other side. Henry must have been pretty bad to drive away everyone who might have helped him in the critical areas of running his business which he himself couldn't handle. Or, what is perhaps more likely, Henry didn't bother to delegate those tasks at all, but insisted on remaining in the thick of things and inflicting his weaknesses on his business directly, all for the sake of his (very real, but situationally irrelevant) strengths.
So your declaration that Henry has made all the right moves is demonstrably false according to other parts of the scenario. Not only should Henry not be bitter that John is more successful than him, he should not be bitter about his general lack of success. Henry, fueled perhaps by some test scores that he got in high school, seems to have felt himself to be the apex of everything and refused to either improve himself in his deficient areas or delegate tasks related to those areas to people who were better suited. John wasn't hired as an engineer, he was hired as a manager, and to try and cross over would have been a disaster for him. Henry was an engineer, not a manager, and he did try to cross over-- and it was a disaster for him.
Second, holding up an example of a John who happened to be successful doesn't really compensate for all of the other people who are socially gifted, if not academically, who are less successful than John or Henry. There are a ton of people who peak in high school, and never manage to leverage their skills into anything of consequence. And I'd bet that "smart" people, however you want to define that term, are underrepresented in that group.
Third, your description of John's power of persuasion either completely discounts the effort that John has to put into it or it raises that persuasiveness to the level of a cartoon super villain. If John can mind-control others with psychic powers to do his bidding and lay fortunes at his feet, then yes, I would say that his skills are too powerful, as compared with Henry's. But if instead John isn't from a comic book, things look very different.
Henry probably has a number of academic things come very easily to him, even if he has to study sometimes. That would be reflected in his much-vaunted test scores and the quality/complexity of the work that he produces. John is naturally personable, reflected in his large number of friends and ease in building and maintaining interpersonal relationships. If John penned a post on the internet complaining that ability to do well on exams is too powerful compared to interpersonal skills, you would tell him to study harder or more or hire help. Why would the inverse situation be any different?
