Inside Steve's Brain (18 page)

Of course, the desire to avoid Jobs is not universal. There are plenty of employees at Apple only too eager to get Jobs’s attention. Apple has its full share of aggressive, ambitious staffers keen to get noticed and promoted.

Jobs is often the center of workplace conversation. The subject of Steve comes up a lot. He gets credit for everything that goes right at Apple, but he also gets blamed for everything that goes wrong. Everyone’s got a story. Employees love to discuss his outbursts and his occasional quirks.

Like the Texan billionaire Ross Perot, who banned beards among his employees, Jobs has some idiosyncrasies. One former manager who had regular meetings in Jobs’s office kept a pair of canvas sneakers under his desk. Whenever he was called for a meeting with Jobs, he’d take off his leather shoes and put on the sneakers. “Steve is a militant vegan,” the source explained.

Inside the company, Jobs is known simply as “Steve” or "S.J.” Anyone else whose name is Steve is known by their first and last names. At Apple, there is only one Steve.

There are also F.O.S.—Friends Of Steve—persons of importance who are to be treated with respect and sometimes caution: you never know what might get reported. Staffers warn each other about F.O.S.s to be careful around. Friends Of Steve are not necessarily in Apple’s upper management tier—sometimes they are fellow programmers or engineers who have a connection.

Under Jobs, Apple is a very flat organization. There are few levels of management. Jobs has an exceptionally wide-ranging knowledge of the organization—who does what and where. Though he has a small executive management team—just ten officers—he knows hundreds of the key programmers, designers, and engineers in the organization.

Jobs is quite meritocratic: he’s not concerned with formal job titles or hierarchy. If he wants something done, he generally knows whom to go to and he contacts them directly, not through their manager. He’s the boss, of course, and can do things like that, but it shows his disdain for hierarchies and formalities. He’ll just pick up the phone and call.

Critics have compared Jobs to a sociopath without empathy or compassion. Staff are inhuman objects, mere tools to get things done. To explain why employees and coworkers put up with him, critics invoke the Stockholm Syndrome. His employees are captives who have fallen in love with their captor. “Those who know anything much about his management style know he works by winnowing out the chaff—defined as those both not smart enough and not psychologically strong enough to bear repeated demands to produce something impossible (such as a music player where you can access any piece of music within three clicks) and then be told that their solution is ‘shit.’ And then hear it suggested back to them a few days later,” wrote Charles Arthur in
The Register
. “That’s not how most people like to work, or be treated. So in truth, Steve Jobs isn’t an icon to any managers, apart from the sociopathic ones.”

As far as great sociopathic managers go, Jobs is relatively mild, at least now that he’s entered middle age. Other intimidators, like moviemaker Harvey Weinstein, are much more abrasive. Larry Summers, the former dean of Harvard, who forced through a series of reforms at the university, conducted infamous “get to know you sessions” with faculty and staff that started with confrontation, skepticism, and hard questioning, and went downhill from there. Jobs is more like a demanding, hard-to-please father. It’s not just fear and intimidation. Underlings work hard to get his attention and his approval. A former Pixar employee told Kramer that he dreaded letting Jobs down, the same way he dreaded disappointing his father.

Many people who work for Jobs tend to burn out, but in hindsight they relish the experience. During his research, Kramer said he was surprised that people who worked with great intimidators often found the experience “profoundly educational, even transformational.” Jobs works people hard and heaps on the stress, but they produce great work. “Did I enjoy working with Steve Jobs? I did,” Cordell Ratzlaff, the Mac OS X designer, told me. “It was probably the best work I did. It was exhilarating. It was exciting. Sometimes it was difficult, but he has the ability to pull the best out of people. I learned a tremendous amount from him. There were high points and there were low points but it was an experience.” Ratzlaff worked directly with Jobs for about eighteen months, and said it would have been hard staying on any longer than that. “Some people can stick it out for longer than that. Avie Tevanian, Bertrand Serlet. I’ve seen him screaming at both of them, but they had some way of weathering that. There have been cases, people who have been with him for a very, very long time. His admin worked with him for many, many years. One day, he fired her: ‘That’s it, you’re not working here anymore,’ ” Ratzlaff said.

After nine years working at Apple, the last few closely with Jobs, programmer Peter Hoddie ended up quitting, somewhat acrimoniously. Not because he was burned out, but because he wanted more control at Apple. He was tired of getting his orders from Jobs and wanted to have a greater say in the company’s plans and products. They had a fight, Hoddie quit, but later Jobs was contrite. He tried to talk Hoddie out of leaving. “You’re not going to get away that easy,” Jobs said to Hoddie. “Let’s talk about this.” But Hoddie stuck to his guns. On his last day, Jobs called him from his office across campus. “Steve was charming to the end,” Hoddie said. “He said good luck. It wasn’t, ‘fuck you.’ Of course, there’s a degree of calculation in everything he does.”

Lessons from Steve

”Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.”

On July 3, 2001, Apple put its critically praised Power Mac G4 Cube on ice. Jobs had introduced the cube-shaped machine just a year before, to critical raves. An eight-inch cube of translucent plastic that popped CDs from its top like a toaster, the Cube was a smash hit with critics. The
Wall Street Journal
’s Walt Mossberg said it was “simply the most gorgeous personal computer I’ve ever seen or used.” Jonathan Ive won several awards for its design. But it was not a hit with consumers. It sold poorly. Apple had hoped for sales of 800,000 the first year, but shifted less than 100,000 units. A year after its introduction, Jobs suspended production of the machine and issued an unusual press release.
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“The company said there is a small chance it will reintroduce an upgraded model of the unique computer in the future, but that there are no plans to do so at this time,” the release said. It appeared Jobs couldn’t bear to discontinue the Cube officially, but he wasn’t prepared to sell any more either. It was sent to a permanent product purgatory.

The Cube was Jobs’s baby: a beautifully designed, technically advanced machine that represented months, maybe years, of prototyping and experimentation. The Cube packed a lot of powerful hardware into a very tight space. It was fast and capable, and dispensed completely with one of Steve Jobs’s oldest pet peeves—an internal cooling fan. But aside from a few design museums, few were interested in it. At about $2,000, it was too expensive for most consumers, who wanted a cheap monitor-less Mac like the Mac mini that succeeded it. And those who could afford it—creative professionals who worked in graphics or design—needed a more powerful machine that could be easily upgraded with new graphics cards or extra hard drives. They bought the cheaper Power Mac G4 tower instead. It was ugly, but it worked.

Jobs had badly misjudged the market. The Cube was the wrong machine at the wrong price. In January 2001, Apple reported a quarterly loss of $247 million, the first since Jobs had returned to the company. He was stung.

The Cube was one of Jobs’s few missteps since returning to Apple, and he learned a valuable lesson from it. The Cube was one of the few products he’s overseen that was entirely design led. It was an experiment in form over function. The cube has always been one of Jobs’s favorite forms. The computer he sold at NeXT—the NeXT Cube—was a pricey, laser-cut cube made of magnesium (which, funnily enough, was also a market failure). The underground Apple store on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue is topped by a giant glass cube that Jobs helped to design (which is not a failure).
The Register
called the G4 Cube a “glorious experiment of aesthetics over commonsense.”
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Instead of focusing on what customers wanted, Jobs thought he could give them an elegant museum piece, and it cost him.

Jobs usually pays very careful attention to the customer experience. It’s one of the things that has earned him a reputation for innovation. One of the central questions about Jobs and Apple is: Where does the innovation come from? Like any complex phenomenon, it comes from many places, but much of it is informed by Jobs’s careful attention. From the scroll wheel on the iPod to the box the iPod comes in, Jobs is alert to every aspect of the customer experience. His instinct for the experience of using his products is what drives and informs Apple’s innovation, and the Cube was one of the rare occasions when he took his eye off the ball.

One of the hottest topics in business these days is innovation. With ever-increasing competition and shortening product cycles, companies are desperate to find the magic key to innovation. In the search for a system, workers are sent to innovation workshops where they play with Legos to unleash their creativity. Companies are hiring chief innovation officers, or opening innovation centers where managers brainstorm, free associate, and “ideate” surrounded by boxes of Legos.

Jobs is scornful of such ideas. At Apple there is no system to harness innovation. When asked by Rob Walker, a
New York Times
reporter, if he ever consciously thinks about innovation, Jobs responded: “No. We consciously think about making great products. We don’t think, ‘Let’s be innovative! Let’s take a class! Here are the five rules of innovation, let’s put them up all over the company!’ ” Jobs said trying to systemize innovation is “like somebody who’s not cool trying to be cool. It’s painful to watch.... It’s like watching Michael Dell try to dance.
Painful.
”
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Nonetheless, Jobs has an almost mystical reverence for innovation. As described earlier, his heroes are some of industry’s greatest inventors and entrepreneurs: Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Edwin Land. Apple’s former CEO, John Sculley, wrote that Jobs often spoke of Land. “Steve lionized Land, saw in him one of America’s greatest inventors. It was beyond his belief that Polaroid ousted Land after the only major failure in Land’s career—Polavision, an instant movie system that failed to compete against videotape recording and resulted in a near $70 million write-off in 1979. ‘All he did was blow a lousy few million and they took his company away from him,’ Steve told me with great disgust.”
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Sculley recalled a trip he and Jobs took to see Land after he was kicked out of Polaroid. “He had his own lab on the Charles River in Cambridge,” Sculley recalled. “It was a fascinating afternoon because we were sitting in this big conference room with an empty table. Dr. Land and Steve were both looking at the center of the table the whole time they were talking. Dr. Land was saying, ‘I could see what the Polaroid camera should be. It was just as real to me as if it was sitting in front of me before I had ever built one.’ And Steve said, ‘Yeah, that’s exactly the way I saw the Macintosh.’ He said, ‘If I asked someone who had only used a personal calculator what a Macintosh should be like, they couldn’t have told me. There was no way to do consumer research on it. I had to go and create it and then show it to people and say, ‘Now what do you think?’ Both of them had this ability to—well, not invent products—but discover products. Both of them said these products have always existed, it’s just that no one has ever seen them before. We were the ones who discovered them. The Polaroid camera always existed and the Macintosh always existed. It’s a matter of discovery. Steve had huge admiration for Dr. Land. He was fascinated by that trip.”

During television and magazine interviews, Jobs often invokes innovation as Apple’s secret sauce. He’s talked about innovation several times during his keynote speeches. “We are going to innovate ourselves out of this downturn,” Jobs declared in 2001 when the PC industry was in recession. “Innovate,” he boasted at Macworld Paris in September 2 003. "That’s what we do.”

Under Jobs’s leadership, Apple has earned a reputation as one of the most innovative companies in technology.
Business Week
in 2007 named Apple the most innovative company in the world, beating Google, Toyota, Sony, Nokia, Genentech, and a host of other A-list companies. It was the third year in a row that Apple had earned the top spot.
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