Lunch With the FT: 52 Classic Interviews (18 page)

Lest Wozniak be misunderstood, it should be noted that he speaks with an engineer’s frankness, even naivety. He has complained of being
quoted out of context before, though that seems only natural given the guileless barbs he throws out.

He says of the book, trying to right the balance, ‘I’m sure I said some very good things about Steve Jobs, I can’t remember.’ For the record, he did – but not enough to outweigh the jibes.

The waitress has come back with iced tea refills three times and we can’t put off ordering food any longer. This is not the sort of place you come if you are concerned about your cholesterol. I flirt with the idea of ordering the full rack of ribs with all the trimmings, lose my nerve and opt instead for the junior rack. Wozniak asks for a slice of key lime pie, seems genuinely disappointed when it turns out there is none, and settles for cherry.

When you listen to Wozniak talk, it quickly becomes clear that he is like an ageing rock star – eager to relive the glory days. For the first hour and more, in mind-numbing detail, he races through the electronics projects of his youth, all the resistors, flashing light bulbs and soldered wires of school projects dating back to age 11.

He is an engineer’s engineer, a man who sees the twists and turns in the history of computing as the direct and sole result of engineering choices made by men such as him. Ask any business-school student how it was that Apple squandered its early lead in personal computing, and you will be told that it was because of a business decision not to license its technology to other computer makers. Microsoft, producing software for the ‘open’ IBM PC, won the day. Wozniak, though, can focus only on the engineering shortcomings of the machines that followed his own pristine creation, the Apple II.

In this version of events, his machine marked the high point of a golden age in electronics. It was a time when a single person, inspired by nothing more than a desire to produce the best work he possibly could, was able to change the course of computing history. It took only three months of work. If one person could do that, why wouldn’t the following years bring a flowering of technology?

‘We just envisioned all these computers where the human was more important than the technology,’ he says. This has left a trail of bugs, badly designed products and machines that don’t make allowances for their all-too-fallible users, he maintains. ‘I’m absolutely convinced that Apple, just like the rest of the world, has lost that formula.’

What went wrong? In Wozniak’s somewhat simplistic world-view, the Engineer was replaced by the Businessman. The causes of the weaknesses that crept into the personal computer business? ‘A lack of good, solid testing. A lack of good caring. Just basically the way the business is run.’

The food has arrived and the ribs are surprisingly good. The sides – oak-roasted corn and wood-smoked beans – are pretty much inedible. I look enviously at the thick wedge of cherry pie.

Wozniak warms to his theme. In this story, the engineer is the lone hero, the creator. This is ‘the person who’s coming up with all the ideas just sitting down and programming it and getting it to work and show off and adding in the little touches they think of’.

In this idealized world – which is still the world that inspires many of the engineers drawn to Silicon Valley – this hero-engineer is also the artist.

‘It’s gotta be a part of me,’ says Wozniak. ‘It’s an art. When it’s gotta be a part of me, I’m gonna make it as perfect as can possibly be. I remember doing the floppy disk board [for the Apple II] when I laid it out myself, little pieces of tape where the metal traces on the PC board will go. I’m laying it out for two weeks every night till four in the morning. And when I got done, I realized that if I had designed the circuit a different way I would have five holes through the board instead of eight. So I took everything apart and redid it. The user doesn’t see the holes. But it mattered to me. It’s a part of me. It’s like my own body is the device.

‘There was a window in time when things did work that way.’

This smacks of self-mythologizing. Yet if this is a hallucination it is a common one in Silicon Valley, which still thrives on the dream that a lone engineer with a good idea can change the course of the world – in part because Wozniak himself helped to prove that it was true. Money may dictate the way that giant industries such as personal computing are built, but it can do nothing to stop the next hero-engineer from having his dream.

‘The intent to try new things and find them is sort of built into the human being and the human brain,’ says Wozniak. ‘It’s just part of our own innate curiosity. Thinking up a new idea that could really radically [make things] better can happen anywhere, and it doesn’t necessarily
happen because I’m gonna put some money down to some bright engineers and they’re gonna come up with it.’

That mantle has now passed to the Google generation. For Wozniak himself, nothing else has ever come close to that early glimpse of engineering perfection. While Jobs later returned to Apple and launched a second act, Wozniak’s later efforts – a company that built unified remote-control devices for the living room, and one that tried to create wireless electronic tags that people could use to keep track of pets or personal items – fizzled.

He professes satisfaction from the years spent as a concert promoter, philanthropist and (for eight years) teaching 10-year-olds, yet still clearly hankers for a place back at the centre of the personal-computing revolution he helped launch.

‘I would love to have some involvement [at Apple]. But I don’t think Steve would like it,’ he says, before conceding that his knowledge of computer system design is no longer current. It is hard to avoid the feeling that, however indelibly the two men’s pasts are linked, Wozniak is now like one of those old school friends or faintly embarrassing relatives that sometimes turn up; someone to be tolerated with a forced smile.

Of a recent business venture, he says: ‘One friend sort of suggested, “Hey, you should put Steve on your board or something like that.” The answer came back very quickly, “No.” ’ Jobs was invited to write a foreword for the book but refused.

It is 4pm and lunchtime is long past. Wozniak, a self-confessed gadget freak, goes to the back of the Hickory Pit to retrieve his Segway – the self-balancing two-wheel electrical transporter that was once seen by its Silicon Valley backers as the machine that would revolutionize transportation. Instead, it has become little more than a curiosity.

It’s nowhere near sunset yet, but as Wozniak prepares for the ride west on this oddball piece of machinery, it feels like it should be.

12 MAY 2012

The US entrepreneur is urging Chinese businessmen to increase their ‘likability’, forgo Confucius and instead take lessons on western etiquette. But why should they listen to a foreigner who barely speaks their language?

By Jonathan Ford

Entrepreneurs, it is said, dream of selling a toothbrush to every Chinaman. My lunch companion is different. She dreams of selling them manners.

Eden Collinsworth plans to set up a finishing school in China, bringing deportment, etiquette and the essentials of civilized behaviour to the new generation of young thrusters. Stage one in her masterplan to teach one-third of the world how to eat soup without slurping, to give and receive compliments and to ‘disagree agreeably’ is her new book
The Tao of Increasing Your Likability
, launched at the end of this month. It is in Chinese – though I have been allowed to look at a translation – and the publisher is one of China’s biggest private-sector players. Some powerful businessmen in the Middle Kingdom have clearly been charmed by Collinsworth’s own command of the social graces. As for her, she hopes to make a great deal of money. Or, to quote from an email she sends me some days after our lunch: ‘Simply put, the point of what I am doing in China isn’t just teaching manners, it’s pursuing a business opportunity.’

Collinsworth makes an unlikely emerging-market pioneer. An editor and one-time senior executive of the Hearst publishing empire, until
recently she lived the life of a New York socialite, flitting elegantly between gallery openings and charity dinners.

Her last job was running the EastWest Institute, a New York-based international think-tank specializing in conflict resolution. There she mixed with statesmen, policy-makers and do-gooding celebrities, haring between New York, Brussels and Moscow while discussing the latest thinking on arms control and cyber-security.

Then, at the age of 58, she jacked it all in to seek her fortune in China. A little more than a year later, Collinsworth is living out of a suitcase in Beijing where – despite speaking barely a word of Mandarin – she has set out to become a sort of Martha Stewart, laying down the law on deportment and manners.

Running late on my way to our lunch at Caffè Caldesi, a small Italian restaurant just north of Oxford Street in London, I recall with alarm that a whole section of Collinsworth’s book is devoted to the importance of punctuality. ‘There is an expression in America, “Time is money,” ’ it starts forbiddingly.

Collinsworth shrugs off my apologies, and even compliments me for emailing ahead to warn of possible lateness. ‘In terms of deportment, you did just fine,’ she assures me. I feel inordinately pleased with myself, like a child who has been patted on the head.

Tall, elegant and sporting a startling shock of copper-coloured hair, Collinsworth styles herself more like one of Dorothy Parker’s co-conspirators at the Algonquin hotel in the 1920s than a boardroom operator from today’s Beijing.

I am longing to skip the niceties and plunge in with a blunt question about what she thinks she is doing but first we have to order. ‘This is such a pleasure for me,’ she says languidly as we scan the menu. ‘Just to have an inclusive role in deciding what to eat.’ At the business dinners she attends in China, Collinsworth rarely gets to choose.

Not only does this mean she has to devour a profusion of dishes, clearly an ordeal for the X-ray-thin Collinsworth; it also exposes her to the risk of eating animal bits she would rather not think about, let alone consume. She still winces at the memory of ducklings’ tongues, which are ‘rather like the rubbers on the tips of pencils that you used to eat at school’.

The menu here contains no such excitements and Collinsworth
chooses the lemon sole while I go for the
saltimbocca alla romana
. We order wine even though Collinsworth declares herself to have a feather-light head (‘even ginseng sends me practically into a coma’). She asks for a glass of Pinot Grigio, while I have a deliciously inky Malvasia Nera Salento.

Collinsworth’s book is basically a primer of modern western business etiquette – the latest in a long tradition stretching from Castiglione’s
The Courtier
right up to Lucy Kellaway’s ‘Dear Lucy’ column in this newspaper. There are sections on table manners or greeting someone (‘The proper handshake between men should be brief. There should be strength and warmth in the clasp. You should look at the person whose hand you are taking’).

Although there is a fair amount of high tech – email manners, phone manners – much of the advice has a faintly sepia-tinted feel. For instance, when a woman holds her hand out to greet a man, Collinsworth advises, she should relax her arm and fingers ‘because it is customary among Europeans for the man to lift her hand and bow slightly’. There is a chapter on rudeness which advises against ‘spitting on the sidewalk, belching at the table or blowing your nose on anything other than a handkerchief’. Other traits singled out for admonition include treating ‘a salesperson, waiter or waitress as someone who is beneath you’ and ‘not picking up after your dog on the sidewalk’.

Are the Chinese really going to buy into this stuff? I muse. After all, they have got pretty far without fretting about dog mess and the hurt feelings of underlings. And aren’t those who care about fish forks and handshakes already sending their children to expensive schools in England or Ivy League US universities where you learn western mores through direct emulation?

Collinsworth assures me that the interest is there. As part of her research she went round Chinese universities quizzing the young. ‘Students understand that as China opens up to the world, they are going to deal more and more with westerners,’ she says. ‘They absolutely want to receive this information.’

Good deportment, she claims, is a way to avoid the social pitfalls that come from the Chinese not understanding western culture and vice versa. Collinsworth cites an example from her own experience. She struggled to set up a business meeting with a Chinese publisher because
he didn’t want to set a precise time (‘the whole afternoon was fine by him’) while she wouldn’t attend without one. The publisher was irritated by the misunderstanding; so was she.