Jobs

"tri-partite leadership is challenging in the best of cases, but it worked at Pixar. As Pixar filmmaker Pete Docter told me: “Here there was a clear definition of power: John on creative, Ed on technical, and Jobs on business and financial. There was an implicit trust of each other, as well as one guy with the final word (Steve)."

"Jobs eventually canceled the other phone ideas and declared multi-touch the future. He was adamant there’d be no keyboard, so the phone would be as full screen as possible. Apple’s engineers suddenly had to find suppliers that could build multi-touch displays at scale—something that didn’t exist at the time. There was no way Apple could send the specs to some factory and wait for the parts to be built; instead, it sent teams of engineers to Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and China to find hungry vendors it could work with to co-create the processes. “There were a few truly groundbreaking mass production processes we were involved with, where we really had to go around to find the best people in the entire world—the peak of what humans have developed for some of these technologies,” says a product manager. By early 2006, they had a full-screen prototype enclosed in brushed aluminum. Jobs and Ive “were exceedingly proud of it,” journalist Fred Vogelstein would later recount. “But because neither of them was an expert in the physics of radio waves, they didn’t realize they’d created a beautiful brick. Radio waves don’t travel through metal well.”"

"Jobs’s newfound enthusiasm brought out the best parts of his character: curiosity, leadership, and an ability to articulate a product path. But it brought out his worst traits, too: arrogance and a habit of belittling others. De Luca, the head of Apple marketing, recalls his embarrassment. The “Apple people” Jobs was referring to were account managers for some of Apple’s biggest clients, and their boss was humiliating them. Griffiths felt bad for them. A third person present says: “Even the account manager, who is going to pay their mortgage based on whether Michigan buys this stuff or not, was told to leave.”"

"Jony Ive emerged from the hard reset with newfound powers and influence. Jobs had made it crystal clear that ID’s zero tolerance for defects was integral to a new culture that would cascade across product development and then throughout the organization. The new approach hit Apple in waves. “I remember these other groups being like, ‘I’m glad I’m not in your shoes!” ’ Hoenig says. “But sure enough, it just literally rippled through the organization over the course of a year, and every group eventually suffered.” Engineers in other departments gained a respect for Ive because of his diplomatic skill. “What Jony did was—he understood that Steve’s cruelty, his savagery, his impatience would cause people to split and just quit the company,” says a senior person on the project. “That happened a lot. And he would run interference with them. He was a Steve handler as much as he was a visionary, detail obsessed, brilliant designer.”"

"Cook’s disdain for mediocrity was similar to that of Jobs, but it manifested itself in an entirely different way. He would persistently ask his managers for layer upon layer of information that flummoxed poor performers and exposed bullshitters. Parents know it takes only a few rounds of a toddler asking, “Why?” before their knowledge is exhausted, leading to frustration and made-up answers. Cook’s questioning was like that. He exhibited a memory and an understanding for data and planning that nobody in Cupertino had experienced before. A lower-level executive recalls Cook stopping people in the hallway ahead of a meeting to glance at their spreadsheets. Within a minute he might spot an error. “And if one number was wrong, he wouldn’t trust the whole spreadsheet,” this person says. “We just knew him as this Terminator machine. Like, he could tell if you were lying…. My boss would say: ‘If he calls on you and you get the number wrong, he’ll try again the next week. If that’s wrong, he’ll never call on you again.’ ”"

"Apple itself could have played this dominant role; in fact, it *had* played this role. At the behest of Steve Wozniak—overruling Jobs—the Apple II featured an open architecture with eight expansion slots and a floppy drive. This allowed third-party software and hardware companies to build applications for it, widening its appeal beyond hobbyists and gamers to the workplace. That openness gave rise, in October 1979, to a breakthrough digital spreadsheet tool, VisiCalc, the first “killer app” for personal computers. Along with EasyWriter, an early word processor, VisiCalc helped transform the Apple II from a plaything to a workhorse."

"Previewing the action he would take at NeXT in 1993, Jobs took Pixar out of the hardware business. He cut staff by two-thirds and narrowed their efforts to storytelling. The result was a major deal with Disney, and out of that came *Toy Story*, the first feature-length computer-animated film and a smash hit at the box office. Jobs, who owned 80 percent of the company, took it public, and instantly became a billionaire. Its success reframed the public perception of Jobs."

"When Apple came calling, Jobs entranced Amelio and Apple’s board in a private presentation. “It was just mind-blowing to watch,” recalls a participant. “The heads started to nod affirmatively. They were very much taken with what he had to say, and taken with him—as people were—with his persona. It was obvious the board was going to approve it.”"

"When the first iMacs started shipping in August 1998, Jobs held a celebratory, all-hands meeting in the atrium of Infinite Loop. Some of the same people he’d reamed out half a year earlier were there, and Jobs thanked them. Standing next to a blow-up iMac the size of a kids’ air castle, Jobs said, “I came here a year and a half ago, and people were laughing at us. They aren’t laughing at us now.”"

"He was an envisioning a plug-and-play computer for the internet age, competitive on cost because less complexity meant less hardware—and software updates would be handled centrally. “I can’t communicate to you how awesome this is unless you use it,” he said. But Jobs wasn’t yet wholly convinced by his own vision. He was just spitballing with developers."

"The response of the audience was curiously tepid, with little applause. But then, as in 1984, Jobs turned the machine on, revealing a montage of graphics ending with “Hello (again).” As a cameraman panned around the computer and gave a 360-degree view of the translucent plastic, the crowd roared. “It looks like it’s from another planet,” Jobs exclaimed. “And a good planet! A planet with better designers.”"

"[I](private://read/01jxcz4ts3b4bxbhhtw2hd062t/#footnote-000-backlink). In April 2002, Apple proposed a solution: a new all-in-one CRT with a G4 processor: the eMac. The CRT wasn’t dead after all. The all-white, non-translucent computer started at $999 and had a seventeen-inch monitor, up from fifteen inches on the previous CRT. Apple marketed it as “a new desktop line designed specifically for education,” but this was a half-truth. Really the eMac was just the “good” and “better” iMac that had been abandoned in Jobs’s earlier excitement for the flat-panel design."

"Indeed, a decade later after Jobs created Apple University, a corporate institution meant to convey his values to a new generation of employees, Apple came close to codifying the principle that pushing employees to burnout was acceptable. In a slide deck called Leadership Palette, Apple states: “Fighting for excellence is about resisting the gravitational pull of mediocrity. It involves being dead tired and still pushing yourself, and others, to get it right, every time.”"

"Jobs had little reason to know what Ive was capable of, and even less reason to care. Three weeks earlier, on July 9, 1997, Jobs stood before several dozen Apple staffers in shorts and sneakers, displaying an unkempt beard. “Tell me what’s wrong with this place,” he stated firmly. Without waiting for an answer, he exclaimed: “It’s the *products!* The products suck!” Then he offered remarkable clarity of vision, scribbling out a two-by-two chart on a whiteboard. Apple, he declared, would make desktop and portable computers, each coming in consumer and professional versions. Everything else was dead. In an instant, the number of Apple products in development was cut from forty to four. Reception to the strategy was mixed, but at least, finally, there *was* a strategy. “It felt like we may have all been driving off a cliff,” says product designer David Hoenig. “But at least we were all going together in the same direction for once.”"

"Rubinstein says it was about to be approved for production. But when Hillman presented the process matter-of-factly, describing how the vertebrae would first attach to the base, and then be moved to the next line for the internal computer components to be stuffed inside, the challenges of the complicated design became clear. The process was in opposition to standard procedures, because usually you’d want to build each component and then, as a last step, bring them all together in the enclosure. But Hillman, responding to the demands of ID, was instead beginning with the enclosure, introducing the possibility of scratches and dings that could result in expensive manual rework. Jobs was listening and watching intently. He leaned over the table, pointed at parts, and picked a few up as he digested the process. Then he stood up abruptly and was right in Hillman’s face. “Are you telling me *that’s* the assembly method?” Jobs asked. As Hillman started to answer, Jobs interjected: “That’s so fucking stupid!”"

"Cook could make grown men and women cry. A few screamed at him, leaving the room, never to come back. He was unapologetic about these episodes. Like Jobs, Cook wanted only A-list players. No hard feelings if you didn’t fit in. Those who stayed, adapted. It might not have been fun. But it was effective."

"Other teams contributed, too. At the Consumer Electronics Show someone chanced upon PortalPlayer, a nascent semiconductor company capable of making chips combining audio processing and power management. And the software group created an interface that, responding to a demand from Jobs, allowed the user to navigate from one song or function to another in just three clicks. Songs would be transferred from the Mac using FireWire, a blazingly fast standard developed by Apple before Jobs had returned."

"Every high-ranking executive aligned against Jobs to convince him to let Apple write iTunes software for Windows—an idea he loathed. He backed down only after multiple experts demonstrated the revenue potential of expanding the iPod and iTunes markets. “Screw it,” he told colleagues. “I’m sick of listening to you assholes. Go do whatever the hell you want.”"

"NeXT expected to sell its factory capacity of ten thousand computers a month. Only four hundred a month were sold. NeXT was a magnificent flop – Jobs at his most expansive, and least commercial. Yet the venture served a function for Jobs – it distracted him from being fired from Apple, it kept him in the digital game, it preserved his self-respect as a player in the brave new world, it gave him valuable lessons in how not to create a viable business, and most of all it eventually paved the way for his return to Apple, when it was in even worse straits than NeXT."

"Jobs was a kind of bully, but a rare one – he bullied the strong, not the weak. His team were stars. He made them believe they were as incredibly, unbelievably good as they became. This is an extreme version of the Matthew principle – ‘To everyone who has, will more be given, and he will have abundance.’8 Jobs manifested a super-abundance of talent and achievement, nay, quite unreasonable achievement for a mere mortal."

"‘Jobs liked to see himself as an enlightened rebel, a Jedi warrior or Buddhist samurai fighting the forces of darkness’ – such as IBM."