John

"The Ordways’ farm probably included sixty or eighty acres, with pastures for livestock, fields of wheat and rye, and a family vegetable garden, along with maple trees for sugar and an orchard for cider. The family ate most of what they grew, taking small surpluses to local markets; this was easiest during the region’s long winters, when a sled moved faster on snow than a wagon ever could on the erratic roads. Their home was one story and built of lumber, thanks to Bow’s sawmill, though the unpainted boards had quickly faded to gray. John pitched in from a young age, working alongside his father, mother, brothers, and sisters. He loved farming—loved how it required the management of many details and how it kept the family at the center of daily life. Even as an adult, he called his mother and father “honored parents.”"

"John’s working relationship with Steve began as trusting and close. The two shared private talks and meals. They seemed preternaturally aligned on most parts of Apple’s corporate strategy. But the relationship soured as the company’s fortunes declined. Apple computers weren’t selling. John struggled to put forward a clear vision to boost sales. And Steve—convinced of his own brilliance—was impossible to manage. He had recently told an executive, “I am the board.”"

"A few weeks later, the night before the fateful April 11 board meeting, John did exactly that. He proposed to the board that Steve be transferred from his post as leader of the Mac team to a newly invented, completely powerless unit tasked with dreaming up far-off ideas. For three hours, from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m., Steve and John went back and forth, arguing for their professional lives. After taking a break for the night, the pair picked up at 9:00 a.m. the next day and fought before the board for another grueling six and a half hours. John declared that if the board didn’t side with him, he would resign as CEO. Exhausted, the board backed John. Though they criticized him for hesitating to assert his leadership, they needed him more than they needed Steve, whom they saw as an immature agent of chaos. The board’s clear message to Steve: Let John run the company. The board allowed Steve to keep his title as chairman of the board, but they removed him from his post leading the Mac team—a crushing blow."

"Under Jean-Louis’s leadership, Apple France became the company’s most successful global arm. Impressed by his track record, John tagged Jean-Louis for a promotion—he wanted him to join the Mac Division. But Jean-Louis was hesitant to enter Apple’s toxic leadership fray and was put off by the idea of working for Steve. In his book of essays, Jean-Louis had described Steve as “that handsome and tragic character out of some novel, that visionary monster, aesthete, lonely, detestable and fascinating creature.”"

"On May 7, 1985, John and Jay landed in Paris. They needed a spiritual replacement for Steve to lead the Mac team and hoped to convince the head of Apple France, a debonair executive named Jean-Louis Gassée, to do it. Like Steve, Jean-Louis had a je ne sais quoi. He was charismatic and handsome. He wore leather jackets, seductive colognes, and a diamond earring. He had appeared in French Vogue, where he was lauded as one of France’s best-dressed men. Even his descriptions of tech strategy had an edge. “At Apple,” he wrote, “one sometimes tends to forget that life is not made of a series of orgasms but also of love.”"

"“I can’t believe this is happening,” he told Nanette Buckhout after the meeting. Nanette worked as the assistant to—of all people—John. Steve’s famed “reality distortion field”—his ability to convince anyone (including himself) that almost anything was possible—made him unafraid to express his emotions to anyone, even the assistant of his nemesis. Apple employees half-jokingly called this ability “the world according to Steve.”"

"Early the next morning, as John wrote in his memoir, Steve called John’s office and asked for five minutes with him at 7:25 a.m. It was Friday the thirteenth and John had a foreboding feeling. At 7:25, Steve entered John’s office and handed him an envelope. John opened it and unfolded a typewritten note listing the five Apple employees who would resign that day: Rich Page, Dan’l Lewin, Bud Tribble, Susan Barnes, and George Crow. John looked up, shocked. These were not “low-level” employees, as Steve had claimed. Susan was financial controller of the company’s important Macintosh Division. Rich was a senior engineer with access to projects across Apple. Bud had worked on the Mac’s user interface and was revered by his teammates for his technical brilliance. George had salvaged the entire Macintosh launch by designing a new floppy drive when the original disk failed just months before shipping. Dan’l, meanwhile, had built Apple’s most profitable business from the ground up and was running all of the company’s education sales. Its continued success rested on his relationships with university buyers. Now Dan’l would be taking his skills, knowledge, and relationships with him. John panicked. He feared not only the loss of talent but also the loss of secrets. The defectors carried Apple’s schedules, costs, and product plans in their heads—knowledge that could give Steve’s new company an instant advantage. Steve asked John to ensure that the departures would be “as smooth and unharassed” as possible. At 7:30, John delivered the news to his top six executives gathered in the boardroom. As he read off the names of the departing leaders one by one, the meeting devolved into chaos. Jean-Louis and Jay accused John of failing to assert leadership. He had let this happen, they said, by failing to advocate more fiercely for Apple’s interests."

"“I’ve been thinking a lot and it’s time for me to get on with my life,” Steve began at the September 12 board meeting. “It’s obvious that I’ve got to do something. I’m thirty years old.” He slid into a soliloquy about how meaningful it had been to bring computers to schools and universities at Apple and how passionately he felt about helping the next generation discover computing, John recounted in his memoir, Odyssey. Then, his big announcement: He was going to leave Apple to design a computer for the university market. At first, the board members appeared puzzled, unsure of what Steve was really saying. He reassured them that his new company wouldn’t compete with Apple. But, he said, holding up his hand with five fingers outstretched, he would need to take a few “low-level” Apple employees with him. He offered Apple the chance to buy distribution rights to his forthcoming product, though he wasn’t completely sure what the product would be. Heck, he’d even give Apple the opportunity to license Macintosh software for his new device. He reassured them that however it turned out, it would be a great deal for Apple. As Steve spoke, the board members grew visibly annoyed. Steve was overplaying his hand, a recurring annoyance they had about him. By framing his departure as a favor to them, he glossed over the fact that he was abandoning his company in a moment of challenge, poaching its employees, and pitching a start-up with long odds of success. “Why would you take anyone at all?” asked Mike Markkula, Apple’s original investor and mentor to Steve. “Don’t get upset,” Steve replied. “These are very low-level people that you won’t miss, and they will be leaving anyway.” Both assertions were untrue."

"Amid the doldrums, John lauded one division for posting strong sales: Dan’l’s education division. The education market had become Apple’s most lucrative, with long-term growth potential. Apple also saw it as a means of turning young people into lifelong Apple customers. But their success didn’t save Dan’l’s team from John’s sweeping layoffs. Dan’l recounted that John asked him to whittle the department down to ten people from his staff of about sixty. When Dan’l pushed back, reminding John that the education market was Apple’s most successful business, John pointed out that the snack-chip manufacturer Frito-Lay had managed to build a successful brand with only ten people in the marketing department. Dan’l chafed at the cuts—and at John’s defense of them. Steve would never have drawn such a soulless analogy. More than that, Dan’l found the cuts to be dangerously shortsighted. “The research showed that two thirds of Apple’s business was in education,” Dan’l recalled. Why clamp down on a key, growing market?"

"Steve would need a world-class team to build the machine researchers actually wanted, so he began reaching out to the Apple colleagues he knew and trusted best. Winning them over wouldn’t be an easy task—Apple, for all its troubles, was still a successful brand name. By contrast, Steve was at the nadir of his power. Betting on him and his vision would be risky. Staying at Apple had downsides too. Like Dan’l, many Apple employees resented John’s staid leadership style and Jean-Louis’s overreach. They missed Steve’s vision, his passion for technology, and his panache. Some even took to wearing T-shirts around the office that read “We want our Jobs back.”"

"Steve stood before his team—and John’s cameras—in a crisp white shirt, red suspenders, and a black turtleneck. He was deliberate and composed. “More important than building a product,” Steve said, “we are in the process of architecting a company that will hopefully be much, much more incredible. The total will be much more incredible than the sum of its parts.”"

"Steve was livid. He reminded the board members that Apple was his baby—the company he had built from nothing out of his parents’ garage. He remained indispensable, he told them, as nothing less than Apple’s beating heart and its intellectual force. But only one person could lead Apple, and John wanted it to be him. “I had given Steve greater power than he ever had and I had created a monster,” John recounted later."

"Ross’s fascination with Steve followed a pattern. Many in Apple’s orbit lavished attention on Steve while overlooking John’s contributions to the company, fueling an emerging rivalry between the two that was exacerbated by Apple’s shaky market position."

"Sure enough, Apple released the Macintosh Office three days later to muted press coverage and weak sales. Worse, John’s fears about Apple’s capacity to deliver the product were realized. The technical heart of the product—Apple’s much-hyped file server—was severely delayed and not yet ready to ship."

"Things got so bad that Steve and John entered secret talks to sell the company to General Electric. According to journalist Frank Rose, the conglomerate hired Texas-based businessman H. Ross Perot to meet with Apple’s leadership and investigate the company as an acquisition target. In the end, GE decided against buying. But Ross was impressed with Steve, a connection that would later prove important when Steve needed investors."

"John had previously made In Search of Excellence, a series of vignettes about successful companies that included a glowing portrait of the Mac team. Steve had been difficult during that earlier shoot—a “full blossomed pain in the ass,” John said—but Steve liked the resulting film. When John secured funding from Merrill Lynch to make his second film, Steve agreed to participate."

"The plan sounded simple enough. But John faced one big obstacle: bringing Steve to heel. Under his proposed reshuffle, Steve would become one of three coequal product executives. On the back side of his office door, John hung a graphic outlining his mission: a simple pyramid with himself perched at the top."

"John was not on board. He thought Steve’s plans were unrealistic. The Mac was designed to be a simple device for drawing and typing at home. Its architecture was not built for pressure-cooker corporate environments with complex demands. Even engineers in Steve’s own department argued that the project lay beyond their capabilities. Steve forged ahead anyway."

"Larry and Sergey were good at listening to people who knew what they were talking about. I’m sure they argued with John, but they listened. They had never run a company or even worked in a company before. John came in and said, “This is a way you can run your business, and it’s measurable and trackable.” Measurables were intuitive to Larry and Sergey, and they had to be impressed by the fact that Intel used OKRs. Intel was such a great company, and we were so small by comparison."

"ONE mustn’t get institutional; we need to stay disruptive. I’m always scared that we’re going to go corporate and try to beat every quarterly goal. We needed John to remind us, “If everything’s at green, you failed.” That was counterintuitive for a lot of people, especially now that we’re financed up and have the best and the brightest working here. But John kept saying, “More red!” He was right. We needed more big ambitions because that’s what we’re good at. We’re less good at the incremental stuff."

""Obviously, some of the information we share flows to the street," John adds. "But the value of sharing everything with our employees is much greater than any downside there might be to some information getting out. It hasn't seemed to hurt us through 27 years of profitable growth in an industry that hasn't consistently done well.""

"Building that network was expensive, however. Columbus’s expansion was funded with US $ 1.25 billion—including from banks like Citi, RBC, and Scotiabank, the largest retail bank in the Caribbean, as well as further investment from CFFI. During one cash call, Michael Lee-Chin found himself short on funds. “I didn’t have the liquidity then. So John said, ‘It’s OK, Mike, don’t worry—I’ll put it in. Pay me when you have the money.’"

"“John Malone is not the kind of guy that walks through the halls of Liberty and puts his head down when people are coming towards him. He’s a very approachable guy, just like John is. Very charismatic.”"

"As I sat there with John and Ed, my experience of the day was suddenly giving birth to a new feeling. These two leaders had dedicated themselves for years to their crafts, with almost no commercial success and recognition. I had no idea how, when, or where they might succeed, but one thing was becoming clear to me. They were winners. I might not know how that victory would come, but I was quite confident that, for them, somehow it would."

"“How do you see the creative decision process moving forward?” I asked. “Our films must come from the heart,” John explained. “It’s not just about entertainment. It’s about telling stories that audiences connect with emotionally. The way to do this is to make our films personal, to make certain they mean something to our directors.” John had such passion in his voice, such sincere conviction, that it was almost impossible not to be moved by it. He literally touched over his heart as he spoke. “We have to trust our story team,” he went on. “They have to believe we trust them.” “So what you’re saying,” Steve said, “is that we should bet on our creative talent, no matter the risk.” “Yes,” John replied. “I know that’s asking a lot, but it is what I think we should do.”"

"A few hours after I was born, my father, Andreas Catsimatidis, took me to the house of his mother, who hadn’t been well. He carried me into the bedroom and handed me to my *Ya-Ya,* which is what Greek children call their grandmothers. Without a word of prompting, she said to my father, “A new Yiánni Catsimatidis is born.” That was her late husband’s name, Yiánni—Greek for John. And that night, my grandmother died. That very night. She was happy the whole day long."

"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)."

"When Ford’s brother came to visit him in China, John would teach this same lesson in a more fun, slightly dangerous way. “My brother loved driving with me and my car in China, ‘cause I could pull up next to a cop at a red light, then run the red light in front of him,” he says. “My brother would laugh and say, ‘How do you get away with that?’ It was because the cop assumed that if I was doing it, I must be *able* to do it. If he pulled me over, he’d be risking getting fired by this powerful person who clearly knew he was powerful enough to pull around the red light right in front of him.”"

"“You’ve built an impressive HDTV set,” I said to Morita. “What if we were to buy ten thousand of ’em? What would it cost us?” Morita talked to his deputies and they retreated to a corner for a moment. When we reconnected minutes later, Morita smiled politely and said, “We can build them for seven thousand U.S. dollars apiece.” Which was a great price at the time, because in Japan they were not yet the commodity that they are now. We had seen ads for HDTV sets for $30,000. Then the visiting cable team was off by themselves, too. “Hey, John, we didn’t bring our checkbook, and I’m not authorized to spend anything!” said one CTO, concerned we were in the middle of a purchase order. The intention wasn’t to buy HDTV sets, I explained. A simple question like that will get you answers from Sony about how they’re thinking about high-volume production. What are they pricing sets at, how many can they make, and how quickly can they penetrate the market? All these things, just by asking a question."

"John continued to test the limits of man in the sky throughout his life. Planes were becoming increasingly complex, from biplanes flown with the wind in one's face to enclosed cockpits. The requirements of pilots and their eyes changed as well. In an attempt to break a new altitude record, Macready returned to the ground with an irritation in his sight. The old goggles were no longer enough to protect him from the increasingly closer sun rays. He contacted Bausch & Lomb, the optical company from New York State and supplier of lenses for the American army, asking to develop anti-glare glasses that would stop the solar rays. After years of attempts, in 1937 the glasses were ready: the Ray-Ban Anti-glare was born, anti-blinding glasses that banish the rays. They are glasses with a light metal frame, with teardrop-shaped lenses to fully cover the eyes following the face, in mineral glass to filter the solar rays. On May 7, 1937 not just a model of glasses for aviators, called not coincidentally Aviator, was born, but also a myth, that of the quintessential sunglasses. The Ray-Ban. In 1938, Ray-Ban launched the Shooter model: the central "cigarette holder" ring, designed to allow the shooter to have his hands free, is the distinguishing feature."

"Then John came to my house one afternoon. I began by saying, “Right now, you are the biggest star in the world, and you worry you’re going to screw it up. You’re listening to this twerpy, inexperienced manager of yours, and it’s leading you to the wrong decisions. This is a critical time for you, and when you’ve got a great script and a great part, you don’t let anything put you off it.” I went on with various examples of how his management had been mishandling things since his spurt to superstardom."

"Of course, Charlie had loved the first movie, and about an hour after it opened, he already wanted a sequel: the story of what happened to Tony Manero once he crossed the river. Four years had passed since *Fever*, and still no one thought this was anything but a bad idea. Nevertheless, Charlie wouldn’t get off this dim sequel horse and I placated him by arranging a meeting with Travolta at the Hôtel Byblos in Saint-Tropez. Charlie romped around the room, trying to talk John into doing it. It was, of course, a stupid thing for John to agree to, but he was overwhelmed by Charlie, and he uttered an incautious yes. For no connected reason Charlie then met with Sylvester Stallone. He immediately called me and said, “I have a great coup! Stallone is going to direct the movie.”"

"I called Milken, who said, “John wants a billion seven fifty. But he thinks he could sell the Boston station to Hearst for six hundred million. So it’s a billion one for the other stations.” I called Murdoch and reported all that. Rupert wasn’t fazed and just asked how much the whole effort would cost. I called my friend Marty Pompadur, a very senior media executive who had been a key ABC executive and knew everything about broadcasting. An hour later Marty was in my office, and we began chewing over how to build a fourth network."

"As with John in Australia three years earlier, Craig’s hiring may have been a surprise to a few people who had thought Steve Ridgway’s successor (Steve had been Virgin Atlantic’s CEO for twelve years) was probably going to come from within the airline. Again, though, like in Australia, we opted to take someone from a big legacy carrier – it wasn’t the first time we went fishing at American, having hired David Cush from there to head up Virgin America some years earlier."

"John makes it part of his routine to do what the Australians call ‘going walkabout’ around the company. When he does this, one of many things that make the NBO different is John’s habit of not just saying ‘Hi, how are you?’ but instead taking the time to get into deep impromptu discussions with all level of employees and, importantly, acting on their feedback rather than telling them he’ll ‘consider it’ and moving on."

"Anyway when John raised the subject in front of all the airline heads I was probably expected to be the one to quickly put this Qantas interloper in his place and say something like, ‘Sorry, but that is one area where we cannot go.’ On the contrary, other than John, I think I was the only one in the room who thought it made sense and so said, ‘Screw it, if that’s what you think you need then let’s do it.’ The result was a very different-looking sideways rendition of the logo that, in all honesty, some love and some don’t, but the updated treatment freshened up the brand and got us lots of media and consumer attention in the process."

""You do what's right for your project and don't worry about the rest of the relationship," John said. "Each decision has to stand on its own.""

"*TCI didn’t believe in business class. Since this was its first venture outside the United States, it had no view on 12-hour flights. So I flew to New Zealand in an economy seat and arrived early after an uncomfortable flight and went straight to a breakfast with Alan Gibbs, Trevor Farmer and two of the American directors. After exchanging pleasantries someone said, ‘John, talk a bit about your background.’ Halfway through my story Alan cuts me off. ‘You bloody Americans had the chance to do everything perfectly after World War Two, but you didn’t have the guts to take on Russia.’ Then he launched into a tirade against America’s lack of courage. I was aghast. I mean, I was born in 1953. I fought back a little bit, as best I could when I could get a word in, which wasn’t easy. I think I said, ‘Well, I’ve just met the only guy in the globe who thinks Americans aren’t sufficiently tough.’ Afterwards I said to my colleagues, ‘Jeez, that didn’t go well’, but the Americans who knew him said, ‘Oh no, I think he likes you.’ Thereafter, when things were going OK, Trevor Farmer would be there, but if Gibbs turned up we knew we were in trouble.*[30](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477273-050103421-30)"

"In the event, as the television pictures around the world showed, when Branson reached the shore, the tide had dropped a little too low and he needed a lift from some bystanders to get the back wheels on to the ramp. It was only a problem because we’d been held up by two things. First, he and I had taken off in the Aquada when I took a message on the radio to tell Richard that some guy called John, evidently a journalist, wasn’t on the flotilla. ‘Oh, we can’t go without him,’ Branson said. So we stopped and floated around in the harbour for 20 minutes waiting for this guy to arrive from London. Then because it was the twentieth anniversary of Virgin Atlantic and Branson had taken possession of his first Boeing 777, he wanted a photo of the plane swooping above the car. We reached the precise spot using GPS coordinates, but there was no sign of the plane. It had been delayed by air traffic control. That left us waiting another 20 minutes or so for it to fly by."