Steve Jobs

by Walter Isaacson

“The thing that struck me was his intensity. Whatever he was interested in he would generally carry to an irrational extreme.”

Jobs had honed his trick of using stares and silences to master other people. “One of his numbers was to stare at the person he was talking to. He would stare into their fucking eyeballs, ask some question, and would want a response without the other person averting their eyes.”

I learned the truth of the Zen saying that if you are willing to travel around the world to meet a teacher, one will appear next door.

Bushnell agreed. “There is something indefinable in an entrepreneur, and I saw that in Steve,” he said. “He was interested not just in engineering, but also the business aspects. I taught him that if you act like you can do something, then it will work. I told him, ‘Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are.’”

More than that, he wanted a product that would, in his words, make a dent in the universe.

Among its visionaries was the scientist Alan Kay, who had two great maxims that Jobs embraced: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it” and “People who are serious about software should make their own hardware.”

There falls a shadow, as T. S. Eliot noted, between the conception and the creation. In the annals of innovation, new ideas are only part of the equation. Execution is just as important.

“Everything you’ve ever done in your life is shit,” Jobs said, “so why don’t you come work for me?”

This would allow an attribute that both Atkinson and Jobs wanted: WYSIWYG, pronounced “wiz-ee-wig,” an acronym for “What you see is what you get.”

But many others realized that despite his temperamental failings, Jobs had the charisma and corporate clout that would lead them to “make a dent in the universe.” Jobs told the staff that Raskin was just a dreamer, whereas he was a doer and would get the Mac done in a year.

“Steve has a reality distortion field.” When Hertzfeld looked puzzled, Tribble elaborated. “In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he’s not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules.”

Tribble recalled that he adopted the phrase from the “Menagerie” episodes of Star Trek, “in which the aliens create their own new world through sheer mental force.” He meant the phrase to be a compliment as well as a caution: “It was dangerous to get caught in Steve’s distortion field, but it was what led him to actually be able to change reality.”

“The reality distortion field was a confounding mélange of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand,”

“He can deceive himself,” said Bill Atkinson. “It allowed him to con people into believing his vision, because he has personally embraced and internalized it.”

“It was a self-fulfilling distortion,” she claimed. “You did the impossible, because you didn’t realize it was impossible.”

At the end of the presentation someone asked whether he thought they should do some market research to see what customers wanted. “No,” he replied, “because customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.”

‘Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?’”

“Well, we’ve got to finish it,” Steve Capps said. And so they did. Once again, Jobs’s reality distortion field pushed them to do what they had thought impossible.

Even though he had left the apple commune in Oregon to start the Apple corporation, he still wanted to be viewed as a denizen of the counterculture rather than the corporate culture.

Now he was about to launch the Macintosh, a machine that violated many of the principles of the hacker’s code: It was overpriced; it would have no slots, which meant that hobbyists could not plug in their own expansion cards or jack into the motherboard to add their own new functions; and it took special tools just to open the plastic case. It was a closed and controlled system, like something designed by Big Brother rather than by a hacker.

But when he is on his best behavior, Jobs is a curious blend of charm and impatience, oscillating between shrewd reserve and his favorite expression of enthusiasm: ‘Insanely great.’”

But neither Raskin nor Wozniak nor Sculley nor anyone else at the company could have pulled off the creation of the Macintosh. Nor would it likely have emerged from focus groups and committees.

On the day he unveiled the Macintosh, a reporter from Popular Science asked Jobs what type of market research he had done. Jobs responded by scoffing, “Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?”

Gates was fascinated by Jobs and slightly envious of his mesmerizing effect on people. But he also found him “fundamentally odd” and “weirdly flawed as a human being,” and he was put off by Jobs’s rudeness and his tendency to be “either in the mode of saying you were shit or trying to seduce you.”

But Jobs had latched onto what he believed was a key management lesson from his Macintosh experience: You have to be ruthless if you want to build a team of A players. “It’s too easy, as a team grows, to put up with a few B players, and they then attract a few more B players, and soon you will even have some C players,” he recalled. “The Macintosh experience taught me that A players like to work only with other A players, which means you can’t indulge B players.”

“He has his own way with the truth,” Gassée later remarked. “The only way to deal with him was to out-bully him.”

I used to be an angry man myself. I am a recovering assaholic. So I could recognize that in Steve.”

As Hoffman later lamented, “The reality distortion field can serve as a spur, but then reality itself hits.”

Wozniak, always a teddy bear even when annoyed, hired another design firm and even agreed to stay on Apple’s retainer as a spokesman.

For Sculley, the problem was that Jobs, when he was no longer in courtship or manipulative mode, was frequently obnoxious, rude, selfish, and nasty to other people. He found Jobs’s boorish behavior as despicable as Jobs found Sculley’s lack of passion for product details. Sculley was kind, caring, and polite to a fault.

Belleville proposed a toast “to those of us who really understand what the world according to Steve Jobs is all about.” That phrase—“the world according to Steve”—had been used dismissively by others at Apple who belittled the reality warp he created.

“Steve, can I talk to you?” she said. His jaw dropped. “Do you have any idea what a privilege it has been even to know someone as fine as John Sculley?” she demanded. He averted his gaze. “Can’t you look me in the eyes when I’m talking to you?” she asked. But when Jobs did so—giving her his practiced, unblinking stare—she recoiled. “Never mind, don’t look at me,” she said. “When I look into most people’s eyes, I see a soul. When I look into your eyes, I see a bottomless pit, an empty hole, a dead zone.” Then she walked away.

He stared without blinking at Sculley, who would remember “Steve’s look of contempt” years later. “It’s unyielding,” Sculley recalled, “like an X-ray boring inside your bones, down to where you’re soft and destructibly mortal.” For a moment, standing onstage while pretending not to notice Jobs, Sculley thought back to a friendly trip they had taken a year earlier to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to visit Jobs’s hero, Edwin Land. He had been dethroned from the company he created, Polaroid, and Jobs had said to Sculley in disgust, “All he did was blow a lousy few million and they took his company away from him.” Now, Sculley reflected, he was taking Jobs’s company away from him.

The company had not only a new logo, but a new name. No longer was it Next. It was NeXT. Others might not have understood the need to obsess over a logo, much less pay $100,000 for one. But for Jobs it meant that NeXT was starting life with a world-class feel and identity, even if it hadn’t yet designed its first product. As Markkula had taught him, a great company must be able to impute its values from the first impression it makes.

What particularly struck Nocera was Jobs’s “almost willful lack of tact.” It was more than just an inability to hide his opinions when others said something he thought dumb; it was a conscious readiness, even a perverse eagerness, to put people down, humiliate them, show he was smarter.

When Kapor began slathering butter on his bread, Jobs asked him, “Have you ever heard of serum cholesterol?” Kapor responded, “I’ll make you a deal. You stay away from commenting on my dietary habits, and I will stay away from the subject of your personality.”

When Business Week asked him why he treated employees so harshly, Jobs said it made the company better. “Part of my responsibility is to be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.”

“It was a screaming battle, right in front of everybody,” recalled Adele Goldberg, the Xerox PARC engineer. Jobs insisted that NeXT was the next wave of computing. Gates, as he often did, got more expressionless as Jobs got more heated. He finally just shook his head and walked away.

Jobs was onstage for three hours, and he again proved to be, in the words of Andrew Pollack of the New York Times, “the Andrew Lloyd Webber of product introductions, a master of stage flair and special effects.”

When one reporter asked him immediately afterward why the machine was going to be so late, Jobs replied, “It’s not late. It’s five years ahead of its time.”

Right after the announcement event, Gates wrote a parody email to his staff. “All reality has been completely suspended,” it began. Looking back at it, Gates laughs that it may have been “the best email I ever wrote.”

Pixar had a rendering program, known as Reyes (Renders everything you ever saw), for making 3-D graphics and images.

He would give her computers, but not a dress, and when he brought her flowers he made sure to say they were left over from an event in the office.

She would later recall how incredibly painful it was to be in love with someone so self-centered. Caring deeply about someone who seemed incapable of caring was a particular kind of hell that she wouldn’t wish on anyone, she said.

Jobs was known during his career for creating great products. But just as significant was his ability to create great companies with valuable brands. And he created two of the best of his era: Apple and Pixar.

It was not so much a Machiavellian power play as it was Jobs being Jobs. Wanting control was ingrained in his nature.

One of Jobs’s great strengths was knowing how to focus. “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do,” he said. “That’s true for companies, and it’s true for products.”

“Think different” and “Here’s to the crazy ones” made for good advertising slogans, but the board was hesitant to make them guidelines for corporate strategy.

The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas first, but also that it knows how to leapfrog when it finds itself behind.

So I moved $75 million of advertising money to the iPod, even though the category didn’t justify one hundredth of that. That meant that we completely dominated the market for music players. We outspent everybody by a factor of about a hundred.