Becoming Steve Jobs

by Brent Schlender

  Again and again, Steve made choices that seemed justifiable in isolation but that damaged the company’s critical mission. Steve did a poor job of evaluating these ideas against one another. He couldn’t accept that it was impossible for him to have everything exactly the way he wanted it.

  In part, this was because he believed his own press. He was a genius, according to the media and his investors. Ross Perot frothingly described Jobs as “a 33-year-old with 50 years’ worth of business experience.” Little did he know how wrong he was. President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of commerce, Malcolm Baldrige, called Jobs for advice. Editors of the most important publications in the land kept sending their reporters to the West Coast to find out what Steve was thinking about all kinds of subjects, not just computing and technology. (I once tracked Steve down for such an assignment, and listened to him confidently opine on industrial policy, competition with Russia, the drug war, and General Manuel Noriega of Panama.) The fascination with his new company, so out of proportion for a startup with no product entering a highly competitive industry, confirmed his own sense that he was destined to do great things. That sense of genius and destiny made it harder for Steve to sideline any of his own ideas. He acted as if each detail he advanced could make the difference between creating a breakthrough product and putting out the kind of dreck he thought was offered by other manufacturers. Years later, Perot admitted that he had been snowed. “One of the biggest mistakes I ever made was to give those young people all that money,” he said.

  Also, Steve could not resist pursuing anything that would show up Apple. Since Apple had a logo that had become iconic, Steve needed one with the same potential and a great pedigree. Apple had a state-of-the-art factory, so Steve’s tiny company built an outrageously expensive factory that could handle as much volume as Apple needed. His obsession with Apple seemed to ooze out of his pores, despite the silence he’d imposed on his handlers. The first time that John Huey, then the editor of Fortune magazine, went to visit NeXT, Huey was waiting in the lobby when Steve returned from a lunch date with other visitors. Not recognizing Huey, Jobs sat down on another of those expensive lobby couches and spent fifteen minutes flipping through a set of magazines, excoriating Apple’s “stupid” advertising created by whatever “bozos” they had running the show over there now.

  Some writers have tried to cast Steve’s obsessiveness, and his hunger for the spotlight and success, as a Freudian attempt to bring down the birth parents who “rejected” him by letting him be adopted. It always struck me, however, that at his childish worst Steve was really nothing more than a spoiled brat. Brilliant, precocious, and meticulous, he had always gotten his way with his parents, and had brayed like an injured donkey when things didn’t turn out as he planned. As a grown-up he could behave exactly the same way, sometimes exploding in a temper tantrum. At NeXT there was no one to keep that side of him in check. While more grounded and cooler-headed folks like Lewin and Barnes would disagree with him and weigh in with advice, he ignored them with impunity and, often, scorn. Talking about the days after the historic introduction of the Mac, Steve had told Joe Nocera, “I think I know what it must be like to watch the birth of your child.” Unfortunately for the team at NeXT, in many ways Steve himself was still the child, rather than the more mature and supportive parent.

  STEVE’S ARBITRARY DECISIONS dumbfounded those under him at NeXT, and his micromanagement gave them no peace. He assumed they would work nights and weekends. He wouldn’t hesitate to call them at home on Sundays or holidays if he’d discovered some “urgent” problem. And yet hardware and software engineers still could not resist working for Steve Jobs.

  Steve understood their sensibility. Engineers, at heart, are problem solvers. They thrive on digging their way out of sinkholes, especially the gnarly kind with no clear path forward. Steve challenged them in ways they had never imagined. No one else in the computer business had such radical goals and expectations; no one else seemed to care so much about their work. The idea of creating a computer that could transform the very process of education was cool; but to his incredibly talented programmers and gearheads, the idea of creating this particular computer for this particular boss was irresistible.

  As the years went on, it became apparent that Steve’s goals for the NeXT computer went way beyond serving the university market. Lewin and his salespeople were courting customers in all kinds of businesses, thinking that the NeXT computer could transform the corporate workplace, blending the computing power to do 3-D modeling and to interpret copious data with the ability to connect with others easily on corporate networks. A machine like that, made available not just to the denizens of the ivory tower but also to the quants of Wall Street and the merchants of Main Street, truly would be revolutionary. So even as the company drifted from month to month, year to year without delivering a final product to the market, many of the engineers continued to do great work and viewed their jobs as both a noble mission and a labor of love. Engineers ruled the roost at NeXT. They had their own special wing at headquarters, equipped with a grand piano and locks that kept out all other employees. And indeed, Steve’s amazing collection of geeks at NeXT produced some genuinely great work.

  Richard Crandall, a physics professor from Reed College, became the company’s chief scientist and was given enormous latitude to see just how far computing could expand the scope of high-level teaching in fields such as computational science. His work at NeXT carried over into decades of advanced research on cryptography; he later became the head of Apple’s Advanced Computation Group. Michael Hawley, fresh out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, worked with a group of folks to create the world’s first digitized library, which included the complete works of Shakespeare and the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. And when it finally did appear, the NeXT computer would have easy multitasking, easy ways to attach documents to email, and an intuitive user interface to facilitate the networking it made possible.

  Most important, Jobs convinced Avie Tevanian, a young software whiz from Carnegie Mellon University, to come to NeXT rather than join Microsoft. At CMU, Tevanian had worked on Mach, a supercharged version of Unix, the powerful operating system for workstations. At NeXT he became Bud Tribble’s key developer on the computer’s operating system, called NeXTSTEP. For years, Tevanian kept a calculator window open on his computer that tallied daily the total value of the stock options he gave up when he turned down Microsoft. But he loved the work, in part because Jobs recognized his genius and handed him enormous responsibility as soon as he walked in the door.

  Steve said many times that the difference between NeXT and the manufacturers of traditional workstations was that he cared more about software than they did. The NeXTSTEP operating system that Tribble and Tevanian developed truly was elegant; in typical Jobs fashion, it put a gorgeous, approachable face on an operating system that previously only engineers had been able to decipher. And Steve recognized that a technique called object-oriented programming (OOP for short) had great potential to help developers slash the amount of time required to create applications. One OOP toolkit that Tevanian’s team created, called WebObjects, eventually became a profitable product for NeXT; after the rise of the Internet, it proved to be a great help to companies looking to quickly build Web-based services.

  As much as he depended on Tribble’s and Tevanian’s skills, Steve could not resist managing them ferociously. “Early on,” remembers Tribble’s wife, Susan Barnes, “Bud would complain to me about the fact that Steve kept pushing to see what he was working on in action, on a screen. ‘Steve can yell that the sun shouldn’t rise in the east,’ Bud would tell me, ‘but it’s going to rise in the east, and it’s going to take time to get this software to the point where you can see something visually on the screen. I know he’s a visual learner, I know he can see that way, and I know it’s frustrating for him to look at lines of code. But that’s life!’ ”

  “The company was so small,” says Tevanian, who looks like a
professional soccer player, with his dark curly hair, deep-set eyes, and athletic frame, “that everybody knew everyone else. I’d be working late at night and Steve would come by and I’d show him what I’m working on, and then he’d yell and scream at me, tell me how terrible it was and all that kind of stuff. But in the end, there was a bunch of stuff that I knew that he didn’t know. He knew that he didn’t know it, so we developed this mutual respect where I could tolerate some of his criticisms because he would also actually listen to me when I had something to say. We made it work.”

  EARLY ON AT NeXT, Steve said the most important thing he could do was “architect a great company.” This potentially noble sentiment became a half-baked and confused endeavor, and yet another distraction. Sometimes Steve’s good intentions could lead to a deep intellectual self-deception, in which trivial issues loomed larger than life and fundamental realities were swept under the rug.

  He did try to be a good boss. For example, Steve hosted annual “family picnics” for his employees in Menlo Park. They were kid-oriented Saturday affairs, featuring clowns, volleyball, burgers and hot dogs, and even hokey events like sack races. At his invitation, I attended one in 1989 with my daughter, Greta, who was five years old at the time. Steve, who was barefoot, sat with me on a hay bale and chatted for an hour or so while Greta wandered off to watch the Pickle Family Circus, a Bay Area comedic troupe of acrobats and jugglers that Steve had hired. NeXT staffers would come up from time to time, thanking him for throwing the bash. We talked about his business a bit, but mostly Steve rattled on about how important families were to NeXT, and about how many families there were over at Pixar, the small graphics computing outfit he’d acquired from George Lucas. Some of it was hot air, but some of it was a reflection of the fact that Steve really was wrestling with the issue of paternal responsibility. Down deep, he ached for a family of his own. He was spending more and more time with his daughter Lisa, a reconciliation process that was never entirely successful, but that would eventually lead to her living with him during her high school years. I had the feeling that he looked at those picnics as evidence that he could in fact be a good father, if not to his daughter, then at least to his employees. “I think he looked around those gatherings and thought, ‘Oh God, I’m not just carrying all these employees, I’m carrying their families, too,” says Barnes. “It added to the pressure he felt.”

  Steve’s budding paternalism carried over into his efforts to develop friendships with some of his closest executives. When Tribble and Barnes had their first child, Steve snuck into the hospital after hours to visit. “Steve so much wanted to be a father figure,” remembers Jon Rubinstein, who joined NeXT in 1991 and eventually replaced Rich Page as the lead hardware engineer. “He’s just a year older than I am. But he had this father-figure thing going that was very funny because, you know, he thought he knew more about life than anyone else around him. He always wanted to know about my personal life.”

  But when he tried to intellectualize or institutionalize his paternalistic feelings, he often did so in shallow, poorly designed ways. As part of “architecting a great company” Steve tried to implement an idealistic social experiment he called the “Open Corporation.” Salaries were set by category, so that everyone with a certain job title would be paid the same amount. And every employee’s salary information would be available to everyone else. It was, Steve once claimed to me, an example of his commitment to treating everyone at the company fairly. Then he launched into the “heartfelt” soliloquy he’d prepared for that particular moment:

  “It’s people who make our factory work. It’s people who write the software, who design the machines. We’re not going to have to out-scale our competitors, we have to out-think them. Every time we hire somebody, we put a brick into building our future.

  “Hiring the right people is only the beginning—you also have to build an open corporation. Think of it this way: If you look at your own body, your cells are specialized, but every single one of them has the master plan for the whole body. We think NeXT will be the best possible company if every single person working here understands the whole basic master plan and can use that as a yardstick to make decisions. Sure, there is some risk with giving everybody access to all the corporate information, and potentially some loss. But what you gain vastly surpasses what you lose.

  “The most visible sign of the open corporation at NeXT is our policy of allowing everybody to know what salary everybody else is making. There’s a list in the finance department, and anyone can go look at it. Why? In a typical company, a typical manager might spend three hours a week on compensation issues. Most of those three hours a week is spent defusing false rumors and talking in caged terms about relative compensation. In our company, the manager still spends those three hours, but we spend them defending in a very open way the decisions we made and explaining why we made them, and coaching the people that work for us about what it will take for them to achieve those levels of compensation. So we tend to look at those three hours as an educational opportunity.”

  Talking about the Open Corporation gave Steve a way to cast a sheen of moral exceptionalism on NeXT. But his actions soon contradicted his words. By the time he was telling me this, the practice had already been exposed inside the company for the twaddle it was. That’s because Steve was always hell-bent on hiring the very best people in the world, especially engineers. “In most businesses, the difference between average and good is at best 2 to 1,” Steve once told me. “Like, if you go to New York and you get the best cabdriver in the city, you might get there thirty percent faster than with an average taxicab driver. A 2 to 1 gain would be pretty big. In software, it’s at least 25 to 1. The difference between the average programmer and a great one is at least that. We have gone to exceptional lengths to hire the best people in the world. And when you’re in a field where the dynamic range is 25 to 1, boy, does it pay off.”

  The hiring process at NeXT was rigorous, with multiple interviews. In many cases, even one interviewer’s “No” could blackball a candidate. And there were candidates aplenty, vying for the chance to work with Steve. But of course, even at NeXT it wasn’t possible to hire the best of the best without strong financial incentives. So Steve started making exceptions for certain hires. Some folks got extraordinary signing bonuses. Others were simply granted higher salaries than their category would mandate. And when these backdoor deals started to make their way onto that list in the finance department, well, all of a sudden that list became a lot harder to find.

  Not only was the Open Corporation logistically and managerially unrealistic; it was emotionally out of synch with the reality of a Steve Jobs workplace. He would repeatedly undermine the vision of harmony, peace, and equality he had promised to foster with his irascible temper and anger and his penchant for using passive-aggressive methods to drive his people harder and harder. Steve was as erratic and verbally abusive at NeXT as he was anywhere else during his career. Moreover, he was an equal-opportunity abuser, yelling not only at his engineers but also at his executive team and his own personal administrative assistants on a regular basis.

  His inner circle came to understand the pattern of his anger, but that didn’t make it any easier. Tevanian did his best to protect his software engineers from the wrath of Jobs, by making sure they were away from the office when he informed Steve of a slip on schedule, or when a user interface feature he had ordered up turned out to be unworkable. Barnes, who had become familiar with Steve’s unpredictable anger while at Apple, had clear strategies for herself and her employees. “If he’d get mad and start screaming, I’d hang up the phone. He is the only person I knew that you could hang up the phone on, and then pick it up and call him back and he’d be calmer. I mean, if you hung up the phone on me, I would kill you. But with him, if yelling isn’t getting him what he wants, disengage. Leave the room and he will come back nicer, in a different way. I understood that this was something he could turn on and off, and that he would use if it work
ed.” As for her staffers, she routinely told them to mentally plug their ears and try to “listen through the yelling.” Explains Barnes: “You had to get through the yelling to the reason for the yelling—that was the important part, something you could try to fix.”

  THE SENSE OF urgency around the company ratcheted up as Jobs pressed everyone to prepare for the October 22, 1988, debut of the NeXT computer. Steve always relished putting on a show to unveil his digital creations, but he hadn’t performed onstage since pulling the Macintosh out of the bag, like a rabbit out of a hat, back in 1984. Steve believed that these magic-act announcements not only were good salesmanship but also helped galvanize employees and energize a company that was weary after its Sisyphean struggle to ready the product for launch. His performances would grow more and more elaborate over the years, his stagecraft would show increasing sophistication, and the amount of groundwork involved would increase correspondingly, as well as the stress for anyone involved with staging the event. It was exhausting work, and afterward anyone who could do so would immediately head off on vacation.

  Introducing the NeXT computer called for more sleight of hand than ever. The operating system, which was at least a year away from being released, was buggy. The optical storage drive ran too sluggishly for a demo. There were no apps written by outside software developers. With the possible exception of the iPhone nearly twenty years later, Steve would never unveil a product that was less ready for prime time. But he couldn’t wait any longer. Steve needed the event to be a success. The halo of being “Steve Jobs’s next great company” was wearing off; even potential like Steve’s comes with an expiration date.

  More than three thousand guests packed Davies Symphony Hall, the sleek modern home of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. Security was tight, and dozens of self-proclaimed VIPs were bluntly turned away. Inside, an exhibit of photography by folk rocker Graham Nash graced the curvilinear vestibules, hinting at the possibility of the presence of some real celebrities on the program.