~ The Biography Of Steve Jobs ~

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Key People

Close Ones



Laurene Powell-Jobs Born in 1964
When Steve Jobs laid eyes on Laurene Powell while giving a lecture at Stanford in 1989, it was love at first sight — or so the story says. The two married less than a year later, in March 1991. Steve and Laurene Jobs were happily married, and gave birth to three children: Reed, Erin and Eve. Before meeting Steve, Laurene got an MBA from the Stanford Business School, and was a trader at Meryll Lynch and Morgan Stanley. She later started Terravera, a natural foods caterer, and College Track, an after-school program to help 'at-risk' high-school students to get into college.

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Lisa Brennan-Jobs Born in 1978
Lisa was the unwanted daughter of Steve jobs and his ex-girlfriend from high school, Chrisann Brennan. She was born out-of-wedlock in 1978, and Steve refused to acknowledge he was her father for years. Paradoxically, while he was in denial, he also called Apple's most promising computer project at the time 'LISA'. Eventually, when she was seven, Steve accepted her and she moved in with him in the late 1980s. She eventually graduated from Harvard's School of Journalism. According to Walter Isaacson's bio, Lisa Brennan-Jobs had a tumultuous relationship with her father until the last year of his life.

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Reed Jobs Born in 1992
Reed is Steve Jobs's only son, and his first child with his wife Laurene. Named after Steve's alma mater (something Jobs denied), he always had a special relationship with his father. For example, Steve said to his biographer Walter Isaacson "When I was diagnosed with cancer, I made my deal with God or whatever, which was that I really wanted to see Reed graduate". Isaacson describes him as an intense young man like his father, but who inherited the sweetness of his mother. After his father was diagnosed with cancer, Reed apparently decided to become a cancer researcher. He is a freshman at Stanford as of 2012.

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Erin Jobs Born in 1995
The second child of Laurene and Steve, Erin Jobs is described in the Walter Isaacson bio as "quiet, introspective, and [who] seemed not to know exactly how to handle [her father], especially when he was emitting wounding barbs. She was a poised and attractive young woman, with a personal sensitivity more mature than her father’s". She personally talked to Walter Isaacson to say "Sometimes I wish I had more of his attention, but I know the work he’s doing is very important and I think it’s really cool, so I’m fine. I don’t really need more attention."

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Eve Jobs Born in 1998
The youngest child of the Jobs family, Eve Jobs is described in the Isaacson bio as a girl "who turned into a strong-willed, funny firecracker who, neither needy nor intimidated, knew how to handle her father, negotiate with him (and sometimes win), and even make fun of him. Her father joked that she’s the one who will run Apple someday, if she doesn’t become president of the United States". Another quote from Steve: "She’s a pistol and has the strongest will of any kid I’ve ever met. It’s like payback." The girl is apparently very fond of equitation and hopes to become a professional horse rider someday.

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Steve on Stage


Steve Jobs keynotes
Apple is famous for its entertaining, world-class product presentations, that attract press coverage (read: free advertising) from the entire world — and there is no debate as to who built this reputation. Steve Jobs's celebrity and charisma made him "the closest thing to a rock star in the world of business". During his second tenure at Apple, between 1997 and 2011, he appeared 4 to 7 times a year (when he was healthy, of course) to unveil new products during one of his trademark 'keynotes'. While he was notoriously a capricious speaker who refused to rehearse in his late twenties, he perfected his art at NeXT, and came back to Apple as the best showman of the industry.



The Apple keynotes were more common in the early 1990s, because broadband Internet and video streaming were far from mainstream yet, making it necessary for Steve Jobs to physically go and preach the Apple gospel in several cities, and for the company to hold conferences to show off their new products. At the time, Jobs spoke at Macworld San Francisco in January, at Macworld Tokyo in February, at WWDC in May or June, at Macworld New York in July, and at the Paris Apple Expo in September. He also spoke at discrete media events and often at the desktop publishing conference Seybold.



As the 2000s progressed, keynotes became rarer. Not only had online video streaming become widespread, but Apple could rely on its chain of retail stores to show off its new products. The company even justified its progressive withdrawal from all Macworld shows by the increasing number of visitors to its stores. Toward the end of Steve's career, he only made about four keynotes a year, including the developers conference (WWDC) keynote in the summer, and the iPod event in the fall.

Steve Jobs typically started his keynotes by some corporate news, such as the company's revenues or retail store numbers. Then a series of mini-segments would follow, either introduction of minor products such as software upgrades or product line refreshes, guest speakers (e.g. developers), product demos, or new commercials. Then, at the end, would come the biggest announcement (typically preceded by Steve's 'One More Thing…' joke) where the most important new product was unveiled. At some events, the audience was also treated with a musician's guest performance to close the show.

The beauty of keynotes was that the whole show appeared completely seamless, one segment following another in an almost natural way. Of course, they weren't natural at all: they were prepared for weeks, scripted and rehearsed and re-rehearsed, not only by Steve and the other speakers, but by any employee whose product was mentioned in the presentation. They were one more example of Apple's operational excellence, as there is no doubt that very few companies could pull something similar off; starting with the absolute secrecy of the company, the key ingredient to make product introductions interesting and new to the audience and the media.

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The Reality Distortion Field



The most common term to describe Steve Jobs's charisma is 'Reality Distortion Field'. It was coined by Mac software engineer Bud Tribble in the early 1980s: "Steve has a reality distortion field. In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. […] The reality distortion field was a confounding melange of a charismatic rhetorical style, an indomitable will, and an eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand."

Although it was invented to qualify Steve's one-to-one arguments, especially with his product team, the expression is now a cliché in describing Steve's persuasion during product introductions. While it is true that watching any keynote makes one want to get one's hands on the new products as soon as possible, it is incorrect to attribute this to Steve's magnetic charisma alone. Yes, he had a natural talent for onstage speaking — but his keynotes were as prepared and calculated as an event can get. Ex-Apple employee Mike Evangelist described them as such: "To a casual observer it is just a guy in a black shirt and jeans talking about some new technology products. But it is in fact an incredibly complex and sophisticated blend of sales pitch, product demonstration and corporate cheerleading, with a dash of religious revival thrown in for good measure."

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The Death March

Note: the source for most of the content below is journalist Adam Lashinsky's Inside Apple and ex-Apple employee Mike Evangelist's Writer's Block Live.

The launch of a new product at Apple is often called 'the death march' because of the very intense work that is demanded of everybody involved, not only engineers, but also marketing and logistics people, to meet deadlines. This is especially true when a product launch has been scheduled for an Apple event, and/or has to meet a cyclical deadline such as the start of the holiday seasons. And when a product made it to Steve Jobs's short list of demos at one of his keynotes, most employees working on it could say goodbye to peaceful nights, weekends or holidays, no matter how long they had planned for it: "executives told all-too-common stories of having personal time off ruined because of an urgent 'Steve request.' They went like this: 'On vacation my product was going to be in a keynote, and I had to jump on a plane and rehearse all weekend'." This was especially the case before Macworld, the year's most popular event, which was held one to two weeks after New Year's Eve.



The reason for these last-minute requests was that every part of the show had to be perfect, including the demo of software that was not always 100% ready to ship: "Although development and release schedules are set far in advance, [Jobs] still has to satisfy himself that the chosen products are keynote-ready. For software, this can be hard to decide: the engineering work is usually still underway, so he will make a preliminary determination based on seeing unfinished software. More than once this has caused some tense moments in rehearsal when programs haven't behaved."

Not only did the software have to be tweaked to be stable enough for a show, but its content had to shine, too. For years, Steve Jobs used video content for his iMovie and iDVD demos, that was sometimes from Apple employees — but if not satisfying enough, it was shot for the demo only. This happened in anticipation of Macworld 2005, when a camera crew was sent to Hawaii at the last moment to shoot a wedding for a few minute's worth of demo of iMovie.

This was sometimes the case for hardware too. An example comes to mind with the prototype iPhone that was showed off at Macworld 2007, six months before its release date. The demo iPhone Steve Jobs used was hooked up to a huge projection screen, so that the whole audience could see what was happening on the screen in full detail. No other iPhone was capable of this for years: it was because custom hardware had been built (i.e. hundreds of hours for hardware and software engineers) just for that demo. It is not easy to find another company that would make product introductions so high on their list of priorities that it would get hold of resources allocated on the development of actual products. Apple did, and that is one of the reasons their products were so successful.

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Rules of the Road

How is a product introduction prepared? "People working on launch events will be given watermarked paper copies of a booklet called Rules of the Road that details every milestone leading up to launch day", and for each of these milestones, the name of the employee responsible for its success (the DRI, see Steve at Work). This included the aforementioned steps of perfecting software, highlighting key features for demos, creating content, etc. Former Apple developer Matt Drance recalled the experience: "I worked at one point for 72 sleepless hours for something that Steve Jobs showed on stage for 9 seconds. It's top three, if not no. 1, of my professional achievements. It didn't look any different on that screen as it did on mine, but it was the knowledge that it was good enough to be on the stage that made it suddenly look different. I'll never get that chance again, and I'm glad I had it."

Then came the time of the rehearsals. If you were an Apple employee, you had to script and rehearse your part several times, first with your team, then in front of your successive bosses, leading up to Jobs. The same applied even for guest speakers: "one partner executive recounted spending a week and a half in Cupertino leading up to an Apple product launch. He presented to an increasingly senior list of Apple executives, culminating with Jobs." Another recalled: "They told us — didn't ask us, told us — what time the rehearsal was, what [we] should wear, and what [we] should say. There was no discussion about it".



Steve Jobs applied the same strict rules to himself, of course. He spent the two days preceding the keynotes rehearsing. "On the first day he worked on the segments he felt needed the most attention. The product managers and engineering managers for each new product were in the room, waiting for their turn. This group also formed Steve's impromptu test audience: he would often ask for their feedback". At this time he could still change the order of the presentation's mini-segments, and rearrange them to have the most impact. Then "on the day before showtime, things get much more structured, with at least one and sometimes two complete dress rehearsals. Any non-Apple presenters in the keynote take part on the second day (although they cannot be in the room while the secret parts [the product introductions] are being rehearsed.)"

Finally came the time for the actual keynote. This was a hugely stressful moment for most people involved — including high-profile CEOs who were not all used to such large audiences and spotlight from the media. (Fox Entertainment CEO Jim Gianopulos told Jobs about his stage anxiety, to which he replied, "It's easy, you just imagine you have a few friends sitting around your living room and you're telling them what's new"). For Steve, it always came off as a brilliant and flawless performance that got everyone listening absolutely captivated. Although they were rare, he did have some embarrassing moments on stage, but he never lost his cool, and often even managed to joke about it: everyone remembers the clicker that stopped working at Macworld 2007, which made Steve contortion to distract the audience.

Steve Jobs keynotes were the most important and efficient means of communication for Apple. After all, this is how most of the world would ever see Apple — and Jobs, for that matter. They were used not only to attract the media's attention to new products, or to boost the faith of Apple fans worldwide, but even as an internal tool of communication. Indeed, the secrecy of the company made it so that most employees heard of their company's strategy and new products at keynote unveilings, while watching them in closed circuit TVs on campus.



After watching Jobs unveil the iPhone in 2007, Steve's old friend Alan Kay qualified the show, often considered Steve's best, with the words: "Steve understands desire."

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Reputation



Steve Jobs had the reputation of a hot-tempered manager throughout his life.

As early as 1987, the New York Times wrote: "by the early 80's, Mr. Jobs was widely hated at Apple. Senior management had to endure his temper tantrums. He created resentment among employees by turning some into stars and insulting others, often reducing them to tears. Mr. Jobs himself would frequently cry after fights with fellow executives".

Some twenty years later, Michael Wolff's description of Jobs was little different: "There's the mercurialness; the tantrums; the hours-long, dictator-like speeches; the famous, desperate, and transparent hogging of credit; and always the charismatic-leader complex […], through which he has been able to seduce and, subsequently, abandon so many of the people he's worked with. He may be as troubled and unsocialized (and, too, as charismatic) a figure in American business life as anyone since Howard Hughes". Yet Jobs was also approved by 97% of Apple employees according to the website Glassdoor.

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What did Steve Jobs do at Apple?

Steve Jobs was not your typical Silicon Valley CEO. Unlike most tech companies founders, he had neither any engineering experience nor any business training. After all, he dropped out of college after one semester! Few people know that Steve Jobs was never CEO of Apple in his first run there: the company was run by older executives and investors, and Steve Jobs actually helped them hire an experienced, 'well-rounded' CEO in 1983, John Sculley. However, Jobs was kicked out of Apple by Sculley two years later and he watched him bring the company to naught during his tenure.

The lesson he learned from this painful experience was to trust his own beliefs and values, and completely disregard the conventional views on how to run a company, including the traditional duties of a CEO. He delegated those duties to members of his executive team, most notably his second-in-command and eventual successor, Tim Cook, and focused on what he was best at: creating products, recruiting, marketing, and of course, being the public face of the company. He described it in a 2004 interview: "I get to spend my time on the forward-looking stuff. My top executives take half the other work off my plate. They love it, and I love it."

Product design
Steve Jobs had a very hands-on approach to product design, which was arguably the favorite part of his job. He famously often came down to the Industrial (i.e. hardware) Design lab to spend time with the designers team and give his opinion and guidance on their prototypes. This was also true of every software UI designer, who would quickly know what her über-boss thought of her work. In fact, product review sessions took up most of Steve Jobs's workday.


Steve Jobs with his iPod product guys in 2005: Tony Fadell, Jon Rubistein, Jony Ive and Phil Schiller

Jobs's reputation as a tech visionary originates not only from the reliable stream of breakthrough products that have come out of Apple in the last decade, but also from an observation from his closest colleagues. They recount countless times when he took a decision out of the blue, without any rationale, which turned out to be true. Ex-Apple employee Frederick Van Johnson explained it in the book Inside Apple: "Because he has that insight. You know, he's Steve. And you're like, how did [he] even know that? [He's] absolutely right. And it's not even blowing smoke. Normally, he has some sort of weird insight where he just knows." Even Bill Gates acknowledged how impressed he was by that instinctual grasp of technology that Steve Jobs seemed to have.

Jobs himself also knew he was often right and made himself Apple's ultimate end user. He often used Henry Ford's quote on people wanting a faster horse to justify Apple's very scarce use of focus groups — but the truth was that he, the CEO, was the company's focus group. He tested thoroughly new products and came back with imperative feedback for the development team. If you've ever wondered why some Apple products, such as the Numbers spreadsheet program or the Xserve, seemed to stall in development, it's because Steve wasn't interested in them. This is actually a complaint that some Apple engineers have formulated over the years. Steve had his executive team focus intensely on 3 to 4 projects over a period of time — and if your project was outside their realm, you were out of luck.

Apple's public image
Steve Jobs had a unique talent for marketing in general, and advertising in particular. Just like his ability to anticipate the consumer's needs and wants, he could guess which marketing messages would work, and which wouldn't. He acknowledged this talent early on, as exemplified by the famous '1984' Macintosh ad that he insisted Apple did despite the board members rising their eyebrows: that commercial is now routinely called the best of the 20th century.



On his second tenure at Apple, Jobs would hold weekly meeting with his top marketing people, and the heads of TBWA's small division which only handles the Apple account, TBWA\MAL. Says Lee Clow, the chairman of MAL and longtime friend of Steve Jobs: "There's not a CEO on the planet who deals with marketing the way Steve does. Every Wednesday he approves each new commercial, print ad, and billboard." This is how obsessed with Apple's image he was.

But it did not end with the ads and the marketing copies. Jobs also often called journalists to give his opinion on their articles on Apple, usually to complain about bad reviews or even the slightest criticism. Calling people up was actually very Jobsian, and he would also phone artists personally to get them to play at Apple events or in commercials, as well as competitors or prospective hires.

Recruiting
Hiring was actually one of his most important roles at Apple. He explained his philosophy in the 1980s already: "A players hire A players," he told the Mac team. "B players hire C players. Do you get it?" He kept this philosophy that his job was to find the best possible people, to have them hire excellent people too, throughout his life "My #1 job here at Apple is to make sure that the top 100 people are A+ players. And everything else will take care of itself. If the top 50 people are right, it just cascades down throughout the whole organization", he told Time in 1999. He personally oversaw the hiring of all top executives, and even some talented engineers or designers, calling them up directly to leverage his celebrity status. Some famous examples of this are his trying to hire (or acquire) the Panic and the Dropbox teams.

Jobs carried through this vision of the 'top 100' people at Apple by an annual event which he called the 'Top 100 retreat'. He took with them the Apple employees he felt were the smartest — not always the highest-ranked, mind you — and they all left to an undisclosed location where he would present them his strategy for the coming year and the long term, and try to have their feedback on it. The Top 100 created something of a caste at Apple: there were the 'Top 100' — the chosen ones that Steve would take with him in the proverbial life raft if he were to start Apple over again — and there were the others.

That vision thing
Of course, it was Steve Jobs who set the direction for all of Apple, together with his executive team (nicknamed 'ET'). The ET consisted of the top 10 executives of the company, including COO Tim Cook, SVP of industrial design Jony Ive, SVP of iOS Scott Forstall, SVP of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller, SVP of Retail Ron Johnson, SVP of Internet services Eddy Cue, SVP of Mac hardware Bob Mansfield, and CFO Peter Oppenheimer. They met with Steve every Monday morning, and reviewed all aspects of Apple, discussing every issue and taking decisions. All the power at Apple was concentrated in these meetings — it didn't lie with the board.

As Adam Lashinsky put it, Apple is "a command-and-control structure where ideas are shared at the top" i.e. at the Monday executive meeting. All groups would work hard on presentations for the Monday meeting where they knew the fate of their product was at stake. Steve Jobs was famously open to the executives' arguments and ideas at these meetings. For example, they convinced him (after a long while) to open the iPhone platform with the App Store… But once a decision had been taken, there was no discussion in the rest of the company: they had to execute.

The best spokesman in the world
Steve Jobs became famous also because of his magnetic charisma and incredible showmanship, which he demonstrated at every Apple event. Although they seemed unrehearsed, these events were rehearsed and rehearsed several times over, and preparing for them was a huge part of Jobs's job — as well as many people at Apple. See Steve on Stage for more details.


Jobs speaks at Apple for the Mac OS X launch

Top negotiator
Everybody knows Steve Jobs was a master showman and a product visionary — but few people know he was also a very harsh businessman. "For most people, he'll go down in history as the guy who made technology user-friendly. But to people in business, he'll be remembered as the guy who only did deals where he had all the leverage -- and used every bit of it. It's not enough that he wins. You have to lose. He's completely unreasonable", said one executive to Esquire. His negotiation skills proved crucial to Apple's success, including when negotiating with the major music labels before the launch of the iTunes Store, and with the carriers to prepare for iPhone. Woz speculated he acquired those skills with his dad who bought parts on car dealerships. It's one of the areas where he will perhaps prove irreplaceable.

A million other things
Steve Jobs was often called the ultimate micro-manager. Indeed, in addition to the big roles described above, he also got involved with all parts of Apple — and no detail was too small not to matter to him. Here are three examples:

- he personally picked the caterer for Apple's cafeteria, Il Fornia, calling his predecessor's menus 'dogfood'. Later, he made sure that the sushi bar offered "sashimi soba", an original creation of his

- he once called Google executive Vic Gundotra on a Sunday morning to change the yellow gradient in the 10-pixel Google logo on the iPhone Map app

- he personally picked the Italian marble to be used in the NY SoHo Store, and insisted that a sample was sent to Cupertino, so he could inspect the veining in the stone

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What did Steve Jobs do at Pixar?

Steve Jobs was Pixar's main investor for exactly twenty years, minus one week: he incorporated it on Feb 6, 1986, and sold it to Disney on Jan 24, 2006. However, his involvement with the company varied greatly throughout his life. Until 1993, he was mostly involved with NeXT, as an early employee recalled on Quora: "Steve was never involved in the day-to-day at Pixar […]. There were large stretches of time, even in Richmond, where we never saw him around. (Someone spotted him up there one day driving around, trying to remember where our driveway entrance was.) NeXT and, later, Apple, kept him pretty busy." His most hands-on period with Pixar was between 1995 and 1997, between the finishing touches on Toy Story and his comeback at Apple.

In 1997, he told Time "There's not a day that goes by that I don't do stuff for Pixar, even if I'm not physically there. And there's not a day that I'm at Pixar that I don't do stuff for Apple", which sums up his involvement with the animation studio quite well. He was mostly involved in major business decisions, such as the negotiation of deals with Disney or the building of the Emeryville campus (although he became obsessed with that campus when it was built in 1999-2000). "The Holy Grail for Pixar is releasing one product—a movie-a-year, and as CEO I might make three really critical decisions a year, and they are very hard to change", said Jobs in 2003.


Jobs announces the merger with Disney to Pixar employees

After Pixar was acquired by Disney in 2006, he became a prominent board member of the Walt Disney Company, but that didn't take him nearly as much time as being CEO of Pixar.

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The culture he has imposed upon Apple

Organization
As explained above, Steve Jobs was told to let 'more experienced' managers run the company in his first tenure at Apple — which led to his resignation and the John Sculley debacle. That is not to say that he had no business sense at the time: in his book about Jobs, Jay Elliot recalls how he used to "dream of the time that Apple could slash its way through to a much simpler management structure, with fewer approval levels, fewer people needing to sign off on every decision. He used to tell me, 'Apple should be the kind of place where anybody can walk in and share his ideas with the CEO'." Although he could never really apply his big dreams at NeXT, which remained small, he did so at Apple after his comeback.

The first priority for Steve when he came back was simplicity: "The organization is clean and simple to understand, and very accountable. Everything just got simpler. That's been one of my mantras -- focus and simplicity", he said in 2004. In other words, the responsibilities of every employee are very clear. For each project, and every task in that project, there will be someone accountable, a so-called DRI (directly responsible individual) who will be congratulated or blamed depending on how he does.



On the executive level, Steve Jobs was very explicit that everyone's job was constantly on the line. In his book Inside Apple, Adam Lashinsky explained Steve's parable of "the VP and the janitor": he imagines his trash not being emptied for some time. When he confronts the janitor, he is told that the keys to the locks have been changed and the janitor can't do his job anymore. Then he says to the VP: "When you're the janitor, reasons matter. Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO reasons stop mattering, and that Rubicon is crossed when you become a VP.' That is not say that each manager is held accountable on a financial level. On the contrary, the only manager with a 'P&L' (i.e. that is his own profit center) is the CFO, so as not to create fiefdoms: there is one bottom line at Apple. General managers are even avoided, VPs being generally specialized engineers that have been promoted — with sometimes little to no business acumen.

As for product teams, they have to remain small, with for example only two programmers in charge of Safari for iPad. The deadlines and the objectives assigned to those teams are in general very precise and in the relative short term. Again, it's all about results and execution: ideas have been debated and decisions taken by the ET earlier. As opposed to traditional product management, products don't pass from team to team: they are worked on in parallel, all at once, in some sort of organic process punctuated by cross-team meetings.

All these business practices: the small teams, the lack of financial responsibility of executives, the very simple hierarchy, the organic development process, even the financial compensation (stock options) were put into place by Steve Jobs to keep a startup mentality at Apple. He even called the company "the world's biggest startup" in 2010, proud of the fact that the company kept reinventing itself while its competitors failed to do so. In many ways, his management philosophy, the polar opposite of classical business training, was a total success.

Secrecy
Steve Jobs learned how important secrecy was for a technology company during the development of the Macintosh. The product was originally supposed to be out in 1982, and Steve Jobs started talking about it around that time — but the release date kept slipping and slipping, until it was finally set in 1984. By then, Jobs had already leaked most of the revolutionary product's features to the press, and the surprise was much lessened. He learned his lesson when he started NeXT two years later. The NeXT Cube was very late, too, but no one could tell, because no release date was ever pre-announced; and the media relayed the introduction a lot because the features of the Cube were a total surprise.



Jobs has enforced this rule as strictly as he could during his second tenure at Apple. The company had become a the leakiest in Silicon Valley, and he made sure everyone understood this was over when he came back. It is fair to say he instilled a culture of fear to prevent Apple employees to talk about their work, on the outside, but oftentimes also among themselves.

The secrecy from outsiders has obvious motives, such as leaving competitors in the dark, not having to apologize for a late product, and of course the huge free publicity that come from both speculation and the sensational release of new products. Every employee knows this is worth millions of dollars, and that a leak would cost them their job and severe trials. Apple actually distills false information to some of its employees to track down the source of leaks, and supposedly keeps a special teams dedicated to just that: tracking leaks. It enforces these rules as hard as it can with all their business partners such as part suppliers or developers, who were sometimes asked to protect the secret beyond reason.

Secrecy was enforced within the company, too, i.e. most Apple employees have no idea what their colleagues are working on. Apple is "the ultimate need to know culture", an environment where engineers are only told what they need to know to get their job done. For example, the iPhone had been seen by about thirty people in the company before Steve Jobs released it in January 2007. The rationale is to further enforce the secrecy to outsiders, but also to avoid politics: "Below a certain level, it is difficult to play politics at Apple, because the average employee doesn't have enough information to get into the game. Like a horse fitted with blinders, the Apple employee charges forward to the exclusion of all else", writes Adam Lashinsky in Inside Apple.

Strive for perfection



The word 'perfectionist' has become a cliché in the corporate world — but it is not a buzz word for Steve Jobs, who genuinely obsessed over the smallest details. Most employees working on Apple products would sooner or later be exposed to his feedback, either directly or through their boss after a Monday executive meeting, and this feedback would usually come in one of these three formats: "it's great", "it's not bad, but change this, this, and that" or, usually (especially for the first time) "it sorrys", "it's shit", "this is a D" or some other qualifier along those lines.

This attitude was often heralded as proof that Steve Jobs was a 'jerk'. Yet how come Apple employees are so loyal, and the company so efficient, with a jerk at the top? Most colleagues of Jobs described him as 'brutally honest' and never willing to settle for anything than the absolute best. In other words, nothing was ever "good enough" — it had to be perfect. Even with Steve Jobs interacting with about a hundred employees, this attitude rippled through the whole company — also by fear. An ex-Apple employee writes: "when Steve was pissed off about something, it got fixed at a pace I've never seen then or since in my professional life. I guess some people reacted that fast out of fear, but more directly, you would get used to refusing to accept anything but flawless execution."

Indeed, most employees felt as if Steve Jobs was always behind them, watching their work and making sure it was up to Apple's standards: "You might go awhile without seeing him. But you are constantly aware of his presence. You are constantly aware that what you're doing will either please or displease him. I mean, he might not know who you are. But there's no question that he knows what you do. And what you're doing. And whether he likes it or not" said an Apple employee. Another said in Inside Apple: "You can ask anyone in the company what Steve wants and you'll get an answer, even if 90 percent of them have never met Steve."

Employees working on product development at Apple were used to other demands of Steve that few companies are familiar with. This included his obsession to saying no more often than yes when it came to a product design or features i.e. the absolute necessity to focus. They were also ready to start over a product from scratch when Jobs and the ET felt they were on the wrong track: this happened in 2006 with the original iPhone. And even executives accepted that their teams compete if the end goal, the product, was going to benefit. For example, Scott Forstall's OS X team and Tony Fadell's iPod team both used their best people to develop an operating system for iPhone, because Jobs hesitated which one to pick. Eventually, iPhone used OS X, and the iPod people had worked for months for no concrete outcome. But the end choice was the best, and such willingness to sacrifice time and money for a better product was natural at Apple under Jobs.

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Steve Jobs's real management style

A common refrain heard when talking about Steve Jobs's management style is that Apple employees are so scared of him than they avoid getting into the elevator with him because they worry to lose their job during the trip. It is likely this must have happened once, probably in 1997 when Steve Jobs was asking every employee to defend their job's contribution to the company, but it certainly wasn't commonplace.

It is true, however, that Jobs was hot tempered, could easily start shouting at his employees and calling their work shit, and reduce them to tears. But he was not just cruel and brutal: he could also be a total charmer and make his colleagues feel like geniuses (this is how he hired most of them actually). While at NeXT, his employees dubbed this swift change of attitude "Steve's hero/shithead roller-coaster", a nice metaphor for the binary view with which Jobs described the world, and how he treated his fellow staff. People often wondered why he felt necessary to resort to derogatory remarks and mean insults when he was disappointed with someone's (hard) work. His biographer Walter Isaacson asked him, to which he replied "that's just who I am". He was indeed very self aware of his attitude — he called Fortune's editor to complain about a piece about him, only to say "Wait a minute, you've discovered that I'm an asshole? Why is that news?"



Most people who worked closely with Steve have a theory on why he acted this way: it was to extract the best of them, make them do the best work they could. And in fact, most agreed they achieved feats they did not think they were capable of under his pressure. The psychological mechanism at work was that once you had been praised by Steve, then insulted, you would work twice harder to earn back his favors. As early as the 1980s, the Mac team members all agreed that without Steve's strong will, there probably wouldn't have been a Mac. More recently, Apple employee Mike Evangelist wrote: "I was incredibly grateful for the apparently harsh treatment Steve had dished out the first time. He forced me to work harder, and in the end I did a much better job than I would have otherwise. I believe it is one of the most important aspects of Steve Jobs's impact on Apple: he has little or no patience for anything but excellence from himself or others."

In his dealings with the executive team, though, he seemed more open to arguments — heated arguments, but arguments nonetheless. In fact, he loved to argue, and one of the defining characteristics of his famed 'reality distortion field' was, according to Andy Herzfeld, Steve's habit of "throw[ing] you off balance by suddenly adopting your position as his own, without acknowledging that he ever thought differently". He wanted to explore every facet of an argument before making his mind. Such arguments were no fun and games, however: if you stood up against him, you'd better come prepared to defend your stance, because he would not suffer a fool. Mike Evangelist called it his "logical flaw detector, his uncanny ability to see thru any BS and to instantly zero in on the weak point(s) of any argument. […] He grasps the salient points of any situation faster than anyone I've met, and if you can't keep up that's not his problem."

Steve Jobs explained the reason for his impossible demands to Steven Levy, as early as 1983: "We have an environment where excellence is really expected. What's really great is to be open when [the work] is not great. My best contribution is not settling for anything but really good stuff, in all the details. That's my job — to make sure everything is great". But the palm for saying it best goes to Jony Ive, who said in the tribute ceremony that Apple held two weeks after Steve's death: "it cost him most. He cared the most. He worried the most deeply. He constantly questioned: is this good enough? Is this right? And despite all his successes, all his achievements, he never presumed, he never assumed that we would get there in the end. And when the prototypes failed, it was with great intent, with faith, he decided to believe we would eventually make something great. […] So his I think was a victory for beauty for purity, and as he would say, for giving a damn."

[MysteRy]

Pesona

Steve at Work


Steve's work day



In the last extensive interview he ever gave, at the D8 conference in 2010, Steve Jobs was asked by Kara Swisher "What do you do all day?" A naive question it seems, but one that many observers ask themselves, given both Steve's few business implications compared to a typical CEO, and his absolute dedication to a million things that have nothing do with the job of CEO.

Steve Jobs answered that question several times throughout his career. In 1999, he said to TIME: "I'm a good morning person. I like it early in the morning. I wake up six-ish. About 10 years ago I put in a T1 to my house. I'm actually getting ready to put a 45 mg fiber to my house, because I want to find out what that will be like, because everybody's going to have that someday. But I have a pretty sophisticated setup; whether I'm at Apple or at Pixar or at my home, I log in and my whole world shows up on any of those computers. It's all kept on a server. So I carry none of it with me, but wherever I am, my complete world shows up, all my files. Everything. And I have high speed access to all of it. So my office is at home too. And when I'm not in meetings, my work is fundamentally on email. So I'll work a little before the kids get up. And then we'll all have a little food and finish up some homework and see them off to school. If I'm lucky I'll stay at home and work for an hour because I can get a lot done, but oftentimes I'll have to come in. I usually get here about 9. 8 or 9. Having worked about an hour or half or two at home."

A huge part of his job was indeed on emails. They could be sent to Apple employees, where it was famous that a message whose subject was "STEVE REQUEST" would get immediate attention. But Steve also read the hundreds of emails he got from various customers everyday, sent to his public address [email protected]. He explained it to TIme: "All these customers email me all these complaints and questions, which I actually have grown to like. It's like having a thermometer on practically any issue. If somebody doesn't flush a toilet around here, I get an email from Kansas about it. Sometimes I can get about 100 or more of those a day from people I will never meet. But I zing 'em around, and it's good to keep us all in touch."



He also described his Monday meetings in 2008, to Fortune: "What we do every Monday is we review the whole business. We look at what we sold the week before. We look at every single product under development, products we're having trouble with, products where the demand is larger than we can make. All the stuff in development, we review. And we do it every single week. I put out an agenda -- 80% is the same as it was the last week, and we just walk down it every single week. We don't have a lot of process at Apple, but that's one of the few things we do just to all stay on the same page." Although the Monday executive meetings were probably the most important of the week, he also had long sessions on Wednesday afternoon with his ad agency TBWA\MAL and his top marketing people, such as SVP Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller.

Finally, the Walter Isaacson bio revealed that one of his favorite pastimes was to hang out in the Industrial Design's lab in the afternoon, where Jony Ive and his team of designers worked on prototypes of future hardware products: "When Steve comes in, he will sit at one of these tables", said Ive. "If we're working on a new iPhone, for example, he might grab a stool and start playing with different models and feeling them in his hands, remarking on which ones he likes best. Then he will graze by the other tables, just him and me, to see where all the other products are heading. He can get a sense of the sweep of the whole company, the iPhone and iPad, the iMac and laptop and everything we're considering. That helps him see where the company is spending its energy and how things connect."

Jony Ive was Jobs's only soulmate at Apple, probably because of his aesthetic, artistic sensibility. Jobs deliberately put Industrial Design on top of every other division at Apple, to ensure that the most beautiful hardware prototypes eventually turned into actual products, without being twisted and deformed by engineers. He explained it to Isaacson: "[Jony Ive] understands that Apple is a product company. He's not just a designer. That's why he works directly for me. He has more operational power than anyone else at Apple except me. There's no one who can tell him what to do, or to butt out. That's the way I set it up."


Jony Ive and Steve Jobs in 2005