Steve At Work:

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.

The goal of this page is to explore that aspect of Steve Jobs in greater detail, and paint a broader and more accurate picture of what kind of manager he was.

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.

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.

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.

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

Apple employees have hundreds do examples of such dedication (some call it 'pain in the butt').

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.

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 sucks", "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.

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?

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.
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Sources: www.allaboutstevejobs.com