Steve and I talked many times about his reluctance to share the spotlight with the others on his team, since I asked repeatedly to speak with them and was largely unsuccessful. Sometimes he’d aver that he didn’t want anyone to know who was doing great work at Apple, since he didn’t want them to get recruited by other companies. That was disingenuous, since Silicon Valley was an incestuous place where tech talent was tracked as closely as the stock market. What was true was that Steve didn’t think anyone else could tell the story of his product, or his company, as well as he could. Steve was a great performer in any setting, and he considered most interviews to be just another performance. He was a terrific extemporaneous thinker and talker, always confident that he could make the most of an opportunity to promote the company. He cared intensely about the look of any article he participated in, because he thought that photography and typography and a stylish layout helped convey the import of whatever message he wanted to get across.
Under Steve’s guidance, Apple would develop one of the clearest brand identities in the world. So, while Steve’s policy irked some members of his core team, it was hard to argue with his success. Working for Steve meant accepting a whole range of idiosyncratic behaviors. Policies that seemed selfish often turned out to be good for the company. Strategies that at first appeared quixotic might well prove farsighted. The members of Steve’s core team learned to anticipate and live with his unpredictability. They knew they were working for someone special.
Steve made sure in his own way that they knew he thought they were outstanding as well. Sometimes he’d ask one of them to join him on a long walk, whether around the Apple campus or near his home in Palo Alto. “Those walks mattered,” Ruby remembers. “You’d think to yourself, ‘Steve is a rock star,’ so getting quality time felt like an honor in some ways.” Steve also compensated his key employees richly, arranging lucrative long-term contracts loaded with stock options for everyone in the inner circle. “He was really good at surrounding himself with really good people and motivating them both philosophically and financially. You have to have the right mix. You have to provide just enough financial motivation in there so that people don’t just say, ‘Fuck you, I’m not taking this anymore.’ ”
Steve also understood that the personal satisfaction of accomplishing something insanely great was the best motivation of all for a group as talented as his. “You had to believe that it was going to take some time; that you weren’t going to wake up tomorrow morning and it was all going to be fixed,” Tevanian once told me. “And that two years, three years down the road you were going to look back and say, ‘Gee, we got through it.’ If you didn’t believe that, you were sunk. Because there was a lot of pain along the way, there were a lot of people saying it’s going to fail, it’s not going to work, this is wrong with it, that’s wrong with it, finding a million things wrong. But you just had to know that if you kept your head down, kept working, kept trying to do the right things, it would work out.” Saving Apple was an accomplishment everyone on the team would take pride in for the rest of their lives.
“He cared deeply,” says Rubinstein. “And that made him a great manager when things weren’t going well. At the beginning of this time at Apple, it was such a pleasure because we were all in it together.”
“When it was tough,” Avie adds, “he’d think carefully about all the decisions. He’d think through the impact of everything very carefully.” While Steve never hesitated to emphatically assert his opinion, sometimes his fretting would drive the group crazy, as he delayed important projects by fussing endlessly over minute considerations, such as whether to change the plug connectors for mice and keyboards. Mike Slade, the head of marketing for a brief period at NeXT, went back to work at Apple in 1998 as a consultant to Steve. “People want to paint him like he’s Michelangelo, you know?” says Slade. “But he was a real nervous Nelly, like an old-fashioned, tiny, old, small businessman saying, ‘Shall I cut another nickel off it?’ Like a junk merchant.”
His attention to the job at hand was intense, and he set up his schedule to ensure that each of his key deputies was equally focused. Every Monday morning at nine o’clock, he convened the executive team (the ET, as it came to be known) in a conference room located in Building 1 of the Apple campus. Attendance was required. Referring to an agenda he himself had written up and distributed, he’d go around the table, asking specific questions about projects under development and getting updates from the team. Each person was expected to be fully prepared for any question he might ask about their area of responsibility. For some, like Fred Anderson or Nancy Heinen, the general counsel, this might be their main encounter with Steve for the week. Others, however, knew to expect rigorous follow-ups. The pressure was intense. Their past successes had earned them a place in the room, but Steve didn’t care about the past. With Steve, says Ed Catmull, “The past can be a lesson, but the past is gone. His question was always, ‘What are we going to do moving forward?’ ”
That’s why “That’s shit!” was as common a response from Steve as a pointed question or a thoughtful discussion. He wanted smart answers, and he didn’t want to waste time on niceties when it was simpler to be clear, no matter how critical his response. “The reason you sugarcoat things is that you don’t want anyone to think you’re an asshole. So, that’s vanity,” explains Jony Ive, a crisply articulate Brit with the muscled frame of a boxer and a tendency to hunch forward over a table as he leans in to speak to you. As design chief, Ive was on the receiving end of Steve’s blunt criticisms as much as anyone. Whenever he felt abused, he would tell himself that someone who sugarcoats his true opinions “might not really even be all that concerned about the other person’s feelings. He just doesn’t want to appear to be a jerk. But if he really cared about the work he would be less vain, and would talk directly about the work. That’s the way Steve was. That’s why he’d say ‘That’s shit!’ But then the next day or the day after, he also would just as likely come back saying, ‘Jony, I’ve been thinking a lot about what you showed me, and I think it’s very interesting after all. Let’s talk about it some more.’ ”
Steve put it this way: “You hire people who are better than you are at certain things, and then make sure they know that they need to tell you when you’re wrong. The executive teams at Apple and Pixar are constantly arguing with each other. Everybody wears their thoughts on their sleeves at Pixar. Everybody’s totally straight with what they think, and the same is beginning to happen at Apple.” His inner circle understood that Steve’s acerbic criticism wasn’t personal. They’d all learned how to, as Susan Barnes said, “get through the yelling to the reason for the yelling.” Steve expected them to do that, and he expected them to push back when he was wrong. “I fought with him for sixteen years,” remembers Rubinstein. “I mean, it was almost comedic. I remember one Christmas morning, we’re on the phone screaming at each other and both of our significant others are in the background, saying, ‘Come on, we have to get going, get off the damn phone.’ He was always screaming about something or other. Once, we were in this huge fight. And I’m standing, I think, in Target down in Cupertino, pushing my cart around buying toilet paper or whatever the hell it was, right? And Steve and I are on the phone, yelling at each other. It’s just how we operate. I grew up in New York City. My family was out of a Woody Allen movie, you know that scene in Annie Hall where they’re underneath the Thunderbolt roller coaster? That’s my family. So fighting all the time didn’t bother me. That was probably one of the reasons we were successful together.”