iJobs

On October 5 of last year, Steve Jobs died after a long bout with pancreatic cancer. He was 56 years old, still a young man by today’s standards, and yet in the years beyond his adolescence he managed to create the PC age, co-create a business that at his death had a market capitalization of $364 billion – a valuation at the time second only to Exxon, which it has since exceeded – he’d created a gaggle of products prefixed by the inscrutable letter “i”, he had lost and then regained control of Apple, the company he helped develop, he’d revolutionized computer animation in developing a new genre of film-making, and he had created a personal fortune of $8 billion. To have done any one of these things would have been breathtaking and yet he did them all – and more.

Seven years ago, confronted with his mortality after learning that he had a serious form of cancer, Jobs asked Walter Isaacson, a journalist-biographer, to write his story. Isaacson, unaware of Jobs’ cancer, initially turned him down because of Jobs’ relative young age and because his story hadn’t been fully lived out in the years Isaacson thought remained. But when Jobs’ lethal condition became known, Isaacson relented and in 2009 began to collect data and interviews from Jobs, his friends, enemies, and former colleagues. Other than requesting that he design the book’s cover, Jobs said he had no interest in reading the book and gave Isaacson complete editorial freedom. The result is a lengthy tome – almost 700 pages – which was on the book shelves a few weeks after Jobs’ death.

Almost 30 years ago I saw a curious looking box in a retail window with an odd, partly eaten, multi-colored apple for a logo. It was a “personal computer” I learned, in a time when the only computers I’d seen were quite impersonal and filled entire rooms despite a memory of only 256K. The one I used to perform the calculations for my doctoral dissertation had a memory of only 10k and the user interface was a teletypewriter with a punched paper tape reader.

As an engineer, I had a natural interest in the guy who created the curious box. And in the 30 years since I first saw it, I have followed his rise and fall, first through articles written about him and later through books that chronicled Jobs and the company known as Apple.

I was interested in how Walter Isaacson, the only person to write Jobs’ “authorized” story, would treat this American icon whose products have touched so many people living today. Every author asserts he is objective but how the objective facts are reported can tell many a different tale. I’ve listened to the audio book version and now I’m reading it. If you decide to do either, you won’t be disappointed. It is not a whitewash. Jobs is presented warts and all. Well, most of the warts, at least.

I am not going to review Isaacson’s book. There are ample reviews online. And there are many other “unauthorized” books – and in-depth articles – about Jobs and his company which I think are also worth reading. Most tell the biographical story of Steve Jobs – facts about his life and accomplishments. But there is the equally important back story – Steve Jobs the person – which is often glossed over and evidentially not understood by his admirers, judging by the worldwide candle lighted adoration the news of his death evoked. There is no disputing Jobs’ accomplishments. Arguably few people could do what he did. But Jobs did not descend from Olympus. He was an abrasive, belittling, manipulative, narcissistic, sociopath. He lived outside of the constraints that mere mortals are compelled to observe with a genius flawed by character. Apologists argue that his genius and flaws are related, as if one couldn’t happen without the other.  My experience indicates otherwise. I’ve personally known many entrepreneurs and read about others who accomplished great things without burning up the people who helped make them happen. Herb Kelleher, the creator of Southwest Airlines comes to mind.

Steve Jobs was conceived by an unmarried couple. Both were university students, although his father had a Ph.D. and was teaching when the child was born. He was put up for adoption, allegedly because his father was Syrian and his American mother’s family disapproved of their relationship. This didn’t prevent a later marriage which produced another child – a girl – before the marriage ended in divorce.

Steve’s mother wanted him adopted by college-educated parents who would assure that he would receive a college education. The prospective new parents were a lawyer and his wife. But when Steve was born, they changed their minds and decided they preferred a girl. Thus, Paul and Clara Jobs – the next names on the list that February in 1955 – were called and told there was a baby boy available for adoption; did they want him? They took him and later adopted a sister for him.

Clara Jobs had not graduated from college and Paul Jobs had not graduated from high school. When the biological mother learned this, she initially refused to sign the adoption papers and relented only with their promise that they would send Steve to college.

Notwithstanding his limited formal education, Paul Jobs could do almost anything – repair cars, rebuild household appliances, build almost anything with his hands – and whatever he did was done right. He was a craftsman and a precision machinist who was employed making housings for lasers, which were just becoming of age in the 1960s.

During one of Isaacson’s interviews with Jobs, the author was shown a 50-year old fence which still stands enclosing the backyard of the modest house where the Jobs lived. Young Steve helped his father (he always said his adoptive parents were his parents) to build it with the understanding that the craftsmanship on both sides of the fence had to be the same. Just because Steve couldn’t see the other side of the fence, his father said, was no excuse for cutting corners on its workmanship.

The Jobs family moved to Cupertino in 1960 where Steve would grow up, attend elementary and high school, and begin being Steve Jobs. Perhaps that story begins with Lisa McMoylar, a little girl who lived across the street from the Jobs house. One day Steve confided in her that he was adopted – something that Paul and Clara had been quite open about with both Steve and his adopted sister.  “Does that mean your real parents didn’t want you?” Lisa asked. Struck by that thought, Steve ran into the house to the people he always acknowledged as his parents. They told him that they had specifically picked him. He was not abandoned. He had been chosen and was therefore someone special.

Jobs seems to have been anointed by that assurance rather than comforted by it. In later life he was non-conformist and anti-authoritarian. His car had no license tag despite the fact he was a billionaire. Told that the law required a license tag, he chose instead to lease a new car every six months and drive it without a tag, since six months was the limit to do so. He parked in handicapped spaces.  The fact that he was adopted because he was special allowed him to live his life independently of rules, he later confessed.

Paul and Clara Jobs were liberal, indulgent parents of a precocious child – the kind of parents that would have been influenced by the childrearing guru of the time, Dr. Benjamin Spock, a proponent of indulgence. Their permissiveness and lack of restraint may further explain a lot of Steve’s adult behavior.

Moreover, he grew up in California of the 1960s and 1970s, which largely rejected the influence of traditional religion or the restraints of traditional morality. Jobs called it a “magical time” and for him a spiritual time. “… taking LSD was one of the most important things in my life … not the most important … but right up there,” Jobs later recalled. Zen, yoga, meditation, the human potential movement, drugs, sex, and other pop psycho-cultural expressions became vehicles in the search for aimless youngsters and adults to find meaning in life.

It was also the dawn of the high-tech age, and technology companies were springing up in the pre-Silicon Valley era, competing with the area’s ubiquitous fruit orchards for real estate. The Cold War and Vietnam War were in full swing, spawning California’s electronic firms, chip makers, military contractors, not to mention the sub-culture of geeks, hobbyists, and non-conformist engineers unsuited to jobs in conventional businesses.

It was during this time that Steve Jobs met Steve Wozniak, five years his senior and his future partner in Apple Computer. Other than the fact that both Steves were long-haired, bearded hippies who were interested in technology, they were almost polar opposites in every other respect. Jobs was cocksure and arrogant, Wozniak was shy, almost child-like. Jobs was assertive and outgoing, Wozniak was reclusive and preferred to work alone. Jobs was disingenuous and manipulative, Wozniak was ethical and sensitive to others. Wozniak was generous in virtually everything, Jobs wasn’t.

Woz had dropped out of UC Berkley and was working on mainframe computers at Hewlett Packard when the two hooked up. He was the technical genius of the duo with a natural talent for the arcana of technology solutions. He would have been happy to invent technologies and give them to the world in the belief that he was making it a better place.

Jobs understood almost nothing about engineering and science and was unable to write a line of programming code. Yet he had an uncanny grasp for esthetic detail, probably the legacy of his father’s love for craftsmanship and doing the little things well. He was as good at seeing the big picture as he was at hammering out its details – a rare combination. Jobs, unlike Woz, could see the future in a product by looking at its inert carcass on a workbench.

Jobs would spend hours admiring the design of high-end kitchen knives in a department store and certain kitchen appliances, like the Cuisinart food processor, whose ideas found their way into the exteriors of Apple computers. He bordered on pathological about the curvature of the corners on Apple computer cases. The iMac colors were supposedly inspired by a visit to a jelly bean factory. For years his house had no furniture because he couldn’t find any with a design he considered worthy of his home. And near the end of his life when he was being treated for cancer, he refused to wear a surgical mask because he hated its design.

Woz was the creative genius who labored out of the limelight while Jobs was the promoter and market maker.

Thinking of Jobs and Woz, I’m reminded of a scene in Schindler’s List in which Liam Neeson’s character, Oskar Schindler, has organized the Polish Ghetto Jews to put up the money and perform the unpaid jobs for Schindler’s pots and pans factory. He has asked Ben Kingsley’s character, Itzhak Stern, also a Ghetto Jew, to be the plant manager and its business accountant. The following dialog takes place between Stern and Schindler.

Itzhak Stern: Let me understand. They put up all the money. I do all the work. What, if you don't mind my asking, would you do?

Oskar Schindler: I'd make sure it's known the company's in business. I'd see that it had a certain panache. That's what I'm good at. Not the work, not the work... the presentation!

The Jobs-Woz relationship was similar. Neither could have accomplished anything without the other, but Jobs had the flair, the intuitive understanding of the customer, and the obsessive focus on product detail down to the way it was packed in a box. The MacBook Air makes no keyboard sound as it’s used. Was the click of a keyboard so distracting that users complained? No. But noise in Steve Job’s world was a product negative so he insisted that the keyboard design make keystrokes silent.

Similarly, there is no fan, and therefore, no fan noise in the Apple II or Macs. Fans were installed in early PCs to get rid of heat. Preventing heat would eliminate fans which in turn would eliminate fan noise. So while Jobs didn’t know how to design or build a power supply that generated minimal heat, he found a power supply designer and told him that is what he wanted. The result was a low heat generating, pulsed power supply which is now the industry standard.

This drive to bend the realities of the natural world and bend the abilities of the people who inhabit that world became known as Jobs’ Reality Distortion Field. It’s believed that a co-worker borrowed the term from Star Trek. Jobs’ insistence that things be as he wanted them was not his force of will – it was his belief that reality existed as he saw it. For example, if he disbelieved the law of gravity, he simply acted as if it didn’t exist. Therefore, alternating between charisma and intimidation, Jobs bent the world and the people around him to match his Reality Distortion Field.

He used various methods to accomplish his ends. For example, Jobs practiced staring into the eyes of others without blinking, and if he asked someone a question, he expected that person to maintain eye contact and answer. It was like some weird form of mind control with him. One former employee of Apple said that after talking with Jobs he almost felt the need to be deprogrammed.

When the original Mac was created, Jobs announced to a work team that certain tasks had to be completed within a month. When the team protested that the volume of code required couldn’t be done in a month, Jobs answered, “Yes, you can do it.” Over the howls that he was asking the impossible, but knowing that the consequences would be unpleasant otherwise, the impossible task was completed – which only reinforced Jobs’ belief that he was right all along. Apple’s coding productivity (lines/hour) was no longer adequate if it met conventional industry standards; it now had to meet standards mandated by Jobs, who wasn’t a programmer.

Another by-product of Jobs’ Reality Distortion Field was his belief that a fruitarian diet consisting of no vegetables or protein was not only healthy but also eliminated the need for bathing and body odor control. As a result he smelled like a bum, which coupled with his long hair, beard, scruffy dress, and the fact that he was usually barefoot, completed an image of a solipsistic person living in his own reality. To deal with stress, he would often soak his feet in a toilet bowl. He thought nothing of meeting with someone he intended to impress – like an investor to sponsor a substantial amount of capital – and putting his filthy feet on the person’s desk. He was shocked because they were shocked.

People told Jobs that he smelled awful. Yet, he never considered that they might be right. Reality Distortion. He once decided that he would go to work with Atari. The person in charge of hiring took one look at him and turned him down. Jobs said he would stay in the lobby until he was hired. Nolan Bushnell, the owner of the company, came out, interviewed him, and decided he was a bright kid – so he hired him. His fellow workers complained so much about his body odor that he was assigned to the night shift – the only person on the night shift.

Meeting with the Chairman of Lotus Software for breakfast once, Jobs observed the amount of butter the man was spreading on his toast. “Have you ever heard of serum cholesterol?” Jobs volunteered. “Look,” said the Chairman, “I’ll make you a deal. You stay away from commenting on my dietary habits, and I’ll stay away from the subject of your personality.”

The weirdness of Jobs’ persona was who he really was – not something he imitated – and it led to treatment of colleagues that was beyond cruel. His language at times was so profane that I cannot use it here. He could be (and was) so abusive to a waitress that she would flee the restaurant in tears. Once when interviewing a candidate for a job in Apple, he asked the young man when he had lost his virginity. Obviously flustered and embarrassed by the question, the candidate began shifting in his chair and flushed through several shades of red. “You mean you’re still a virgin?” Jobs asked. One Apple manager told herself before meetings with Jobs that she was already dead in order to dull her senses to the humiliation she knew awaited her.

A programming team might stay up all night to meet one of Jobs’ impossible deadlines and be told the performance of their software was s---. Subordinates were screamed at and told they – not their work – were (expletive), (expletive), (expletive) and then they were fired on the spot. Jobs could be equally brutal in hiring: “Everything you’ve done in your life is s---,” he told one prospective employee, “so why don’t you come and work for me?” He didn’t learn that in charm school.

Laurene Powell, his wife for 20 years, tried to put a pretty face on her husband’s bizarre behavior in interviews with Walter Isaacson. “Like many great men whose gifts are extraordinary,” she said, “he’s not extraordinary in every realm.…He doesn’t have social graces, such as putting himself in other people’s shoes, but he cares deeply about empowering humankind.” Co-workers who had learned to tolerate his abuse convinced themselves that it was just his perverted way of challenging them to higher levels. “We learned to accept ‘This is s---’ as a code that meant ‘Tell me why this is the best way to do it’.”

Jobs excused his behavior by saying that he wanted to work with people who demanded perfection; “that’s who I am,” he said. “If you’re an insanely great person, wouldn’t you want to work in an insanely great organization?” he once said. In Jobs’ Manichean world, people were either heroes or zeros – or “s---heads” as he called them – usually to their face.

In contrast, I recall the leadership methods of Vince Lombardi, no performance pushover in the world of professional football. In one practice session, things weren’t going well. There was a player, a hulking guard, who wasn't playing up to Lombardi's standards, and finally the coach had enough. "You're not putting out! In fact, I doubt whether you're going to make this team. Go to the locker room!"

About an hour and half later, Lombardi entered the locker room with the rest of the team, and the big guard was still there in his sweaty practice uniform with his head in his hands. Lombardi walked over to him, put his hand on the man’s shoulder, and said, "Son, you are a lousy football player. But inside of you is a great football player, and I'm going to stay by your side until that football player comes out." With that assurance, Jerry Kramer stripped off his uniform, and took a shower. Years later, he would be elected to the Football Hall of Fame.

Unlike Lombardi, Jobs apparently never believed leadership can be used to make great people as well as make great products.

(Continued next week...)