iJobs v.2.0

(… continued from last week)

When it came to the architecture of the Apple I and II and later the Macs, Jobs decided the operating system and applications should run only on Apple hardware. It was a strategic mistake. PCs had not yet become mainstream and that is always a dangerous time for technology developers because the format that the market will ultimately embrace is not yet known. Remember VHS and Betamax? They were not interchangeable and since more content could be stored on the larger, bulkier VHS, it became the ultimate winner. Betamax players became relics.

Jobs’ decision to stick with an integrated design left the door open to developers who pursued modular designs. For example, when IBM decided to introduce a PC, even though its management believed the company’s future was in mainframes, it had to get into the market fast because it was a latecomer. The PC development team was sequestered in Boca Raton, Florida and told to produce a product in one year. The IBM mainframe processor, operating system, hard drive, and applications couldn’t be quickly converted to work in its PC, so IBM chose a modular design. Intel provided its processor, several suppliers provided hard drives, and Microsoft created a GUI-based Windows operating system for IBM, reserving the right to sell it to other PC manufacturers. Ironically, the Apple operating system was superior to Microsoft, but it would only run on an Apple product, whereas the Microsoft operating system was adaptable to any PC. In time the Apple equivalent of a PC – the Mac – would garner only 5% of the market because of its vertically integrated design. Third-party printers and other peripherals also wouldn’t run on Macs because they couldn’t interface to Apple’s integrated design. The market quickly recognized the restrictions of the Apple and the flexibilities of other PCs. Apple lost.

Woz had anticipated that this would happen and wanted to sell his operating system to other PC producers from the outset, even though those producers would use it compete in the market against Apple. But even then, Apple would be successful because vendors and competitors would be using the Apple operating system. Instead, that advantage shifted to Microsoft. Unwittingly, Apple put Microsoft in business. Jobs – and later John Sculley who had come to Apple as its new CEO – recognized that the integrated architecture was a mistake.

Apple became a public company in the last month of 1980. About 300 people became millionaires, multimillionaires, and several venture capitalists became billionaires. Among them, at age 25, Jobs was a multimillionaire as was Woz, barely 30. But many who should have gotten stock before the public offering were left out. Some were old friends who went back to the days when Jobs and Woz were headquartered in the Jobs’ garage. Because he was by nature a generous person, Woz began giving some of his stock options to people he thought deserved them.

One of the people denied options was Daniel Kottke. He had been a college classmate of Jobs, gone to India with him when Jobs was searching for himself, and he had helped in early trade shows for the Apple II, manning a demo table and doing the grunt work. Kottke had been Jobs’ housemate for two years. He was truly upset that he hadn’t gotten stock options and, marching to Jobs’ office, tried to talk to him about it. But confronted by Jobs’ unblinking stare, Kottke broke down in tears, turned around, and left. It bothered one of the Apple engineers so much that he told Jobs, "We have to take care of your buddy Daniel. If you will give him some stock, I’ll match whatever you give. Jobs said, "OK. I'll give zero and you give zero." So much for loyalty.

As a public company the rules of the game changed and Jobs’ cavalier management style cast doubt among the Board that he was suited to run the company’s day-to-day operations. Persuaded that he would continue to lead product design and strategy, Jobs participated in recruiting the new CEO, John Sculley, whom he enticed to leave the presidency of Pepsi Cola in 1983. With predictable Jobs bravado, he challenged Sculley: "Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?”

For a while the two were able to stay out of each other’s way, but Sculley and Jobs held different visions of the future and Apple’s role in it, so Jobs was increasingly isolated and ultimately resigned in 1985. In a fit of petulance, he sold all of his Apple shares for $70 million in a down market. But now he had the ability to finance himself and started NeXT computer, which went nowhere. He also acquired a small company from George Lucas for $5 million that would become Pixar. Creating computer-generated animation occupied Jobs’ creativity for a while but it wasn’t his first love. At one point, he put the company on the market for $25 million but there were no takers. Then came the technology breakthrough at Pixar which resulted in Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Monsters, and Finding Nemo. Jobs sold Pixar to Disney in 2006 for $7.4 billion. It was a happy ending for Jobs but not for the people who created the breakthrough. They got very little money out of the sale. Kottke redux.

Jobs had been in the wilderness for ten years when the Apple Board announced in 1996 that it was buying NeXT for $427 million, ousting its CEO, Gil Amelio, and bringing Jobs back to run the company. Apple was only months from bankruptcy. Remarkably, Jobs persuaded his arch-rival, Bill Gates, to put $150 million into Apple. Jobs performed a quick survey of the company’s product line and announced to the senior team that they were to get out of all of the product proliferation that had occurred since he left. Apple would make a desktop and a laptop for the home and professional markets – four computers. No more. Almost overnight 3,000 people were terminated and the company retrenched.

The iMac was introduced in 2000 at a time when Napster was riding high and young people (the primary market for iMacs) were ripping tunes and sharing them. A CD player/copier was added to the iMac design but there was no software to manage a music library. This led to the iPod and ultimately iTunes. Jobs negotiated a deal with the recording artists – reminding them that something is better than nothing, and nothing was what they were getting – and the iTunes store began selling the recording artists’ music by the song rather than by the album. Each song sold for 99 cents, with Apple retaining 29 cents. Overnight, the iTunes store became the biggest music retailer in the world selling a million downloads the first day it was open and eight million four months later. The songs were just a way to sell iPods with its proprietary file format and high margins. Yes, Jobs stuck with the integrated architecture.

In 2007 Jobs released the iPhone to the market, which bought over six million units in 15 months. It was a combination phone, camera, content player, and Internet client and browser, allowing emails and text messages to be sent and received. Then in 2010 the iPad was released and sold 300,000 on the first day and three million in the first 80 days. The “i” products, including those not yet released orbit around the iMac as its digital hub, which will possibly migrate to the iCloud in the future.

The integration of these satellite products around the digital hub was likely envisioned by Jobs sometime after he returned to Apple. He concluded that the age of the Internet was fast reaching maturity and that a new age of digital device integration was beginning. In his MacWorld 2001 presentation, Jobs discussed his conception of the digital hub business model – whose satellites would be digital phones, digital photograph and movie cameras, PDAs, CD players, and MP 3 music devices. It was remarkable insight for the time. The iPod/iTunes, iPhone, and iPad became those satellites, albeit in more modern formats as digital technology advanced.

It’s interesting, therefore, to hear Isaacson’s account of the iPad creation when told by Jobs and when told by one of the senior engineers also interviewed. Remember that Jobs had envisioned the PDA as a satellite to his digital hub as early as 2001. As the iPod and iPhones assumed their orbits in the Apple digital constellation, they were not single-function devices. More and more functionality was added to them both at launch and in successive versions. When it was introduced, the iPad was also not a single-function PDA. It was a digital platform for text (books, periodicals), audio (music, audio books), video (movies), games, applications, and Internet browsing.

Jobs recalled the genesis of the iPad for Isaacson. It occurred at a party he attended in 2009 at which a Microsoft engineer boasted that his company was working on a tablet PC. Afterward, Jobs said, “F--- this, let’s show him what a tablet can really do.” He called his team together and directed them to come up with a touch screen tablet with no keyboard or stylus.

Jony Ive, the head of design for Apple, recalled a different genesis story. He told Isaacson that his team had been experimenting with a touch input screen device in a sort of “skunk works” without Jobs’ knowledge or direction. Until its functionality was more or less perfected, he was loath to let Jobs’ know about it for fear that it might earn another “this is s---” summary judgment with an order to kill it. “I realized that if he pissed on this, it would be so sad, because I knew it was so important,” Ive told Isaacson. When the device was bulletproof, Ive showed it to Jobs privately with no audience to posture for and Jobs loved it.

Here again is the accursed Reality Distortion Field convincing Jobs that the ideas of others had really been his own and that things really had happened in the inflated way he later recalled them. Jobs frequently took credit for the work of others. It revealed not only a character flaw in his leadership style, if it can be called that, but also his tendency to look upon the senior executive team as personal staff rather than an organization of specialized functions, each with its own agenda. Even when he took the ideas of others and made them better, Jobs failed to give credit; he always took credit. Predictably the turnover at the top of the organization was high.

For all that he did well, Jobs was inept at human relations. Nowhere was that ineptitude more evident than in his family.

Lisa Brennan-Jobs is the daughter of Steve Jobs and his on-and-off girlfriend Chris Ann Brennan. She was born in May 1978 just after Jobs and Woz formed Apple. Initially Jobs denied paternity, going so far as to file a sworn statement with the court that he was sterile and incapable of fathering a child. When Apple went public, making Jobs a multimillionaire, his daughter and former girl friend continued to live in poverty on welfare. Only because of court-ordered DNA tests was Jobs finally compelled to admit that he was Lisa’s father. The court not only ordered him to pay child support, he was ordered to repay $5,000 to the county for the welfare it had paid to Chris Ann Brennan.

Lisa was a teenager before she had any kind of a relationship with Jobs and only then when she moved in with him, his wife, and their children – Reed, Erin, and Eve. Lisa lived there for several years before she left for college, which Jobs financed. It’s odd that someone who was so hostile to his parents for abandoning him would do the same to his daughter. But that was Steve Jobs.

As many adopted children do, Jobs began to search for his biological parents. He found his mother in 1986 through the doctor who delivered him. His mother, Joanne Schieble Simpson, was living in Los Angeles and revealed that Jobs had a sister by his biological father, Abdulfattah "John" Jandali. He met his sister, Mona Simpson, and they hit it off at once. She was at his bedside when he died.

When Jobs was searching for his mother, he learned things about his father that convinced him he didn’t want to meet him. But Mona did. The man who abandoned her and her mother was managing a small café and coffee shop in Sacramento. Jandali asked about her brother, but she feigned ignorance, saying he had gone off somewhere and they would likely never hear from him again.

Her father told Mona about the “good old days” … "I wish you could've seen me when I was running a bigger restaurant. I used to run one of the best restaurants in Silicon Valley. Everybody used to come there, even Steve Jobs used to eat there. He was a great tipper.” Jandali didn’t know his son’s adopted name was Steve Jobs. Mona said nothing.

She later revealed the conversation to her brother. “Yeah, I was in that restaurant once or twice and I remember meeting the owner who was from Syria,” Jobs said, “it was most certainly him. And I shook his hand and he shook my hand. And that's all.”

Jobs was first diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003. Tests revealed that his was a slow growing type that had a good chance of being cured, but for certain, with surgery, his life could be prolonged many years. Enter the Reality Distortion Field. Instead of surgery, Jobs chose unorthodox diets, acupuncture, fasts, purges, even a psychic. He delayed surgery for nine costly months before scheduling it. The tumor was removed and his health rebounded for a while. But the 9-month delay in surgery had crossed the tipping point and it was apparent to his public that his weight loss and increasing gauntness revealed a very sick man. He began to set his affairs in order in Apple. A successor was named to run the company. And in his own way, he began to think of his family.

My story has now come full circle. Walter Isaacson consented to write Jobs’ story. When asked why the notoriously secretive Jobs would grant such a license after all these years to write of a life filled with so many shortcomings, Jobs said he wanted his kids to know who he was. “I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did,” he said.

When Isaacson interviewed Erin Jobs, just a teenager at the time, about her father she said, “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.” Having four children myself, two of them girls, it’s hard for me to believe Jobs’ children didn’t need his time and attention regardless of the importance of his work to the world. Mine did. But it’s really hard for me to believe that a man who is dying and truly wanted his children to know him would choose a biographer and a book to do it.

In his last interview with Jobs, Isaacson recalls sitting with him in his backyard garden. Jobs began talking about God. "Sometimes I believe in God,” he said,

… sometimes I don't. I think it's 50-50 maybe. But ever since I've had cancer, I've been thinking about it more. And I find myself believing a bit more. I kind of – maybe it's 'cause I want to believe in an afterlife. That when you die, it doesn't just all disappear. The wisdom you've accumulated. Somehow it lives on.

He stopped and thought. "Yeah, but sometimes I think it's just like an on-off switch. Click and you're gone."

Then he paused again. "And that's why I don't like putting on-off switches on Apple devices."

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...)