This post is about the book
“Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson.
This is a book about the roller-coaster life and searingly
intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for
perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal
computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital
publishing.
In August 2011, right before he stepped down as CEO, the
enterprise he started in his parents’ garage became the world’s most valuable
company. He was not a model boss or human being tidily packaged for emulation.
Driven by demons, he could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his
personality and passions and products were all interrelated, just as Apple’s
hardware and software tended to be. His tale is thus both instructive and
cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and
values.
First story is:
Abandoned.
Chosen. Special.
Steve Jobs knew from an early age that he was adopted.
“My parents were very open with me about that,” he recalled. He had a vivid
memory of sitting on the lawn of his house, when he was about six years old,
telling the girl who lived across the street. “So does that mean your real
parents didn’t want you?” the girl asked. Lightning bolts went off in Jobs’
head. He ran into the house, crying. And his parents said, ‘No, you have to
understand.’ They were very serious and looked him straight in the eye. They
said, ‘We specifically picked you out.’
Both of his parents said that and repeated it slowly for him.
And they put an emphasis on every word in that sentence.
Abandoned. Chosen. Special. Those concepts became part of
who Jobs was and how he regarded himself.
…
If you can’t keep ‘em interested, it is your
fault.
In his elementary school, Jobs countered his boredom by
playing pranks. He had a good friend named Rick Ferrentino, and they’d get into
all sorts of trouble. Like they made little posters announcing ‘Bring Your Pet
to School Day.’ It was crazy, with dogs chasing cats all over, and the 25 teachers
were beside themselves. Another time they convinced some kids to tell them the
combination numbers for their bike locks. Then they went outside and switched
all of the locks, and nobody could get their bikes. It took them until late
that night to straighten things out. When he was in third grade, the pranks
became a bit more dangerous. One time they set off an explosive under the chair
of their teacher. They gave her a nervous twitch. Not surprisingly, he was sent
home two or three times before he finished third grade. By then, however, his
father had begun to treat him as special, and in his calm but firm manner he
made it clear that he expected the school to do the same. “Look, it’s not his
fault,” Paul Jobs told the teachers. “If you can’t keep him interested, it’s
your fault.”
…
Secrets of the Little Blue Box
A blue box was a
tool to make long distance calls for free by replicating the tones that
routed signals on the AT&T network.
At first the Blue Box was used for fun and pranks. But
then Jobs came up with the idea that the Blue Box could be more than merely a
hobby; they could build and sell them. It was an important milestone in Jobs
and Woz’s life, one that would establish a pattern in their partnerships. “I
got together the rest of the components, like the casing and power supply and
keypads, and figured out how we could price it,” Jobs said, foreshadowing roles
he would play when they founded Apple. The finished product was about the size
of two decks of playing cards. The parts cost about $40, and Jobs decided they
should sell it for $150.
The partnership paved the way for what would be a bigger
adventure together. They had created a device with a little circuit board that
could control billions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure.
The Blue Box adventure established a template for a partnership
that would soon be born.
…
Reed College
Jobs quickly became bored with college right on. Jobs
refused to go to the classes he was assigned and instead went to the ones he
wanted, such as a dance class where he could enjoy both the creativity and the
chance to meet girls.
Jobs also began to feel guilty, he later said, about
spending so much of his parents’ money on an education that did not seem
worthwhile. “I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how
college was going to help me figure it out,” Jobs recounted.
He didn’t actually want to leave Reed; he just wanted to
quit paying tuition and taking classes that didn’t interest him. The college
dean allowed him to do that, provided that he would audit the classes. Among
those classes was a calligraphy class that appealed to him after he saw posters
on campus that were beautifully drawn where Jobs learned about serif and sans
serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter
combinations, and about what makes great typography great.
…
Apple Marketing Philosophy
Now, Mike
Markkula was the angel investor of Apple Computers. Markkula taught Jobs things
such as that you should never start a company with the goal of getting
rich. Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company
that will last.”
Markkula wrote his principles in a one-page paper titled
“The Apple Marketing Philosophy” that stressed three points. The first was
empathy, an intimate connection with the feelings of the customer: “We will
truly understand their needs better than any other company.”
The second was focus: “In order to do a good job of those
things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant
opportunities.”
The third and equally important principle, awkwardly
named, was impute. It emphasized that people form an opinion about a company or
product based on the signals that it conveys. “People DO judge a book by its
cover,” he wrote. “We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most
useful software etc.; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be
perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner,
we will impute the desired qualities.”
…
Good artists copy, great artists steal!
This is the story of the Apple’s raid on Xerox PARC that
is sometimes described as one of the biggest heists in the chronicles of
industry.
In December 1979, Jobs had convinced Xerox venture
capital division to show him and his chosen colleagues what Xerox was working
on in terms of technology, research and development.
At first, Jobs was only demonstrated superficial details
and publicly known technologies like word processors but then Jobs had his way
through the investors at Xerox who bought what Jobs told them.
The project managers heading the teams and engineering
were angry and infuriated but they had no options ahead of orders decreed to
them by their bosses.
Jobs and his team were shown everything. Apple folks were
astonished. At the demo, Xerox finally showed them what was truly under the
hood. Jobs bounced around and waved his arms excitedly.
He was the exclamation point for every step showed and he
kept asking questions. Jobs kept saying that he couldn’t believe that Xerox had
not commercialized the technology. “You’re sitting on a gold mine,” he shouted.
“I can’t believe Xerox is not taking advantage of this.”
The Smalltalk demonstration showed the graphical
interface that was made possible by a bitmapped screen. “It was like a veil
being lifted from my eyes,” Jobs recalled. “I could see what the future of
computing was destined to be.”
And recalling this incident, he once said, “Picasso had a
saying— ‘good artists copy, great artists steal’—and we have always been
shameless about stealing great ideas.”
…
The Reality Distortion Field
According to the Macintosh team, Steve had a reality
distortion field. In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone
of practically anything. It wears off when he’s not around, but it makes it hard
to have realistic schedules. It was dangerous to get caught in Steve’s
distortion field, but it was what led him to actually be able to change
reality.
The reality distortion field was a confounding mélange of
a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and eagerness to bend any fact
to fit the purpose at hand.
There was little that could shield you from the force.
Amazingly,
the reality distortion field seemed to be effective even if you were acutely
aware of it.
He would assert something—be it a fact about world
history or a recounting of who suggested an idea at a meeting —without even
considering the truth. It came from willfully defying reality, not only to
others but to himself. It allowed him to con people into believing his vision,
because he has personally embraced and internalized it. A lot of people distort
reality, of course. When Jobs did so, it was often a tactic for accomplishing
something.
…
Birth of rounded corner rectangles in computer
graphics
Jobs obsessed with equal intensity about the look of what
would appear on the screen.
He wanted his team to make the rectangles in Lisa and Mac
to have rounded corners but the team was reluctant due to the implementation
complexities.
To argue this Jobs said, “Rectangles with rounded corners
are everywhere!” jumping up and getting more intense. “Just look around this
room!” He pointed out the whiteboard and the tabletop and other objects that
were rectangular with rounded corners. “And look outside, there’s even more,
practically everywhere you look!” He dragged the engineer out for a walk,
pointing out car windows and billboards and street signs. “Within three blocks,
we found seventeen examples,” said Jobs. “I started pointing them out
everywhere until he was completely convinced.”
The dialogue boxes and windows on the Lisa and the Mac,
and almost every other subsequent computer, ended up being rendered with
rounded corners.
…
Obsession with design and detail
From his father Jobs had learned that a hallmark of
passionate craftsmanship is making sure that even the aspects that will remain
hidden are done beautifully. Jobs argued for clean looking circuit boards
saying that “it should be as beautiful as possible, even if it’s inside the
box. A great carpenter isn’t going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet,
even though nobody’s going to see it.”
From Mike Markkula he had learned the importance of
packaging and presentation. People do judge a book by its cover, so for the box
of the Macintosh, Jobs chose a full-color design and kept trying to make it
look better. He got the guys to redo it fifty times. It was going to be thrown
in the trash as soon as the consumer opened it, but he was obsessed by how it
looked. To Rossmann, this showed a lack of balance; money was being spent on
expensive packaging while they were trying to save money on the memory chips.
But for Jobs, each detail was essential to making the Macintosh amazing.
…
Mac Celebration
The retreat of September 1982. Here, Jobs’ speech
comprised of multiple parts.
The first was “Don’t
compromise.” It was an injunction that would, over time, be both helpful
and harmful. Most technology teams made trade-offs. The Mac, on the other hand,
would end up being as “insanely great” as Jobs and his acolytes could possibly
make it—but it would not ship for another sixteen months, way behind schedule.
After mentioning a scheduled completion date, he told them, “It would be better
to miss than to turn out the wrong thing.”
Another chart contained a koōan-like phrase that was his
favorite maxim: “The journey is the
reward.” The Mac team, he liked to emphasize, was a special corps with an
exalted mission. Someday they would all look back on their journey together
and, forgetting or laughing off the painful moments, would regard it as a
magical high point in their lives. At the end of the presentation someone asked
whether he thought they should do some market research to see what customers
wanted. “No,” he replied, “because customers don’t know what they want until
we’ve shown them.”
It had been a grueling ride for Mac team, and many egos
had been bruised by Jobs’s obnoxious and rough management style. But neither
Raskin nor Wozniak nor Sculley nor anyone else at the company could have pulled
off the creation of the Macintosh. Nor would it likely have emerged from focus
groups and committees.
On the day he unveiled the Macintosh, a reporter from
Popular Science asked Jobs what type of market research he had done. Jobs
responded by scoffing, “Did Alexander
Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?”
…
Sculley and Jobs Face-off
In 1983, Jobs had
got John Sculley (the then CEO of Pepsi) to take the job at Apple using his
famous line “You want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you
want to come with me and change the world?”.
But honeymoon
period of the two was over by the second half of 1984 when Macintosh’s sales
began to taper off because of several technical issues.
There were many
reasons for the rift between Jobs and Sculley in the spring of 1985. For Jobs,
the problem was that Sculley never became a product person. He didn’t make the
effort, or show the capacity, to understand the fine points of what they were
making.
For Sculley, the
problem was that Jobs, when he was no longer in courtship or manipulative mode,
was frequently obnoxious, rude, selfish, and nasty to other people. He found
Jobs’s boorish behavior as despicable as Jobs found Sculley’s lack of passion
for product details.
In May 1985, Sculley decided to reorganize Apple, and
proposed a plan to the board that would remove Jobs from the Macintosh group
and put him in charge of "New Product Development". This move would
effectively render Jobs powerless within Apple. In response, Jobs then
developed a plan to get rid of Sculley and take over Apple. However, Jobs was
confronted after the plan was leaked, and he said that he would leave Apple.
The Board declined his resignation and asked him to reconsider. Sculley also
told Jobs that he had all of the votes needed to go ahead with the
reorganization. A few months later, on September 17, 1985, Jobs submitted a
letter of resignation to the Apple Board. Five additional senior Apple
employees also resigned and joined Jobs in his new venture, NeXT.
…
iCEO
In 1996, Apple announced that it would buy NeXT for
$427 million. The deal brought Jobs back to the company he had
cofounded. In March 1998, to concentrate Apple's efforts on returning to
profitability, Jobs terminated a number of projects, such as Newton and
Cyberdog.
In the coming months, many employees developed a fear of encountering Jobs
while riding in the elevator, "afraid that they might not have a job when
the doors opened. The reality was that Jobs's summary executions were rare, but
a handful of victims was enough to terrorize a whole company."
…
iMac
The first great design triumph to come from the Jobs-Ive (the
chief design officer of Apple, joined Apple in 1992) collaboration was the
iMac. Jobs had certain specifications. It should be an all-in-one product, with
keyboard and monitor and computer ready to use right out of the box. It should
have a distinctive design that made a brand statement. And it should sell for
$1,200 or so. (Apple had no computer selling for less than $2,000 at the time.)
Design Changes:
It was the first computer to not have a floppy disk
drive. Jobs reasoned it by quoting the hockey star Wayne Gretzky’s maxim,
“Skate where the puck’s going, not where it’s been.”
The plastic casing that Ive and Coster proposed was
sea-green blue and it was translucent so that you could see through to the
inside of the machine.
Even the simplicity of the plastic shell itself involved
great complexity. The cost of each case was more than $60 per unit, three times
that of a regular computer case. Other companies would probably have demanded
presentations and studies to show whether the translucent case would increase
sales enough to justify the extra cost. Jobs asked for no such analysis.
…
The iPhone Design
On many of his major projects, such as the first Toy
Story and the Apple store, Jobs pressed “pause” as they neared completion and
decided to make major revisions. That happened with the design of the iPhone as
well.
The problem was that the iPhone should have been all
about the display, but in their current design the case competed with the
display instead of getting out of the way. “Guys, you’ve killed yourselves over
this design for the last nine months, but we’re going to change it,” Jobs told
Ive’s team. “We’re all going to have to work nights and weekends, and if you
want we can hand out some guns so you can kill us now.” Instead of balking, the
team agreed. “It was one of my proudest moments at Apple,” Jobs recalled. The
new design ended up with just a thin stainless steel bezel that allowed the
gorilla glass display to go right to the edge. Every part of the device seemed
to defer to the screen. The new look was austere, yet also friendly. You could
fondle it. It meant they had to redo the circuit boards, antenna, and processor
placement inside, but Jobs ordered the change. “Other companies may have
shipped,” said Fadell, “but we pressed the reset button and started over.”
Thoughts on Death
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big
choices in life.
Almost everything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure, these things just
fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to
lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet, death is the
destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it, and that is how it should be, because death is very likely
the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.
...
In his last meetings with Isaacson, Jobs shifted the conversation to his thoughts regarding religion and death.
"I remember sitting in the back garden on a sunny day [on a day when] he was feeling bad, and he talked about
whether or not he believed in an afterlife," Isaacson tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "He said, 'Sometimes I'm
50-50 on whether there's a God. It's the great mystery we never quite know. But I like to believe there's an
afterlife. I like to believe the accumulated wisdom doesn't just disappear when you die, but somehow it
endures."
Jobs paused for a second, remembers Isaacson.
"And then he says, 'But maybe it's just like an on/off switch and click — and you're gone.' And then he paused
for another second and he smiled and said, 'Maybe that's why I didn't like putting on/off switches on Apple
devices.'"
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