Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [12]
He sometimes wondered if he was doing the right thing. He was already CEO of Pixar, which was enjoying the success of Toy Story. He knew that returning to Apple would put pressure on Pixar, his family, and his reputation. “I wouldn’t be honest if some days I didn’t question whether I made the right decision in getting involved,” he told Time.23 “But I believe life is an intelligent thing—that things aren’t random.”
Jobs was mostly worried about failing. Apple was in dire trouble, and he might not be able to save it. He’d already earned a place in the history books; now he didn’t want to wreck it. In the 1998 interview with Fortune, Jobs said that he looked to his hero Bob Dylan for inspiration. One of the things that Jobs admired about Dylan was his refusal to stand still. Many successful artists at some point in their careers atrophy: they keep doing what made them successful in the first place, but they don’t evolve. “If they keep on risking failure, they’re still artists,” Jobs said. “Dylan and Picasso were always risking failure.”
Getting “Steved”
Even though there are no published reports of mass layoffs involving thousands of staff after Jobs took the helm, there were, in fact, mass layoffs. Most, if not all, were performed by the product managers, who laid off staff after projects were killed. But it was very quietly kept out of the papers.
There are stories—likely apocryphal—of Jobs cornering luckless employees in elevators and quizzing them on their role in the company. If their answers weren’t satisfactory, they’d be fired on the spot. The practice became known as getting “steved.” The term is now part of tech jargon for any project that gets unceremoniously terminated: “My online knitting pattern generator got steved.”
Jim Oliver is doubtful that any employees were personally “steved” in elevators. Jobs may have fired someone on the spot, but it wasn’t in Oliver’s presence—and he accompanied Jobs almost everywhere for three months as his personal assistant. If Jobs did fire anyone, Oliver doubts he did it more than once. “But the stories certainly got around and put people on their toes,” Oliver said. “These stories get repeated, but I never found the person he did it to.”24
Based on what he’d heard, Oliver expected Jobs to be an unpredictable, bad-tempered basket case, and was pleasantly surprised to find him quite calm. Jobs’s outbursts are overplayed, Oliver said. He did witness a few temper flare-ups but they were “very rare” and often premeditated. “The public dressing-downs were clearly calculated,” Oliver said.
Jobs may have killed the Newton, but he kept most of the Newton team, whom he had judged to be good engineers. He needed them to build one of the machines in his simplified product matrix: the consumer portable, later named the iBook. While doing his product survey, Jobs had also been conducting a people survey. The company’s assets weren’t just products; they were the employees as well. And there were some gems. “I found ten months ago the best industrial design team I’ve ever seen in my life,” Jobs would later say, referring to Jonathan Ive and his team of designers. Ive was already working for Apple—he’d been there for several years and had risen to head the design group.
Jobs paid careful attention to find the talent on the product teams, even if they weren’t the ones running the show. Peter Hoddie said that after the QuickTime presentation, in which he’d talked a lot about the software, Jobs asked him his name. “I didn’t know if that was good or bad,” Hoddie recalled. “But he remembered my name.” Later, Hoddie became QuickTime’s senior architect.
Jobs’s plan was simple: cut back so that the core A team—his cadre of ex-NeXT execs, and the company’s best programmers, engineers, designers, and marketers—could again develop innovative products, and keep improving and updating them. “If we could make four great product platforms that’s all we need,” Jobs explained in a 1998 interview.