Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [38]
Jobs is the kind of person who wants the best—the best car, the best private jet, the best pen, and the best employees. “He does tend to polarize things,” Jim Oliver told me. “People are ge niuses, or bozos. There was a Pilot pen that was his favorite. All the others are ‘crap.’” When working on the Mac, everyone not on the Mac team—even inside Apple—were “bozos.” “There was a lot of elitism at the company,” said Daniel Kottke, a close friend of Jobs’s since childhood who traveled with him around India. “Steve definitely cultivated this idea that everyone else in the in dustry were bozos.”2
Jobs’s strategy is to hire the smartest programmers, engineers, and designers available. He works hard to maintain their allegiance with stock options, and fosters the identity of small working groups. “I always considered part of my job was to keep the quality level of people in the organizations I work with very high,” said Jobs. “That’s what I consider one of the few things I actually can contribute individually to—to really try to instill in the organization the goal of only having ‘A’ players. In everything I’ve done it really pays to go after the best people in the world.”3
Jobs is an elitist who believes that a small A team is far more effective than armies of engineers and designers. He has always sought out the highest quality in people, products, and advertising. Unlike a lot of companies that recruit more and more staff as they get bigger, Jobs has kept the core of Apple relatively small, especially the key A team of select designers, programmers, and executives. Many of Jobs’s A team have worked at Apple, and for Jobs, for years. When he returned to Apple, most of the company’s top management were executives he brought with him from NeXT. It’s not easy working for Jobs, but those who can weather it tend to be loyal.
His first partner, and perhaps the most important, was his high school friend Steve Wozniak. Wozniak was the nerdy hardware genius who made his own PC because he couldn’t afford to buy one. It was Jobs who thought of making and selling Wozniak’s designs, and arranged for them to be assembled by their teenage friends in a garage. He also arranged for them to be sold at a local hobbyist electronics store. Jobs was soon recruiting outside talent to grow the company and develop its products. Since then, Jobs has followed the same modus operandi—recruit and retain the best, from the original Mac team to the storytellers at Pixar.
Pixar: Art Is a Team Sport
Jobs’s dedication to building an A team is best illustrated by Pixar, the animation studio he sold to Disney in 2006 for $7.4 billion. In 1995, Pixar released Toy Story, the first feature-length computer-animated movie, which went on to become the highest grossing film of the year and won an Oscar. Every year since 1995, Pixar has released one hit after another—A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo. The movies have earned $3.3 billion and won a clutch of Oscars and Golden Globes. It’s a remarkable record, unrivaled by any other studio in Hollywood. Even more remarkable, it was achieved by flipping Hollywood’s traditional working method on its head.
Pixar is headquartered in several smoked-glass-and-steel buildings on a leafy campus in Emeryville, a former port town across the bay from San Francisco. The campus has a relaxed, collegial atmosphere. It boasts all the perks of a high-tech, twenty-first-century workplace: swimming pools, movie theaters, and a cafeteria with a wood-burning stove. Everywhere there is whimsy: full-size statues of animated characters, doorways disguised as swinging bookshelves, a reception desk that sells toys. Instead of cubicles, the company’s animators work in their own private huts, literally garden huts assembled in a row,