Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [40]
The answer is that Pixar has created a nurturing, fun place to work. In Hollywood, filmmakers spend a lot of time jockeying for position, stabbing collaborators in the back to gain advantage, and constantly worrying whether they are in or out. It’s hyper-competitive and insecure, and it burns people out. At Pixar, the process is all about collaboration, teamwork, and learning. There’s pressure, of course, especially when movies approach deadlines, but the workplace is generally nurturing and supportive. The opportunity to learn, to create, and, most of all, to work with other talented people is the reward. Plus the generous stock options, of course. At Pixar, the animators are getting rich and having fun, too. As the Latin inscription on the Pixar University crest says, Alienus Non Diutius, Alone No Longer.
As a result, Pixar has poached some of the best animation talent in Hollywood. Other top Pixar animators include Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo), Brad Bird (The Incredibles, Ratatouille), and Pete Docter (Monsters Inc.), who have all been aggressively headhunted by competitors. For many years Lasseter had a standing offer from Disney to jump ship, which he resisted because of the unique creative work environment at Pixar. None of the other studios could compete, not even Disney. As Jobs boasted: “Pixar’s got by far and away the best computer graphics talent in the entire world, and it now has the best animation and artistic talent in the whole world to do these kinds of film. There’s really no one else in the world who could do this stuff. It’s really phenomenal. We’re probably close to ten years ahead of anybody else.”7
The Original Mac Team
Jobs’s first A team—Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, Burrell Smith, et al.—was assembled in 1980 to build the original Mac and they worked under a pirate flag at Apple HQ.
Jobs did a lot of the recruiting himself. He pulled in talent from all over Apple and Silicon Valley, without regard to job title or experience. If he judged someone fit to contribute, he did everything he could to recruit them. Bruce Horn, for example, a programmer who created the Mac’s Finder—the heart of the Mac’s operating system—didn’t initially want to work at Apple, until he was seduced by Jobs. Horn had just taken a job with another company, VTI, which promised him a $15,000 signing bonus, a large sum of money at the time. Then Jobs called.
Horn told Jobs he’d accepted a position at VTI, but Jobs persuaded him to take a tour of the Mac unit. “Steve switched on the Reality Distortion Field full-force,” recalled Horn. “On Monday I called Doug Fairbairn at VTI and told him I had changed my mind.”8
It was an example of Jobs’s incredible charm. Plus, it illustrates his dedication to finding the best. Jobs’s instinct was right: Horn turned out to be one of the key contributors to the Mac project.
Once he’d assembled his team, Jobs gave them the freedom to be creative and shielded them from the growing bureaucracy at Apple, which tried several times to shut down the Mac project because they viewed it as an unimportant distraction from the Apple II, Apple’s core product at the time. “The people who are doing the work are the moving force behind the Macintosh. My job is to create a space for them, to clear out the rest of the organization and keep it at bay,”9 Jobs wrote in a 1984 essay that was printed in the inaugural issue of Macworld magazine. Hertzfeld put it more bluntly: “The most important thing Steve did was erect a giant shit-deflecting umbrella that protected the project from the evil suits across the street.”10
As well as recruiting the best talent, Jobs is quick to get rid of those who don’t measure up. Hiring only insanely great employees and firing