Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [53]
And like any true believer, he’s passionate about his work. Yes, his commitment produces a lot of screaming and shouting. Jobs is no pussycat when dealing with underlings. He knows what he wants, and he’ll throw a fit to get it. Oddly, many of his collaborators like getting yelled at. Or at least, they like the effect it has on their work. They appreciate his passion. He pushes them to greatness and, though they might burn out, they learn a lot along the way. Jobs’s secret: it’s OK to be an asshole, as long as you’re passionate about it.
Making the world a better place has been Jobs’s mantra from the get-go. In 1983, Apple was six years old and growing explosively. It was transforming from a classic Silicon Valley startup run by young hippies into a big corporation with blue-chip customers. It needed a seasoned businessman in charge.
Jobs had spent months trying to seduce John Sculley to run the company. But Sculley wasn’t convinced it was wise to step down as head of a big established firm like PepsiCo for a risky, hippie startup like Apple. Still, he was tempted. Personal computers were the future. The pair met numerous times in Silicon Valley and New York. Finally, one evening, looking out over Central Park from the balcony of Jobs’s luxury apartment at the San Remo building, Jobs turned to the older man and brazenly challenged him: “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to change the world?”
It’s perhaps the most famous dare in modern business history: it’s an insult, a compliment, and a soul-searching, philosophical challenge rolled into one question. Of course, the question cut Sculley to the core. It unsettled him profoundly, and he fretted about it for days. In the end, he couldn’t resist the gauntlet Jobs had thrown down. “If I didn’t accept, I’d have spent the rest of my life wondering if I made the wrong decision,” Sculley told me.
Ninety Hours a Week and Loving It
The team that developed the first Mac was a ragtag bunch of ex-academics and technicians working on an under-the-radar skunkworks affair that had little chance of seeing the light of day—until Jobs took it over. Right from the start, Jobs convinced the team that they were creating something revolutionary. This wasn’t just a cool computer or a challenging engineering problem. The Mac’s easy-to-use graphical interface was going to revolutionize computing. For the first time, computers would be accessible to the nontechnical public.
The Mac team members worked like slaves for three years, and though Jobs screamed at them, he kept up morale by instilling in them the conviction that they had a higher calling. The work they were doing was nothing less than God’s work. “The goal was never to beat the competition, or to make a lot of money; it was to do the greatest thing possible, or even a little greater,” wrote Andy Hertzfeld, one of the lead programmers.
Jobs told the Mac team they were artists, fusing technology with culture. He convinced them that they were in a unique position to change the face of computing, and privileged to be designing such a groundbreaking product. “For a very special moment, all of us have come together to make this new product,” Jobs wrote in an essay for the premier issue of Macworld magazine in 1984. “We feel this may be the best thing we’ll ever do with our lives.”
In retrospect, this turned out to be true. The Mac was a revolutionary breakthrough in computing. But this was perhaps an article of faith. The Mac was just one of dozens of competing computers being developed at the time. There was no guarantee it would be better, or even that it would get released to market. The team took Jobs’s conviction on faith. They joked that their belief in Jobs’s