Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [57]
Sculley described how Jobs would celebrate the team’s accomplishments with “unusual flair.” He uncorked bottles of champagne to mark milestones, and frequently treated the team to educational trips to museums or exhibits. He’d spring for lavish, bacchanalian “retreats” at expensive resorts. To celebrate Christmas 1983, Jobs threw a black-tie party in the main ball-room of San Francisco’s posh St. Francis Hotel. The team waltzed the night away to the strains of Strauss played by the San Francisco Symphony. He insisted the team sign the inside of the Mac’s case, the way that artists sign their work. When the Mac was finally finished, Jobs presented each member with his or her own machine bearing a personalized plaque. In recent years, he’s expanded his largesse to the entire company, or at least to all the full-time staff. He’s given iPod Shuffles to all Apple employees and, in 2007, all of Apple’s 21,600 full-time employees got a complimentary iPhone.
Yet Jobs can also be extremely cutting and cruel. There are numerous accounts of Jobs’s calling employees’ work “a piece of shit” and throwing it at them in a rage. “I was amazed at his behavior even when the criticism was correct,” said Sculley.4 “He was constantly forcing people to raise their expectations of what they could do,” Sculley told me. “People were producing work that they never thought they were capable of, largely because Steve would shift between being highly charismatic and motivating. He’d get them excited, to feel like they are part of something insanely great. But on the other hand, he would be almost merciless in terms of rejecting their work until he felt it had reached the level of perfection that was good enough.”5
One of the Great Intimidators
Jobs is one of the “great intimidators,” a category of fearsome business leader characterized by Roderick Kramer, a social psychologist at Stanford. According to Kramer, great intimidators inspire people through fear and intimidation, but aren’t mere bullies. They’re more like stern father figures, who inspire people through fear as well as through a desire to please. Other examples include Miramax’s Harvey Weinstein, Hewlett-Packard’s Carly Fiorina, and Robert McNamara, the U.S. secretary of defense during the Vietnam War. Great intimidators tend to be clustered in industries with high risks and high rewards: Hollywood, technology, finance, and politics.
Most management advice for the last twenty-five years has focused on issues like empathy and compassion. Advice books encourage building teamwork through kindness and understanding. There’s been very little written about scaring the pants off employees to improve results. But as Richard Nixon said, “People react to fear, not love—they don’t teach that in Sunday School, but it’s true.”
Like other great intimidators, Jobs is forceful. He pushes and cajoles, often quite hard. He can be brutal and ruthless. He’s willing to use “hard power”—to put the fear of God into people—to get things done. This kind of leadership is most effective in crisis situations, like company turnarounds, when someone needs to take the reins and make sweeping changes. But as Jobs has shown, it’s very effective in getting products to market—quickly. Kramer found that many business leaders aspire to such power. Yes, they treat employees with fairness and compassion, and they may be well liked, but every now and again they’d love to be able to put boot to ass to get things done.
Jobs often puts boot to ass and has often stepped over the line, especially when he was younger. Larry Tessler, Apple’s former chief scientist, said Jobs inspired equal measures of fear and respect. When Jobs left Apple in 1985, people in the company had very mixed feelings about it. “Everybody had been terrorized by Steve Jobs at some point or another and so there was a certain relief that the terrorist would be gone,” Tessler said. “On the other hand,