Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [58]
Some of it is pure show. Jobs has chewed out underlings in public for the effect it has on the rest of the organization. General George S. Patton used to practice his “general’s face” in the mirror. Reggie Lewis, an entrepreneur, also admitted to perfecting a scowl in the mirror for use in hardball negotiations. Contrived anger is common among politicians, and has been called “porcupine anger,” Kramer reports.
Jobs possesses a keen political intelligence, what Kramer calls “a distinctive and powerful form of leader intelligence.” He’s a good judge of character. He assesses people, coolly and clinically, as instruments of action, ways of getting things done.
Kramer described a job interview conducted by Mike Ovitz, the fearsome Hollywood agent who built the Creative Artists Agency into a powerhouse. Ovitz sat the interviewee in the blinding afternoon sunlight and kept calling in his secretary to give her instructions. Ovitz had set up the constant interruptions beforehand to test the interviewee. He wanted to keep them on their toes and see how they handled distractions. Jobs does the same thing: “Many times in an interview I will purposely upset someone: I’ll criticize their prior work. I’ll do my homework, find out what they worked on, and say, ‘God, that really turned out to be a bomb. That really turned out to be a bozo product. Why did you work on that? . . .’ I want to see what people are like under pressure. I want to see if they just fold or if they have firm conviction, belief, and pride in what they did.”7
A senior HR executive from Sun once described for Upside magazine an interview with Jobs. She’d already endured more than ten weeks of interviews with senior Apple executives before reaching Jobs. Immediately, Jobs put her on the spot: “He told me my background wasn’t suitable for the position. Sun is a good place, he said, but ‘Sun is no Apple.’ He said he would have eliminated me as a candidate from the start.”
Jobs asked the woman if she had any questions, so she queried him about corporate strategy. Jobs dismissed the question: “We’re only disclosing our strategy on a ‘need-to-know’ basis,” he told her. So she asked him why he wanted an HR executive. Big mistake. Jobs replied, “I’ve never met one of you who didn’t suck. I’ve never known an HR person who had anything but a mediocre mentality.” Then he took a telephone call, and the woman left a wreck.8 If she had stuck up for herself, she would have fared much better.
Take, for example, an Apple saleswoman who received a public tongue-lashing from Jobs at one of the company’s annual sales meetings. Every year, several hundred of Apple’s sales reps gather for a few days, typically at Apple’s Cupertino HQ. In 2000, about 180 reps were sitting in Apple’s Town Hall auditorium waiting for a pep talk from their leader. Apple had just announced its first loss in three years. Immediately, Jobs threatened to fire the entire sales team. Everyone. He repeated the threat at least four times during the hour-long talk. He also singled out the female sales executive, who dealt with Pixar—his other company at the time—and in front of everyone he laid into her: “You are not doing a good job,” he bellowed. Over at Pixar, he had just signed a $2 million sales order with Hewlett-Packard, one of Apple’s rivals, he said. The Apple rep had been competing for the contract, but lost out. “He called this woman out in front of everyone,” Eigerman recalled. But the saleswoman stood up for herself. She started yelling back. “I was very impressed with her,” Eigerman said. “She was furious. She defended herself but he would not hear her out. He told her to sit down. The saleswoman is still at Apple, and she is doing very well. . . . It’s the asshole/hero rollercoaster.”
Perhaps most significantly, the public humiliation of the unfortunate rep put the fear of God into all the other