Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [59]
Two years later at the annual sales meeting, Jobs was extremely pleasant and courteous. (He skipped the 2001 sales meeting, which was held off-site.) He thanked all the sales reps for doing a great job and took questions for half an hour. He was genuinely very nice. Like other intimidators, Jobs can be immensely charming when he needs to be. Robert McNamara had a reputation for being cold and distant, but he could turn on a dazzling spotlight of charm when he wanted to. “Great intimidators can also be great ingratiators,” Kramer writes.
Jobs is famous for his reality distortion field—a ring of charisma so strong that it bends reality for anyone under its influence. Andy Hertzfeld encountered it soon after joining the Mac development team: “The reality distortion field was a confounding mélange of a charismatic rhetorical style, an indomitable will, and an eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand. If one line of argument failed to persuade, he would deftly switch to another. Sometimes, he would throw you off balance by suddenly adopting your position as his own, without acknowledging that he ever thought differently. Amazingly, the reality distortion field seemed to be effective even if you were acutely aware of it, although the effects would fade after Steve departed. We would often discuss potential techniques for grounding it, but after a while most of us gave up, accepting it as a force of nature.”
Alan Deutschman, a Jobs biographer, fell under Jobs’s spell at their first meeting. “He uses your first name very often. He looks directly in your eyes with that laser-like stare. He has these movie-star eyes that are very hypnotic. But what really gets you is the way he talks—there’s something about the rhythm of his speech and the incredible enthusiasm he conveys for whatever it is he’s talking about that is just infectious. At the end of my interview with him, I said to myself, ‘I have to write an article about this guy just to be around him more—it’s so much fun!’ When Steve wants to be charming and seductive, no one is more charming.”9
Working with Jobs: There’s Only One Steve
Thanks to his fearsome reputation, many staffers try to avoid Jobs. Several employees, past and present, gave essentially the same advice: keep your head down. “Like many people, I tried to avoid him as much as possible,” said one former employee. “You want to stay below his radar and avoid him getting mad at you.” Even executives try to stay out of Jobs’s way. David Sobotta, a former director of Apple’s federal sales, describes how he once went to the executive floor to pick up a vice president for a briefing. “He quickly suggested a route off the floor that didn’t go in front of Steve’s office,” Sobotta wrote on his website. “He explained the choice by saying it was safer.”10
In return, Jobs keeps a distance from rank-and-file employees. Aside from associating with other executives, he is fairly private at Apple’s campus. Kramer writes that remaining aloof instills a mixture of fear and paranoia that keeps employees on their toes. Staff are always working hard to please him, and it also allows him to reverse decisions without losing credibility.
But it’s not always easy to avoid Jobs. He has a habit of dropping in on different departments unannounced and asking people what they’re working on. Every now and then Jobs praises employees. He doesn’t do it too often, and he doesn’t go overboard. His approval is measured and thoughtful, which amplifies the effect because it is rare. “It really goes to your head because it’s so hard to get it out of him,” said one employee. “He’s very good at getting to people’s egos.”
Of course, the desire to avoid Jobs is not universal. There are plenty of employees at Apple only too eager to get his attention. Apple has its full share of aggressive, ambitious staffers keen to get noticed and promoted.
Jobs is often the center of workplace conversation. The subject of Steve comes up a lot. He gets credit