Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [60]
Like the billionaire Texan Ross Perot, who banned beards among his employees, Jobs has some idiosyncrasies. One former manager who had regular meetings in Jobs’s office kept a pair of canvas sneakers under his desk. Whenever he was called for a meeting with Jobs, he’d take off his leather shoes and put on the sneakers. “Steve is a militant vegan,” the source explained.
Inside the company, Jobs is known simply as “Steve” or “S.J.” Anyone else whose name is Steve is known by their first and last names. At Apple, there is only one Steve.
There are also F.O.S.—Friends of Steve—persons of importance who are to be treated with respect and sometimes caution: you never know what might get reported. Staffers warn each other about F.O.S.s to be careful around. Friends of Steve are not necessarily in Apple’s upper management tier—sometimes they are fellow programmers or engineers who have a connection.
Under Jobs, Apple is a very flat organization. There are few levels of management. Jobs has an exceptionally wide-ranging knowledge of the organization—who does what and where. Though he has a small executive management team—just ten officers—he knows hundreds of the key programmers, designers, and engineers in the organization.
Jobs is quite meritocratic: he’s not concerned with formal job titles or hierarchy. If he wants something done, he generally knows whom to go to and he contacts them directly, not through their manager. He’s the boss, of course, and can do things like that, but it shows his disdain for hierarchies and formalities. He’ll just pick up the phone and call.
Critics have compared Jobs to a sociopath without empathy or compassion. Staff are inhuman objects, mere tools to get things done. To explain why employees and coworkers put up with him, critics invoke the Stockholm syndrome. His employees are captives who have fallen in love with their captor. “Those who know anything much about his management style know he works by winnowing out the chaff—defined as those both not smart enough and not psychologically strong enough to bear repeated demands to produce something impossible (such as a music player where you can access any piece of music within three clicks) and then be told that their solution is ‘shit.’ And then hear it suggested back to them a few days later,” wrote Charles Arthur in The Register. “That’s not how most people like to work, or be treated. So in truth, Steve Jobs isn’t an icon to any managers, apart from the sociopathic ones.”
As far as great sociopathic managers go, Jobs is relatively mild, at least now that he’s entered middle age. Other intimidators, like moviemaker Harvey Weinstein, are much more abrasive. Larry Summers, the former dean of Harvard, who forced through a series of reforms at the university, conducted infamous “get to know you sessions” with faculty and staff that started with confrontation, skepticism, and hard questioning, and went downhill from there. Jobs is more like a demanding, hard-to-please father. It’s not just fear and intimidation. Underlings work hard to get his attention and his approval. A former Pixar employee told Kramer that he dreaded letting Jobs down, the same way he dreaded disappointing his father.
Some people who work for Jobs burn out, but in hindsight they often relish the experience. During his research, Kramer said he was surprised that people who worked with great intimidators often found the experience “profoundly educational, even transformational.” Jobs works people hard and heaps on the stress, but they produce great work. “Did I enjoy working with Steve Jobs? I did,” Cordell Ratzlaff, the Mac OS X designer, told me. “It was probably the best work I did. It was exhilarating. It was exciting. Sometimes it was difficult, but he has the ability to pull the best out of people. I learned a tremendous amount from him. There were high points and there were low points