Letters to Steve_ Inside the E-Mail Inbox of Apple's Steve Jobs - Mark Milian [31]
Steve’s reliance on his own taste and instincts stuck with him until the end, although he did slowly add more people to his trusted inner circle. He annually appointed a tight knit group of executives, managers and standout engineers as part of the Top 100, who would get together at offsite locations, and discuss products and ideas. The Top 100 are among the first people to see new products outside of top execs and the teams that built them.
After Fortune reported on the existence of this secret club, much to the disdain of Apple employees left out of the field trips, Steve acknowledged the Top 100 in an e-mail to a woman who contacted him to report how her albino daughter was using the iPad to read. (The condition affected her eyesight, and the iPad allows users to adjust the size of onscreen text.) Steve asked for a high-resolution photo of the woman’s daughter, and wrote: “Thanks for sharing your experience with me. Do you mind if I read your email to a group of our top 100 leaders at Apple?" The mother of Holly Bligh shared her story with the Australian Herald Sun, and said, “I never thought we would hear back.”
In an interview at a conference, Steve Jobs tried to dispel the prevalent belief that Apple was run like a dictatorship. “We’re organized like a startup. We’re the biggest startup on the planet. And we all meet for three hours once a week, and we talk about everything we’re doing, the whole business. And there’s tremendous teamwork at the top of the company, which filters down to tremendous teamwork through the company. And teamwork is dependent on trusting the other folks to come through with their part without watching them all the time, but trusting that they’re going to come through with their parts. And that’s what we do really well. And we’re great at figuring out how to divide things up into these great teams that we have, and all work on the same thing, touch bases frequently, and bring it all together into a product. We do that really well. And so what I do all day is meet with teams of people, and work on ideas and solve problems to make new products, to make new marketing programs, whatever it is.” When the interviewer jokingly asked whether Steve wins every argument, he said, “If you want to hire great people and have them stay working for you, you have to let them make a lot of decisions, and you have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win, otherwise good people don’t stay.”
An Apple employee in 2001 who goes by the name Mike Evangelist had a good idea on November 30 of that year. Early that morning, Mike was still reeling from the news that George Harrison of the Beatles had died. He knew he wasn’t grieving alone at Apple; many people who worked there were Beatles fans and had been affected by the loss. Mike fired off a message to Steve Jobs suggesting that Apple do some sort of tribute to George on its homepage, but he did not hear back. Then, hours later, Mike learned that Apple’s Web team was assigned to work overtime as a result of his suggestion. Steve liked Mike’s idea and debated on his favorite pictures of George to be displayed on Apple’s website. For the first time, Apple would forgo its splash page of product promotions in favor of a tasteful tribute with a photo and only the words “George Harrison 1943-2001.” This wouldn’t be the last time Apple would do this. For one, the homepage was replaced a decade later with “Steve Jobs 1955-2011.”
Steve’s humbleness showed itself in a 1999 meeting with staff, as recounted in a story told after his death by Marc Hedlund, who was there. Then, Apple had had its first big hit in a long time with the candy-colored iMac computers. Clearly ebullient over the hard-earned victory, the crowd of Apple employees cheered for several minutes when their leader arrived to the meeting. Steve calmed them down,