Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [125]
Jean Richardson, who started as a secretary and eventually became Apple’s advertising director, recalled, “For a couple of years the pace was awful. It was twelve hours a day and weekends. I knew if I took a drink at a water fountain I would miss a beat and slip a schedule. It was almost inhuman. I was at the burnout stage.” As the professionals arrived, Apple was confronted with the problems of reconciling old and new, coping with the consternation and resentment provoked by the arrivals and accommodating the habits and influences they brought with them.
For a company growing as fast as Apple, hiring new employees was its most important task. In the long run this overshadowed everything else. People recruited one day frequently wound up hiring others within days or weeks of their arrival, so one early misjudgment could be amplified and have grave implications. For relative innocents running a small business, it was easy to be awed by the reputation of other companies, the length of a résumé, a string of advanced degrees, and the sound of a reputation. There was a conscious effort to hire people who were overqualified for the immediate job at hand but who would be able to cope with larger demands as orders increased.
Apple, like other companies before it, took to raiding established firms. Every major steal brought squeals of delight. Markkula couldn’t conceal his glee when he lured somebody from Intel, Scott was just as happy when he snared a body from National Semiconductor, and Jobs interpreted a resignation from Hewlett-Packard as something approaching divine approval. When another company president called to complain about the way Apple was pinching his people, they chuckled some more.
Candidates for senior positions were usually interviewed by Markkula, Scott, and Jobs. The visible differences among the trio were enough to ring alarm bells in the heads of some who contemplated joining Apple. When, during interviews, Jobs insisted on putting his dirty feet on the table or when, at luncheon interviews, he returned a plate to a waitress informing her that the food was “garbage,” he wasn’t necessarily impressive. Though he tended to be swayed by reputations, Jobs distrusted résumés and preferred to rely on his instincts. He conducted many screenings at the Good Earth Restaurant or other nearby eateries, usually plumped for somebody he felt was right, and trusted his choices to be able to do what they said they could do.
In the summer of 1978, fifteen months after the announcement of the Apple II, the manufacturing department was fairly typical of the condition of the rest of the firm. Apple was building about thirty computers a day and managing to ship about fifteen disk drives a week. Twenty-eight people reported to one supervisor who, each morning, handed out instructions and doled out assignments. It was still a manual department. Purchase orders, inventory controls, and shipment rates were monitored with pen and paper. Half the manufacturing area was filled with a three-year supply of plastic that Jobs had managed to buy at a good price.
Roy Mollard, a ramrod-straight Liverpudlian, who had known Scott at National Semiconductor and Fairchild Semiconductor, was hired to direct manufacturing. He looked like a lean cotton-mill manager out of some D. H. Lawrence novel, and brought many of the tricks he had learned at National Semiconductor. He hired security guards, installed hidden microphones to trigger burglar alarms, and on the floor he appointed supervisors, scrapped the casual lunchtime Ping-Pong games, fired the quality-assurance manager, and insisted that there be no cupboards or drawers so that he could always see the inventory. His