Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [132]
Even some of Apple’s staunchest boosters, like marketing manager Phil Roybal, were forced to admit, after several years, a difference in tone. “The character has changed because the company has grown. There is more overhead, policies have been created, administrators have been hired, and there are rigidities. There is less whimsy. Now things happen pretty much as expected. It’s more like an organized company.” Others were less complimentary. Publications manager Jef Raskin, who eventually had a falling out with Jobs, said, “At first the company was run by a consensus, where a good idea had a chance of success. Afterward it was like standing beside a freight train and tugging it with a chain. It wouldn’t move off the tracks.” Some, like Roy Mollard, found that divisions, additional layers of management, and increased specialization meant that his influence was circumscribed. “My area of control was narrowed and the job became less interesting.”
For outsiders like Regis McKenna, who had played a crucial part in Apple’s formative stages, the arrival of a vice-president of communications meant that responsibility for public relations and marketing strategy was split. “You have to go through people to get to the very people you used to deal with one on one. You deal with corporate organization that wants to control everything.” And for the newcomers, the presence of men like McKenna with established ties to the founders did not make life any easier. The uneasy truce was made clear by the way in which Apple came to handle some of its public relations internally while the McKenna Agency dealt with the rest.
However, the emergence of a bureaucracy was not a dull blanket that brought equality. There was a distinct and pronounced pecking order that was camouflaged by appearances. The carefully cultivated suggestions of equality were, in many ways, a mirage. On the surface Apple didn’t bear much resemblance to pinstriped America. There were no reserved spaces in the parking lots. Jeans, open collars, and sneakers were an accepted form of dress. (In fact, they almost came to be a uniform.) There were no lavish office suites, just cubicles and shoulder-high partitions. The offices became a maze of Herman Miller open landscape furniture. Punching clocks was unheard of even on the assembly lines. Secretaries were called area associates and the head of personnel was known as the director of human resources. Business cards carried offbeat titles. For outsiders these unconventional appearances were deceptive. Insiders saw straight through them. Programmer Dick Huston echoed the sentiments of many of his colleagues when he remarked, “I have never thought of Apple as an egalitarian place to work.”
Many of the ways in which employees came to tell each other apart were entirely conventional and bore more similarities to traditional industries and the industrial crescent than Apple’s leaders were prepared to admit. Except at its Irish factory, Apple was not a unionized company. Jobs had all the ruffled pride of a founder who felt that the arrival of a union would mean that he had failed to care for his employees, and he also thought that unions were responsible for problems in some older industries. He promised to “quit the day we become unionized.” But even if walkouts and pickets weren’t part of the Apple vocabulary, there was still an enormous difference between the shop floor and the executive offices.
Don Bruener, who spent some time working in production, said, “People in production were afraid to deal with any people outside production. And the people outside production didn’t care about production. It was workers against executives.” After a time most of the executives took offices in one building and the senior officials were known as members of the executive