Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [133]
A young company like Apple also developed other signals of rank. The greatest distinction was based on wealth. For the disparities that existed at Apple, especially after it became a public company, were far larger than those that separate the chairman from the janitor in mature companies like General Motors and Exxon. The company also made loans to senior executives to help them buy stock or pay large income-tax bills, and profit-sharing was allocated according to rank.
There was never any mistaking who was the boss. The appearance of Scott or Markkula or Jobs could provoke a tightening in the muscles of underlings. A casual comment, a hint, an upturned eyebrow, a skeptical glance, a rise in the voice were all amplified and produced what one keen observer delightfully called “thunderbolt management.” He explained, “Everybody knows who calls the shots. Somebody says something in a hallway or makes a passing remark and suddenly twenty levels below, it becomes law.”
One of the most important signs of status was the numbers given to employees on the day they joined the company—which had caused Jobs such concern at their first appearance. Printed on the plastic identification badges, these numbers became a corporate version of the big-city social register. As Apple grew, the status of the employees with the lowest numbers rose. Though the badges often didn’t match financial standing, they still provoked admiring glances. Some of the earliest employees could rattle off the names of the first fifty or so of their colleagues and others took to advertising their positions by having their employee numbers stamped on their automobile license tags. Another way in which the old-timers emphasized their difference was the Cross pen decorated with a small Apple that had been distributed to every employee on Apple’s third Christmas. Eventually the pens were made available in the company store.
The social order was also visible in companywide messages. One sonorously proclaimed the difference between a monthly newsletter and a shorter corporate memo: “Recently promoted people deserve applause and recognition . . . ‘Apple Times’ will list newly promoted employees . . . ‘Apple Bulletin’ should not be used to announce promotions and other personnel changes below the level of division manager.”
There was also a debate about the value of the technical writers. Jobs had always placed great importance on Apple’s manuals, and there was a feeling that they formed an important part of what the company was selling. Some argued that if this was so, the technical writers deserved to be on a pay scale similar to that of the top-flight engineers. Eventually, however, Apple buckled to the notion of “replacement value” and paid its writers on the levels that existed outside the computer industry. One publications manager was not allowed to become a principal member of technical staff, according to a formal complaint that he lodged, because “doing an industry-leading job in publications just did not have the stature of ‘designing a power supply or software system.’”
So with all these strains and pronounced stripings it was a dizzying challenge for the old hands, let alone the newcomers, to sort out where they fitted, what tasks to pursue, and precisely what it was that the company stood for. As the divisions were formed in the fall of 1980 those sorts of questions became even more baffling. For in the space of twelve weeks Apple went on a hiring binge and boosted its payroll from six hundred employees to twelve hundred: a period that some came to refer to as The Bozo Explosion. Some employees were snapped up from temporary agencies and squads of as many as sixty were gathered for orientation seminars.
For everyone the growth was unsettling. The rate