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By Root 555 0

of fire.” Even one of his court of admirers said Scott enjoyed displaying force “in the way a gorilla enjoys raw, unabated power.” Markkula quietly fielded the petitions of complaints that were spearheaded by Bowers and John Couch, both of whom had developed a reputation among some of their colleagues for being keen corporate politicians. Someone else who complained directly to Markkula about the difficulties of working for Scott was told, “Don’t worry about it. You’re going to have a great career here. I’m going to fix it.”

For Markkula, Scott’s frazzled edge was awkward. As the four years he had promised to devote to Apple drew to a close, Markkula was creeping toward hibernation. For the previous year he had been working in a staff position, taking longer holidays, and spending more time with his family. He did a lot of skiing, enjoyed flying in his new plane to places like Sun Valley, and, in his spare time, doodled with designs for vacation homes. He was preparing for a luxurious retirement. Apple had even gone so far as to pay a headhunting firm $60,000 to search for a replacement. When matters at Apple started to unravel at the beginning of 1980, Scott had asked Markkula to run half the company. Markkula had refused, but Scott’s behavior now left Markkula with no alternative. Jobs wasn’t old enough or experienced enough to run the company, there was no obvious outside candidate who could quickly step into the breach, and nobody else knew Apple as well as Markkula. So Markkula reluctantly accepted the fact that he would have to head an interregnum until somebody suitable to run Apple could be found.

Scott had no inkling of the whispering conspiracy. As matters came to a head, he took a long weekend in Hawaii, where he found relief from troubling sinusitis, entirely unaware of developments in Cupertino where Markkula had convened a meeting of Apple’s executive staff. It was an odd meeting and some of the senior managers, including Scott’s staunchest allies, were not invited. Markkula took a voice vote, working around the table from Scott’s bitterest opponents to his supporters. When Scott returned from Hawaii he found a message on his telephone answering machine, asking whether Markkula could drop by and talk. That conversation ended abruptly after Markkula announced, “Scotty, the executive staff has voted to ask for your resignation.” As Markkula made his way to the front door, he asked Scott to submit his resignation in writing the following morning.

None of the shrewder hands questioned Scott’s contribution. He had within forty-eight months helped transform a garage operation, full of complicated headstrong individuals, into a publicly held, divisionalized, multinational corporation that was running at an annualized sales rate of $300 million. Some at Apple thought he was the victim of a raw deal and a bloody conspiracy. Wendell Sander, the hardware engineer, thought “he couldn’t have done as well with hindsight as he did with foresight.” The venture capitalist Don Valentine regarded Scott’s management as the most successful of any of the seventy or so companies he had invested in.

For his part Markkula explained that Scott’s dismissal was “a matter of management style. Scotty’s management style is very dictatorial and was really good for the company in its early development and I had hoped he would modify his style with the growth of the company.” When Scott departed he took with him the thread of discipline that had run through the company, what amounted to an eagerness to make tough decisions, and a rough relish for strapping Jobs into a corporate straitjacket.

A shallow glee spread among the whisperers at Apple—who never came close to understanding the scale of Scott’s achievement. The scope of the change was concealed from outsiders by a vacuous memo that talked about a reshuffle. Markkula assumed Scott’s duties as president while Jobs took Markkula’s place as chairman. Scott was left with Jobs’s vacated title of vice-chairman. “What we have decided to do,” the memo announced, “is to rotate the responsibilities