Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [3]
There is then some charm about businesses that have not stepped into the public light. They don’t have to worry about the strictures of federal agencies or shareholders who appreciate only a cultivated notoriety. Their founders and managers tend to speak with fewer inhibitions than executives at larger organizations, and they guard their secrets with less anxiety. During their first few years most companies are content with whatever publicity they can get. But the stories that appear in large newspapers and magazines tend, by virtue of the subject, to be short and usually gloss over many aspects of a young company’s progress while the appeal of novelty tends to soften criticism. Yet by the time corporate histories are commissioned the details of those early stages are often lost. Myths spring up about life in the good old days and even the best-intentioned efforts turn from fact to fiction. Nostalgia, as the wise man said, isn’t what it was. So there’s much to be said for writing about a company before its founders and early employees die or lose details in a gin-mottled fog.
While they remain small, companies are easy enough to describe but once they outgrow a garage or an office suite they become increasingly opaque. As employees are scattered in factories and warehouses across the country or overseas, one is left to deal with impressions that have to be recorded with the dots and dabs of pointillism. If sheer size is one obstacle there are also more mechanical obstructions. For trying to figure out the tone and nature of a large American corporation is a bit like charting the affairs of Gorki. Some stories can be gleaned from bitter refugees but a closer inspection is more hazardous. It’s difficult to obtain a tourist visa, simple to discover the official line, impossible to move around without being followed, and all too easy to get expelled.
Sad to say, small businesses in a particular corner of California have an irritating habit of turning into large corporations. During the past thirty years the orchards between San Jose and San Francisco have been mowed down to make way for dozens of companies which now form Silicon Valley. Most of these make their money from some connection with electronics and have grown so fast that it’s easy to believe that the prunes and apricots shed some fertile residue. During the last decade, as developments in microelectronics have moved from the missile cone to the tabletop, these companies have attracted the usual parasitic herd of politicians, management consultants, and journalists eager to uncover a cure for the ills that have bothered other industries.
To some extent the popular conception of these companies has been formed by contrived illusion. They are supposed to conduct their business in novel ways. They are considered to be informal and relaxed places to work, where unusual minds can be kept entertained. Their founders are supposed to share the wealth, while hierarchy and bureaucracy, the curses of conventional corporations, have somehow been abolished. The heads of companies, we are told, let employees wander into their offices and are reluctant to fire anyone but thieves and bigots. To listen to the publicity merchants these companies are started by people with daring imaginations and a yen for risk. They seem to introduce new products with the predictable certainty with which Henry Kaiser once launched Liberty ships and the development of a new chip or a faster computer is invariably portrayed as the result of the march of destiny.