The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [100]
And their dogs were essential to productivity, too. A lot of people worked very long hours at Apple, even nights and weekends. They were hardly ever home. If they couldn’t care for and feed their dogs at the office, they would never get to see the pets.
It seemed as though Steve were pushing his own lifestyle on ten thousand others. At a company meeting, someone asked Steve what he thought was the worst thing about Apple.
“The cafeteria,” Steve said.
Steve proceeded to replace the entire food-service staff. He hired the chef from Il Fornaio in Palo Alto. Before long, tofu was prominent in the menu offerings.
And yet, somehow, the reign of terror was beginning to work. Apple had long been like a civil-service bureaucracy, with thousands of entrenched employees who did pretty much whatever they wanted regardless of which political appointees were temporarily at the top. Now that was changing. People started to realize that Steve could assert his authority over seemingly any aspect of the company’s life. Apple was going to follow the vision of a single person, from the no-smoking rules and the healthy cuisine to the editing of the TV advertisements. Steve was clearly in charge, and Steve was seemingly everywhere. He was trying to be something of a strict parent to Apple, which was like a bunch of bright teenagers who had gone for years without adult supervision.
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STEVE’S MANIACAL FOCUS and micromanagement made it harder for him to devote time to his own family. His neighbors in Palo Alto would pass by his house on their nocturnal jogs, and almost every night they would glance at his window and see him staring at his computer, writing e-mail.
He was proud of his daughter Lisa, who had graduated from the public high school in Palo Alto. She sang well and she wrote folk songs, like the family’s friend Joan Baez. She had been one of the editors of the superb school newspaper, where she worked closely with Ben Hewlett, the grandson of Bill Hewlett, the legendary cofounder of Hewlett-Packard and one of Steve’s role models. The paper took on controversial topics, such as gay and lesbian issues, and it won a national award for an investigative piece questioning several hundred dollars of meal expenses charged by staffers of the school district.
In the summer of 1997, when she was between her first and second terms at Harvard, Lisa performed as a singer at a charity benefit for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a libertarian activist group that lobbied to prevent censorship on the Internet. Since a good number of Silicon Valley’s capitalists were aging liberal baby boomers who grew up with rock music and still played in garage bands, the EFF decided to put on its own amateur concert. It rented the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, the famous venue where Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and the Grateful Dead had all performed.
Lisa took the stage. She bore a close resemblance to her father. She had his nose, his eyes, his mouth, his bone structure, his thin brown arched eyebrows, his hint of Middle Eastern ancestry. Her hair—straight and fine like his, but blond—fell to just below her shoulders, and she wore a sleeveless black top that accentuated her slenderness.
She leaned into the microphone and launched into Tracy Chapman’s “Talkin’ ’Bout a Revolution,” a billionaire’s daughter singing an anthem of working-class revolt.
The crowd broke into whispered conversations. Most of the people in the audience were around the same age as Steve Jobs, and only now were they starting their families. It was hard for them to accept that they were old enough for Steve to have a teenage daughter.
As Lisa sang, her father stood inconspicuously in the very back of the auditorium, holding his baby Erin Sienna, who was turning two years old.
• • •
REED PAUL JOBS was six, and he was enrolled in Nueva, a remarkable private