The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [112]
The magazine killed the story.
Apple had become a nearly ubiquitous advertiser in glossy national magazines. Steve Jobs made the ad-buying decisions himself, and no one wanted to alienate him.
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STEVE DIDN’T HESITATE to humiliate people, because he had gotten away with it for so long. One particularly awful episode came when the public relations firm that handled the Next account, Niehaus Ryan Wong, sent executives to pitch Steve for the Pixar account. Steve took an active role in Pixar’s p.r., which often angered the people at Disney, who thought that Steve was more interested in promoting himself than promoting the movies.
Steve sat at the table, rocking back and forth, laying out his predictions for just how well A Bug’s Life was going to do at the box office. Then, before letting the p.r. people make their pitch about their skills and expertise, he told them they didn’t have a chance.
“I don’t think you guys can do this,” he said.
The senior people were cautious and remained silent, but the most junior member of the team, a woman who was just out of college, spoke up in their defense.
“Nothing you say means anything to me,” Steve responded. “Why do you keep opening your mouth?”
Steve yelled at the young woman until she had tears running down her cheeks.
Afterward, he gave them the account.
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STEVE’S EXECUTIVES knew that there were only two ways to deal with him: either submit entirely to his will or have the intelligence and courage to survive his brutal confrontations. “Steve tests you, challenges you, frightens you,” explains Todd Rulon-Miller, who worked closely with Steve for six years. “He uses this as a tactic to get to the truth. Behind the profanity, it’s his way of asking: ’Do you believe what you’re saying?’ If you wither or blather, you’re lost. I thought those were character-building moments for me.”
Even Steve’s old friends could never be entirely comfortable around him. “Steve is Steve for these reasons,” says Heidi Roizen. “You’re never really ’in’ with Steve. At any moment you can say something that he thinks is stupid and you’ll be relegated to bozo status. He believes everyone is expendable. But very few people write off Steve forever. He’s such an engaging person that no matter how much he steps on you, you’ll come back. He’s the most charismatic person I’ve ever met, and I’ve had the good fortune of knowing a number of famous people. He has it. I kind of feel the same way about Steve as I feel about chocolate. It’s bad for me but I really like it so I try to keep it out of the house. I love being around Steve because he’s the center of the universe—only it’s his universe.”
Heidi has maintained friendships with both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates since the early 1980s. Today, if the phone rings and it’s Bill, she’s not nervous at all. If Heidi has a problem, she knows that she can call Bill. If she’s in Seattle, she’ll visit Bill and his wife, Melinda. “Bill thinks of me as a friend, but with Steve you have this feeling that you are being judged,” she says. “Steve is not a person you can be comfortable with. Steve can say things that make the hair stand on the back of my neck, things that make me shake, like ’Let me explain this to you very slowly.’ If other people said that to me, I’d laugh.”
Heidi believes that Steve’s view of the world has a clear hierarchy. Steve himself is at the top. Then there’s Larry Ellison, who’s almost like Steve. Then there are Steve’s top executives at Apple, Avie Tevanian for software and Jon Rubinstein for hardware, brilliant