The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [114]
“He’s a supreme flatterer,” says Jef.
The approach that Steve took with both Bill and Jef was what psychologists called “pacing and leading,” and it was a well-known ploy that was taught to the people who needed to exert control or influence over others, from car salesmen to cult recruiters. Whether consciously or not, Steve Jobs had assimilated almost all of the classic psychological techniques for personal manipulation and coercion and used them to maintain his power. His modus operandi was almost out of a pysch textbook: First, you have to make the other people “regress” to a childlike state of helplessness. This can be done by berating, intimidating, disorienting, and confusing them. Then, once their self-confidence is destroyed and they become infantilized, they need a strong parent figure to provide guidance. Later they tend to attribute their achievements to the leadership of this parental authority.
Steve’s approach had some intriguing similarities to the style of Werner Erhard, the guru who founded est (for Erhard Seminars Training), which was very popular in Erhard’s home base of the Bay Area when Steve was coming of age in the 1970s. Erhard’s lectures attracted well-educated, driven high-achievers who were also highly insecure. Erhard promised enlightenment, but as soon as his pupils were locked away for marathon sessions in a windowless hotel ballroom, he subjected them to intense verbal abuse, saying that they were all “assholes” and often making them cry and shake hysterically. When they emerged from the “training,” they often claimed that it had greatly improved their self-confidence and gave them the determination to take control over their lives.
It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that working at Steve Jobs’s companies was like attending an est seminar. The brutally long hours that employees spent in windowless cubicles had the same effect as the time that Erhard’s trainees spent in the windowless hotel ballrooms. It disoriented and physically exhausted them, inducing the state of childlike regression and making them more susceptible to their verbally abusive and domineering leader.
There’s no evidence that Steve Jobs ever participated in est, but he did take part in kindred strands of the 1970s human-potential movement, such as primal scream therapy. Steve was a careful student of Zen, which Werner Erhard acknowledged as his greatest influence, and Steve had youthful experience as the follower of charismatic leaders, from his Zen guru Kobin Chino to the head of the All-One Farm commune, Robert Friedland. It wouldn’t have been hard for him to learn the classic tools of manipulation and influence.
The cultlike aspects of Apple and Next were commonly discussed through the 1980s and 1990s. Steve’s former employees would joke that “when you meet Steve Jobs, he’ll make you drink the Kool-Aid,” alluding to the massacre in Guyana of the People’s Temple followers by the San Francisco demagogue Jim Jones.
Steve wasn’t really a cult leader, but he did have a rare ability to influence. “Steve pulls strings I don’t even know I have, like my mother does,” says Heidi Roizen. “And he affects so many people this way—making you want to please him. It’s very captivating.”
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WATCHING AND STUDYING Steve Jobs has been a favorite pastime in Silicon Valley for a quarter century, and there are many opinions and theories about what makes up this icon’s mesmerizing, if frustrating, personality:
He alternates suddenly between being charming and horrible, like a child. One of the longest-running and most perceptive Steve-watchers in the media is Louise Kehoe from the Financial Times. Before she interviewed him for the first time, in the early 1980s, she heard of his reputation for being difficult to deal with. The tough reporter went into the meeting determined not