The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [115]
Not long after, she watched as Steve berated one of his marketing executives right in front of her.
She believes that Steve’s outbursts of verbal abuse are spontaneous rather than calculated. “I think it’s infantile. A two-year-old can be utterly charming and utterly infantile. At ages two and thirteen, a child switches abruptly from being wonderful to being horrible, and Steve is like that. He has the same psychological development issues as a child. He does make you ’love’ him and then he turns around and slaps you in the face.”
He has an amazing ability to change his mind. Heidi Roizen wondered for a long time whether Steve was a pathological liar, someone who just couldn’t prevent himself from dissembling. But then she determined that Steve wasn’t really a liar at all. He could say X one day and Not-X the next day, and each time he would genuinely, passionately believe what he was saying. That’s why he could always speak with such conviction. “Steve’s brain has an amazing ability to recraft things and put a different spin on them,” she says.
He’s the ultimate product of a media culture. Christopher Escher, the former head of Apple public relations, says: “Steve becomes a bucket for peoples’ worldview, and people project on him things that help them explain the world. An icon is like a mirror. I think that Steve is the consummate media figure. The tropes, the patterns, and the implicit language of his career—freshness, young star, banishment, recovery, and renewal—are the tropes of the media. It’s not that Steve understands the mass media zeitgeist: he is it. Steve Jobs, like Bill Clinton, is the product of a media culture. He has an endless supply of rebirths.”
He’s a great man so the rules don’t apply. Steve’s numerous apologists say that his temperamental and abusive behavior is justified because he’s a visionary who accomplishes extraordinary things. “If you’re going to change the world, you don’t do it through conventional means,” says Todd Rulon-Miller. In the case of the Apple turnaround, many observers agreed that the company needed a forceful leader to guide it through the crisis.
Still, a number of Steve’s ex-colleagues and friends argued that it’s possible to become a great business leader without becoming a monster of a human being. “As a culture we richly value corporate success,” says Dan Kottke, Steve’s college friend. “The question is: How much of an asshole do you have to be to be highly successful?”
His tenacity is what makes him great. Several years after leaving Steve’s employ, Susan Barnes conducted a study about family-run businesses. She found that the key to success was “pure staying power, persistence, continually believing in something, dogged stubbornness to get things done, and continual optimism.” That was a good description of Steve Jobs. Steve was beaten down many times but “he kept getting off the mat,” she says.
He is still emotionally insecure. A while after Heidi Roizen quit her job at Apple to spend time with her family and become an investor and adviser to startup companies, she bought a new Apple G3 computer and flat-screen monitor. She was very pleased with the beautiful machines, so she sent an e-mail message to Steve, congratulating him. Even though Steve had incredible demands on his time, he was so hungry for the praise that he wrote back to her within the hour.
He sacrifices personal commitments for his own ends. In the late 1980s, Steve agreed to let Doug Menuez, a well-regarded photojournalist, have complete behind-the-scenes access at Next and document the daily life of the company for a story in Life magazine. Doug put in an extraordinary effort, taking thousands of shots over