The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [116]
He works best with resilient youngsters. Andy Cunningham still runs the large firm she founded, but she says that now, at age forty-two, she would no longer have the energy, patience, or stamina to work for Steve. “When you’re young, you can be led around by the nose,” she says. “When you’re in your twenties, it’s like ’I’m changing the world and this guy is showing me the way.’ You can afford to be squashed and get back up a thousand times.” Now that she’s in her forties and has a family of her own, “life is too short for this shit.”
In the late 1990s, Susan Barnes talked with an Apple employee and compared notes about working for Steve. He told her it was like climbing a glacier every day just to take out the trash. Steve made everything very difficult, but his people did wind up doing exceptional work.
He’s a great enigma. A high-level Hollywood executive who has worked closely with Steve compares him to the unhappy mogul in Citizen Kane: “I hope there’s a sled called Rosebud.”
He’s the ultimate mirror of Silicon Valley. Roger McNamee, a well-known investor and pundit whose garage band has performed with Steve’s daughter Lisa, says: “In my mind he is the defining personality of Silicon Valley. The career of Steve Jobs has paralleled perfectly that of Silicon Valley.”
In the 1970s and early 1980s Steve and the valley were enfants terribles, thumbing their noses at giants. But they both lost their momentum in the late 1980s, when the new powerhouses emerged from elsewhere: Microsoft in Seattle, Dell and Compaq in Texas. Then, in the late 1990s, Steve had his great resurgence with Apple, and northern California became the red-hot center of the technology stock boom.
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STEVE JOBS is the essence of Silicon Valley, the encapsulation of all the good and all the bad. He exemplifies its famous greed and its simultaneous ambivalence about its great wealth. He is a sophisticated elitist who nonetheless yearns for the patronage of the masses. He is torn between trying to change the world and trying to sell computers as though they were sugared water. He alternates between the desire to advance the state of the art in technology and the need to promote a brand that had more to do with slick image-making and advertising than technology. He is a control freak and an egomaniac, but his greatest wealth and success comes from supporting the creative achievements of others. At his professional nadirs, he can act with humility. At his professional peaks, he is a fearsome tyrant. He is loved and hated, and often by the very same people. He is not without his sycophantic admirers or his scathing critics, but most people who know him and have worked with him believe he is a man of great contrasts and contradictions. The Bad Steve can be loathsome, but the Good Steve can be one of the most creative, inspiring, and charismatic of figures. Paradoxically, failure brings out his humanity and success exacerbates his megalomania. But the two Steves can’t be separated. They live in the mind and spirit of one person, and each is partly responsible for his successes and his failures. Over the course of three decades, the times have changed, the culture has shifted, but Steve has stayed largely the same, connecting and separating from the zeitgeist every few years. And as the century begins, they are in perfect sync.
Epilogue:
The Third
Coming?
Apple’s extraordinary resurgence progressed with such momentum in the first