The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [17]
“Ever since I’ve known Steve, he had a very strong affinity for thinking of things involving aesthetics and style,” recalls Bud Tribble. “He approached it by seeking out and gathering around him people who could teach him about it. He’s kind of a name-brand shopper in the world of aesthetics.” When Next needed a logo, Steve asked around to find who was considered the best person in the world at logos. He found Paul Rand. When he took an interest in architecture, he asked many intelligent, cultivated people about who they thought was the best architect. Frank Lloyd Wright was the winner of the informal poll.
Tribble thought of Steve’s method as “the Delphi approach”; this was how Steve overcame his insecurities about determining his own style. He relied on what was most popular among the people he admired; this method would ensure that his tastes were safe and respectable, and it wouldn’t result in a quirky iconoclastic choice. Conducting a survey in the middle of the 1980s would give you a perennial pop favorite like Frank Lloyd Wright, a dead genius enshrined in every college textbook, not a controversial figure like Frank Gehry, a living radical whose work wouldn’t be fully appreciated for another decade. If you asked around about the greatest composer and the best piece of music, you’d probably get Beethoven and the Ninth Symphony. No one could fault you for liking Beethoven. The Ninth Symphony may well be the most wonderful piece of music in Western culture, but an independent thinker would probably try to distinguish himself by advocating the subtler virtues of a composer whose work hadn’t been so thoroughly assimilated by the masses.
Steve wasn’t that kind of boldly independent thinker about art and aesthetics. Although he had good instincts, he lacked the self-assurance that came from real mastery. He hadn’t studied art, architecture, or design, at least not formally; he couldn’t draw on a deep reserve of training or knowledge. But once the Delphi method produced a winner, Steve was a remarkably quick and thorough learner. When the survey came up with Frank Lloyd Wright, Steve devoured books about the great man. “He soaks up information,” recalls Bud Tribble. “The guy’s a sponge once he zeroes in.”
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IN JANUARY 1986, four months after Steve Jobs revealed that he was starting the new company, Apple dropped its lawsuit against Next. Once the tensions had dissipated somewhat, the Apple executives realized that suing their legendary founder wasn’t a good public relations ploy. When your company has a wonderful Genesis mythology, you don’t impugn Adam. Besides, the lawsuit had a number of unintended effects. It kept Next in the news and made the startup seem like a serious threat to Apple’s business. And for the band of five Next cofounders and their leader, being sued and demonized by their ex-employer was an intense “bonding experience,” as Bud Tribble recalls. It solidified their resolve to make Next work. With the lawsuit ended, now they could really begin to build a company.
Steve was fanatical about hiring the best people. He said that they would interview one hundred people for every one whom they finally chose. And he would fill positions with people who were massively overqualified. The example that everyone talked about was a reputedly brilliant guy named Alex, a young hipster who had made it to the middle ranks at Apple. He had an undergraduate degree from Harvard. He was an art collector. His colleagues found him fascinating. He came to Next. Maybe he would become a marketing executive? A project manager? Steve made him the receptionist. The offer was something of an insult, but he took the job just to get in the door. “They were in the habit of hiring extremely experienced people to do fairly menial jobs,” recalls David Wertheimer, himself an early hire.