The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [2]
For nearly two decades he had refused the requests of writers who wanted to discuss his personal life in any sort of detail. In the late 1990s he exerted fierce control over the media coverage of his companies, Apple and Pixar, often walking out of interviews abruptly or refusing to cooperate with publications that hadn’t proven their willingness to stick to his official version of his story. He met only sporadically with tough-minded journalists from newspapers like the New York Times, and he limited them to fleeting fifteen-minute sessions during which he would only talk about the latest product or service that he was promoting. He had the temerity to stand up a Times reporter. He stood up an entire PBS film crew. He walked out on The Wall Street Journal after its reporter asked him a single question. When he wanted to kill a Wired cover story about him, he called the executives of Wired’s owner, the Condé Nast publishing company, with the implicit threat of withdrawing Apple’s advertisements from its many magazines. And still the press treated him with awe.
He succeeded in becoming the Jackie Kennedy Onassis of business and technology—a figure who was ubiquitous as a symbol of his times but little known as a human being.
When I set out on interviews for this book, I was looking for Steve Jobs the person rather than Steve Jobs the icon. He is an exceptional person, to be sure, but I wanted to get at what made him exceptional as well as what made him real. I set out to discover the deep sources of his character and motivation. I strived to find where he got his unusual ideas about leadership, management, and the creative process. I tried to trace how he had been changed by his years of wealth and celebrity and by his years of struggle and failure.
Between February 1999 and February 2000, I talked with nearly one hundred people who have known and worked with Steve Jobs, including many of his closest colleagues and friends from the various stages of his life. Drawing primarily on their recollections, anecdotes, and insights, I have focused this narrative on Steve’s long comeback, his so-called second coming. The story begins in the summer of 1985, when he was exiled from Apple, and goes through early 2000, when he officially became Apple’s chief executive.
Since Steve Jobs is the head of a movie studio, it seems oddly appropriate that his real-life scenario fits so neatly into the “three-act” structure of a classic Hollywood screenplay. In Act One, the protagonist sets forth on his quest, in this case a bid for vindication after an embarrassing fall. Act Two brings the dramatic complications: our hero struggles, he fails, he comes perilously close to the edge. In Act Three, he overcomes the formidable forces aligned against him and achieves his goal, though in a way that he could never have anticipated when the story began. . . .
—Alan Deutschman
San Francisco
February 2000
Andrea “Andy” Cunningham was so tired when she got home from work that she went to sleep without checking her answering machine. The following morning, around eight-thirty, she played the tape. The message was short and cryptic: Andy should show up at Steve’s house at 10 A.M. for a press conference about his new company, Next.
The idea troubled her. Andy was a public relations consultant, one of the shrewdest and most insightful in the technology business. She wasn’t summoned to press conferences as a last-minute thought. She was supposed to be the one who orchestrated the events following weeks of careful preparation, reflection, brainstorming, and strategizing, after thoroughly thinking through the message and exactly how it would be conveyed.
She didn’t even know where Steve lived. And besides, he wasn’t even