The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [24]
No one was really sure where Steve got his ideas about managing people, whether he was motivated by a consciously held philosophy or if he was just acting on his instincts, if that was simply what he was like as a person. Somehow, though, it worked. He got his people to push themselves extremely hard, to strive maniacally, and often to achieve personal goals or improve the technology far beyond what they had thought was possible.
The perplexing fact was that Bad Steve seemed as integral to his success as Good Steve. And somehow they were two faces of the same man. At other companies, the good cops and the bad cops were different people. At Intel, Chairman Bob Noyce had been the wonderfully charming guy who got people to do things because they loved him. His No. 2, Andy Grove, was the harsh taskmaster who got people to do things because they feared him. Bob flashed the irresistible smile, Andy wielded the whip. Steve was a casual friend of Bob Noyce, and greatly admired Bob, but he had a lot of Andy Grove in him, too.
Steve was willing to be loved or feared, whatever worked. “Steve was the master of knowing which buttons to push with different people,” recalls Susan Barnes.
“He applied charm or public humiliation in a way that in most cases proved to be pretty effective,” says Bud Tribble. “I think he continued to do it because he got positive reinforcement from the world that this was a way to get things to happen.”
Bud believes that Steve’s occasional outbursts of fierce criticism helped to create an expectation of unremitting quality that was assimilated by the engineers at Next. Most of the time Steve left them alone. Ninety-nine percent of the time, in Bud’s estimation, Steve wasn’t looking over their shoulders. But that other one percent “he would just come down like a hammer,” and his verbal assaults could be terrifying. Engineers would be so disturbed by the episodes that the rest of the time they would feel as though Steve were looking over their shoulders with his uncompromising eye, even though he wasn’t. He was the corporate superego, the surrogate parent they all wanted so much to please.
Bud believed that Steve operated this way intentionally. Receiving criticism from Steve “wasn’t a pleasant experience,” he says, “but it let the engineers know that it wasn’t OK to be sloppy in anything they did, even the ninety-nine percent that Steve would never look at. It’s almost like a training mechanism, and it’s effective.” It was Steve’s way of infusing his perfectionism into the work of hundreds of people, his way of making them internalize his own striving. A classic example came when Steve tormented his people by scrutinizing countless look-alike paint samples before he decided on the precise pigment of black for the casing of the Next computer. “He was incredibly picky,” Bud says, “but it set the tone for thousands of other decisions that Steve was not involved in at all.”
Other people were shocked by the fierce behavior of Bad Steve, but Bud wasn’t. As a graduate of medical school, Bud was used to that kind of treatment from his brilliant teachers. When he was an intern, the chief surgeon would come down like a hammer and berate the pupils over seemingly trivial matters. That was how