The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [25]
Bud believes that Steve reinforced his perfectionism by using his charm and creativity just as much as by applying criticism and intimidation. He was the master of inspiration through example, like that time he took his cofounders on the tour of Fallingwater. When he held an “off-site” meeting for the entire staff at the Garden Court, a small luxury hotel in Palo Alto, Steve brought in aikido masters to conduct an hour-long demonstration and explanation of their art. The Next employees realized that this martial-arts class was supposed to be a metaphor for their relationship to the rest of the industry. Like an aikido master, Steve wanted them to deflect the hostility and negative energy of the outside world and turn it into their own positive force or energy. He never explicitly made the connection; that would have been too heavy-handed. But the Next people understood the subtle message, and it impressed them so much that they would remember it for many years. What other business executive would think of something so creative and original?
He was Good Steve at least as often as he was Bad Steve, and probably more often, but the Bad Steve episodes began to color his reputation. Even a single anecdote of humiliation would be passed along like a virus through gossip and storytelling and would add a negative strand to his evolving image. He was no longer just the admirable wunderkind; by now, he was also known as an enfant terrible.
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SOMETIMES THE BAD STEVE persona was simply a theatrical mask that he could put on at will whenever he thought it would get results. Once, when they were still at Apple, Susan Barnes walked over to ask Steve to sign some papers. As she stood at the side of his cubicle, she saw that he was screaming into the phone, shouting a stream of derogatory and obscene epithets while hyperventilating as if he were about to be overcome by a heart attack. Then he hung up, the tension instantly disappeared, and he began laughing, obviously pleased with his dramatic performance.
“Well, we’ll see if that method works!” he said optimistically.
Most of the time, though, when Steve seemed angry or upset, he wasn’t acting. His passion and his perfectionism would plague him with intense aggravation when his people couldn’t grasp his grand visions or figure out how to fulfill them. “His frustration level would build up when he thought that he was the only one who got it,” Susan recalls.
Steve’s people reacted to his foul temper and his foul language in a variety of ways. Sometimes they simply tried to ignore him. Susan once asked Bud Tribble: “When he’s screaming at you because the software isn’t done, does that upset you?”
“No,” Bud said. “Steve can scream at the sun but that’s not going to get the sun to set any sooner.”
Bud could be preternaturally even-tempered, a quiet, thoughtful guy with the self-confidence that comes from great mastery of a craft. A few other Next executives were also able to listen calmly to Steve’s outbursts. They believed that Steve was simply a passionate soul given to hyperbole, so his fiery words needed to be discounted from their face value, translated to find their real message. “When Steve says you’re an idiot, that doesn’t mean he thinks you’re an idiot,” says David Wertheimer. “It means he disagrees with you.”
Some members of Steve’s inner circle had a harder time controlling their own emotions when they got into confrontations with their leader. “He told me: ’Susan, when you’re upset, you’re not articulate,’” recalls Susan Barnes. “The same is true of Steve. But when he’s upset, it’s for a reason. Steve had brutal delivery mechanisms, but if you listened through his yelling, Steve had good ideas. And Steve is a rare person because even if he’s really mad at you, you can hang up and later he’ll call you and talk more calmly.”
Another trick to working well with Steve