The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [26]
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STEVE WAS PRONE to speaking with radical honesty, raw and uncensored and undiplomatic. He often seemed like a child who hadn’t learned that he wasn’t supposed to say out loud exactly what he was thinking. When French president François Mitterrand held a formal dinner during a visit to California, Steve didn’t want to partake in the refined French cuisine. He asked Mitterrand whether he could have some pasta instead, since he had recently been to Tuscany and enjoyed such great pasta there. Imagine, the outrageousness! Asking the French leader for Italian food!
Once he abruptly interrupted his business partner Heidi Roizen in the middle of a negotiation and asked her whether she was really a blonde.
“Do you color your hair?” he asked. “Why do you color your hair? What color is it naturally?”
Another time they bumped into each other and Steve said: “Have you gained weight?” And when Heidi introduced Steve to her mother, he blurted out: “So, you’re Heidi’s mother? What drugs were you on when you conceived her?”
Whether with a head of state or a corporate colleague or a personal friend, he was astonishingly uninhibited, but his wide-eyed questions often seemed more innocent than insolent, and his unconventional behavior almost always passed without repercussions.
Steve’s colleagues learned to accept and even to appreciate his bizarre frankness, his disarming directness, his aura of what-you-see-is-what-you-get. “Working with him you never felt that you were getting false praise or that he was being gracious to you when he was really mad at you,” says Susan Barnes. While the Next insiders came to understand Steve’s personality, they were always fearful that his childlike antics would embarrass them in front of outsiders and jeopardize their most important business relationships. Before Susan took Steve for meetings with investment bankers on Wall Street, she gave him a warning speech during the flight to New York, as if she were a mother imploring a rambunctious five-year-old to be on his best behavior in the presence of adults.
“You’re going to be good,” she instructed. “You’re not going to tell them that their suits are lousy or their food is lousy.”
It worked. He behaved.
The odd thing was that Steve wasn’t the stereotypically introverted nerd who lacked social skills and simply didn’t know how to comport himself. He knew. When he wanted to charm, no one was more charming. Susan thinks that Steve persisted with his innocent-insolent routine because ninety-nine times out of a hundred he got away with it. He wasn’t entirely innocent. He used the rude-child persona to disarm other powerful people, to make them slightly uncomfortable and thus give himself a subtle advantage.
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STEVE ACTED WITH extraordinary chutzpah—a posture of nerve and brazenness reinforced by a presumptuous sense of entitlement—and the people who worked with him either had to respond in kind or acquiesce to his dominating will. The result was that his inner circle sometimes seemed like the archetypal Jewish family that was bound by unspoken love but thrived on acrimonious confrontation. One of the young superstars of Next’s software team was Avie Tevanian, a brilliant Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon. Avie’s persona was gentle, quiet, and a bit shy, but when Steve tested him Avie could defend himself unyieldingly.
“Steve, you’re just wrong!” he’d say.
“Avie, you’re missing the entire point.”
“No, you’re just wrong.”
Avie could wrangle acrimoniously with his leader because Steve had so much respect for his talents. Similarly, Steve had great admiration for