The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [53]
In hindsight, it’s easy to argue that Steve squandered a rare historic opportunity to shift the course of the computer business. Looking back, one of Next’s founders says sadly: “If IBM would have embraced Next, it would have been game over for Microsoft.”
• • •
SOMEONE HAD TO TAKE THE FALL for the failure of the Next Cube. Steve turned against the man who had been a brother figure to him, Dan’l Lewin. In July 1989, Steve stripped away Dan’l’s responsibilities as the vice president of marketing. Steve would do the job himself.
A few months later, Dan’l quit and went to another technology startup. The departure of someone so close to Steve was the first signal to the rest of Silicon Valley that something might not be entirely right at Next.
“Dan’l was one of the nicest guys in the business,” recalls a close colleague, “but Steve gave him the short end of the stick and blamed him for a lot of the problems.”
The first wave of executives was beginning to burn out from the sheer intensity of working for Steve. “There were some people who survived at Next and some who would go poof and explode,” says Paul Vais. “If you depended and thrived on Steve’s praise, you would be crushed when he flamed you with public humiliation, which was inevitable.”
Karen Sipprell, who was a marketing manager at Next, says that Steve’s criticism brought out her “maternal instincts” for protecting her employees. “I spent a lot of my time trying to shield my team from him,” she recalls. “He would often be right in his observations, but he would demotivate them and destroy their self-esteem so they couldn’t respond by doing better the next time.” Karen would buffer her people, absorbing most of Steve’s abuse herself. That was common practice among Next executives, but it had a punishing cost. Karen quit her job soon after her brother survived a plane crash and she realized that she hadn’t seen him in an entire year because she had been so fully absorbed by working for Steve.
Next’s executives began collecting their favorite examples of Steve’s profane, hyperbolic put-downs, which could seem witty and comical so long as you weren’t the hapless victim. But even they were stunned when Steve reviewed one employee’s work and said: “You’ve baked a really lovely cake, but then you’ve used dog shit for frosting.”
• • •
IN HIS PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS as well as his professional life, Steve needed to be surrounded by people who were tough enough to take his verbal abuse and dish it back. His girlfriend Tina Redse fit that description. When Tina went along with Steve on a business trip to Tokyo for the Asian debut of the Next Cube, she freely displayed her edgy, sarcastic wit. Steve was obsessed with healthy living, but Tina flaunted her bad habits in front of his colleagues. Steve loved the sushi in Japan, and he arranged for his entourage to have a twelve-course vegetarian dinner at a restaurant with a Zen-like minimalist sensibility. Tina shocked Steve’s business associates when she smoked and ate steaks. She acted as she wanted, not to please Steve, and he respected her for it. Tina was rebellious and had the strength to spurn him, which is one of the reasons he pursued her over the years.
Even while he was dating Tina, Steve would flirt openly with other women but only until they acquiesced to his charm. He couldn’t resist the challenge of pursuit and seduction, but he embodied the old Groucho Marx line about not wanting