The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [74]
Pixar began the actual work of animation in July 1993, but through the summer and early fall, Jeffrey Katzenberg was still unhappy with the storyline. John Lasseter and his colleagues kept coming back with new ideas, but nothing seemed to work. The repeated rejections were frustrating and painful.
In November, Peter Schneider screamed at Ralph Guggenheim. He said that Ralph and Bonnie were terrible producers and that he would fire them if they were employees of Disney and not Pixar. Then he called Steve Jobs and demanded that Steve get rid of Ralph. Steve resisted.
Only Steve could hire or fire at Pixar, but Disney had creative control over the film. On November 17, Jeffrey Katzenberg shut down production on Toy Story.
Pixar looked as desperate and moribund as Next.
Steve Jobs was at the nadir of his career.
In 1993, when Next was finally revealed as a blatant failure, the news media that had adored Steve Jobs for so many years now turned on him with the resentment and bitterness of a spurned lover. One of America’s most highly respected business journalists, Joseph Nocera, published an extraordinary mea culpa, criticizing himself for having fallen for Steve’s charm back in 1986, when he spent a week as a “fly on the wall” at Next and wrote an effusively flattering profile of Steve for Esquire. Nocera had watched as Steve humiliated employees in meetings and obsessed over seemingly trivial details, such as what brand of juice to put in the company’s refrigerator, but he had nonetheless written a positive piece.
Now that Steve’s character flaws had produced a failed company, the journalist went back and reread his old notes. He published a new article, in the October 1993 issue of GQ, saying he was “ashamed” by how he had been seduced: “Like so many others before and since, I spent most of my time falling for Jobs. He knew exactly which buttons to push; that seems obvious to me now.”
Nocera wrote that Steve Jobs was by far the most charismatic person he had ever met, even after a decade of covering business leaders. He concluded: “The real tragedy of Jobs, I think, is that of all the people he deceived with his powerful aura, no one was more hypnotized than Jobs himself. No one bought into the myth of Steve Jobs more than Jobs.”
A couple of weeks later, Fortune profiled Steve as part of a scathing cover story titled “America’s Toughest Bosses,” writing that he was “brilliant and charming but explosive and abusive” and that his “inhuman drive for perfection can burn out even the most motivated worker.” At the end of the piece, the reporter added: “Though Jobs declined to be interviewed for this article, his office did make available several current Next employees who wanted to tell you that Steve is going through a ’major personality change’ . . .”
Not surprisingly, the Fortune reporter remained skeptical of the sugar-coated corporate spin. But in reality, this man who was so fond of abusive tirades and seduce-and-abandon roller-coaster rides was beginning to soften.
Steve’s famous intensity had greatly diminished. Much of the time he withdrew from the turmoil of his career and retreated into the comfort of his family life. He called truces in some old wars. His ex-protégé Susan Barnes rejoined his circle of friends, but when she called his office to set up a meeting with him, it was hard to find a time when Steve would