The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [77]
For years his rare appearances at the Pixar building were like Elvis sightings. He had been the distant investor, the absentee landlord. Now, he yearned to be a star player in what seemed destined to become the blockbuster movie of the holiday season.
At Apple and Next, Steve had been accustomed to everything revolving around himself. But when he descended on Pixar, he found that everything revolved around another man: John Lasseter. John had become the vital creative force and the spiritual leader, the very soul of the company. John was the one whom everyone—artists, engineers, marketing people—looked to for guidance and approval. John made the decisions. The culture was a reflection of John’s smart, warm, quirky personality. He nurtured and touched and hugged people affectionately and inspired a sense of family and acceptance. In some ways he was like an arrested adolescent, and he loved to have all kinds of toys and random pop-culture kitsch strewn around the cluttered offices.
John and Steve were both exuberant, persuasive, and charismatic, but they were polar opposites in their aesthetics and their instinctive leadership methods. Steve adhered to deprivation diets, strived to remain bone-thin even into his middle age, and dressed nearly every day in black. John was a chubby guy who scarfed greasy hamburgers and wore outrageously colorful Hawaiian shirts. While Steve decorated Next’s offices with stiff black leather couches that cost $10,000 apiece, John filled the Pixar screening room with comfy mismatched thrift-shop sofas that were falling apart. John’s style was homey and playful. Steve’s had once been playful but now it was serious, austere, and elegantly minimalistic. John motivated his people through a sense of mutual love and respect. Steve used to inspire extraordinary love, but more and more he had come to rely on intimidation and fear. Now that he was successful again, he was reverting back to his terrifying old self, as if he had never been softened or humbled by his long period of failure.
He was Bad Steve again. And John was . . . the anti-Steve!
Steve’s sudden presence provoked wariness and anxiety at Pixar. When he tried to intervene in creative matters, he inevitably clashed with John, whose positions were always backed by the other executives, Ed Catmull and Pam Kerwin and Ralph Guggenheim.
Before long Steve tried to push the balance of power in his favor by bringing in his own man. He hired Lawrence Levy as the chief financial officer. Lawrence was bright and appealingly young (thirty-six) and he wasn’t a backstabber. In his previous job as the No. 2 guy at a Silicon Valley startup, Electronics for Imaging (EFI), he had proven that he could get along in the shadows of a strong-willed entrepreneurial founder. Lawrence had taken EFI public and then driven up its stock price. He was the kind of smoothly competent fellow who evoked the trust and confidence of Wall Street’s securities analysts. Steve interviewed and hired him with the explicit idea that Lawrence would soon become Pixar’s chief executive officer and that he would take the company public the following year.
Pixar’s old guard weren’t surprised that Steve would want to have “his own man” there as his eyes and ears; indeed, they wondered why he hadn’t done it years ago, why it took so long for him to wise up. Still, it was an affront that Steve’s guy wasn’t going to just keep a watch on them—he was going to be their boss. The Pixar veterans were enraged. They felt it was a brutal insult for Steve to bring in an outsider to displace their patriarch and technological visionary, Ed Catmull. Toy Story was the realization of a dream that Ed had been pursuing with unyielding faith for nearly a quarter century. Pixar was Ed’s brainchild.
“People jumped to Ed’s defense,” recalls Pam Kerwin. “There were meetings with people saying plaintively: ’Ed, why