The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [97]
Steve’s attitude wasn’t confrontational. He wanted to absorb a vast amount of information before he took action. Still, there was always an undercurrent of tension, and Steve would occasionally upbraid people if they didn’t seem to realize the urgency of the situation. Gil had made extensive cuts, but Steve was going to cut a lot more. Steve said that he would keep only the great products and the profitable products. If something was unprofitable but strategic, its managers would have to argue for its continued existence.
During the first review meeting with a group, Steve would listen and absorb. In the second meeting, he would ask a series of difficult and provocative questions. “If you had to cut half your products, what would you do?” he would ask. He would also take a positive tack: “If money were no object, what would you do?”
The series of group meetings helped Steve to get to know hundreds of people at Apple. And once he knew the players, he would deal with them directly. He had total disregard for the hierarchical chain of command. He would remember what several hundred people did and call on whomever he needed, always bypassing their managers. It was as though everyone in the company reported directly to Steve himself. “Steve has the ability to buffer so much in his head,” Jim Oliver explains. “He can remember the last conversation and the last e-mail exchange that he had with three hundred people.”
He put especially intense pressure on the top executives. He tormented Heidi Roizen with constant calls to her office phone, home phone, cell phone, and pager, starting at 7 A.M. almost every day. She was so unnerved by his interrogations and his frequent tirades that she decided the only way to preserve her mental health was to ignore his calls. She tried to communicate with him only by e-mail, which enabled her to consider the issues calmly and rationally, unaffected by the irresistible force of his compelling live presence.
Heidi talked with Bill Campbell, whom Steve had named to Apple’s board of directors. Bill was a bona fide tough guy, a former college football coach, but he confessed that he, too, was unnerved by Steve’s constant phone calls.
“Do what I do,” she advised him. “Don’t answer the phone.”
“That’s what my wife said. I tried that. But then Steve would come over to my house. He lives only three blocks away.”
“Don’t answer the door.”
“I tried that. But my dog sees him and goes berserk.”
• • •
IN HIS FIRST MONTH as interim CEO, Steve began walking around the office carrying a sleekly curved piece of white foam. It was the model for the size and shape of a computer, which would eventually become known as the iMac, for “internet Macintosh.” It was the creation of Jonathan Ive, who was thirty and looked more like a scruffy bicycle messenger or skateboarder than the chief designer at a major manufacturer of consumer products.
While the physical look of the iMac had been conceived before Steve took over, everything else about the computer was still uncertain. Steve’s thinking was strongly influenced by his friendship with Larry Ellison as well as their unspoken rivalry. Larry believed the future belonged to stripped-down machines, called network computers, or NCs, that would connect to the Internet and cost only half as much as PCs. He had even started his own company, Network Computer Inc., to try to cash in on the idea.
Steve decided that the iMac would be a network computer with a retail price of $799. “We’re going to beat Ellison at his own game,” he told his Apple colleagues, who were surprised to