The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [99]
With his back turned away from her, Steve waved and told her to sit down.
Kate eyed a pile of “Think Different” T-shirts as she waited for four minutes.
Steve turned to her.
“Hi, how ya doing?” he said amiably. Then he held up a printout of her message. “Can you tell me what this is?”
Steve had “sniffing” software that could screen and search his employees’ e-mail.
“I was encouraged by your talk, and I just wanted to tell my friend Dave.”
“You realize this is the kind of thing that can be published?” he asked.
“Well, it already has,” she said.
“Do you realize this hundred-million-dollar figure is proprietary?” he continued. His tone was serious and confrontational but not outright hostile.
As she was walking out, he said:
“By the way, what do you do in the QuickTime group?”
“I’m on the engineering team,” she said.
“OK.”
She escaped. She knew that if she had said “marketing,” she would have been fired. Steve still needed Apple’s engineers, but he had no respect for its marketing people.
• • •
BEFORE STEVE’S TAKEOVER, Apple people loved to leak. They did so partly because the company really did have lackluster marketing. If you were proud of your work, the only way to let other people in the industry know about it was to leak it yourself. A number of websites, like Mac OS Rumors, were devoted exclusively to Apple gossip.
Steve insisted on his old “loose lips sink ships” policy. At first the employees were incensed. Before long, though, they began to trust Steve to do Apple’s marketing for them.
Still, the Apple rank and file remained fearful of the Bad Steve persona. Word got around about Steve going into meetings, saying “this is shit” and firing people on the spot. People worried about getting trapped with him in an elevator for a few seconds, afraid that they might not have a job when the doors opened. The reality was that Steve’s summary executions were rare, but a handful of victims is enough to terrorize a whole company.
For a while there was an elevator in Steve’s building that had protective coverings on its walls because construction was going on, and someone said: “This must be Steve’s elevator since it’s padded.” Another employee responded: “Is it for him or for us?”
Apple needed some kind of shake-up. It was filled with people who had virtually ignored and ultimately outlasted three CEOs as they did their own things. “I don’t know if the previous CEOs at Apple had any effect on that company,” says John Warnock of Adobe, which is Apple’s biggest software provider. “We would have meetings with all those CEOs and nothing would happen, no traction, unless the group responsible went for the idea. The energy just dissipated into the organization, where the first person capable to make a decision is the one who makes it. But with Steve, he comes in with a very strong will and you sign up or get out of the way. You have to run Apple that way—very direct, very forceful. You can’t do it casually. When Steve attacks a problem, he attacks it with a vengeance. I think he mellowed during the Next years and he’s not so mellow anymore.”
Before Steve’s takeover, the campus had a leisurely atmosphere. Staffers loved to hang around smoking and chatting in the courtyard of the R&D complex, which always had ashtrays stocked at the outside and inside doors of all six of its buildings. Some employees seemed to spend most of their time throwing Frisbees to their dogs on the lawns.
Steve enforced new rules. He decreed that there would be no smoking anywhere on the Apple property. Then he banned dogs on campus, ostensibly because canines were messy and some people were allergic to them.
The employees were outraged: why didn’t Steve understand them? Smoking in the courtyard was how they networked with their