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Steve Jobs: The Journey is the Reward

Excerpt

    There's a magic to the light up in the canyons and arroyos of California's Santa Cruz Mountain Range. During late summer and fall warm air from inland collides with cool moist winds rising out of the ocean to create an infinite variety of sunlight and mist paintings above the mountains. Fingers of white fog from the Pacific Ocean creep over the ridge like tentacles, spilling down into the miles of protected forests, high reservoirs and wilderness park lands that make up the spine dividing Silicon Valley from the ocean. As the sun sinks behind the hills, canyon after canyon up the eastern slope is picked out in a sequence of cascading relief, like a landscape of falling dominoes. Dramatic, continuously changing, and breathtakingly beautiful, this is the view from the rolling lawns that stretch out for several acres behind Steven Paul Jobs' Woodside California home.

    Set on a slight rise, with a sparse screen of California oaks framing the rolling lawns, the house is a two-story Spanish style mansion of white stucco and red adobe roof tiles. Cool and dark, it is decorated with an ascetic's restraint. There is very little furniture in the living rooms. Very little of anything. A couple of chairs. Enormous six foot high stereo speakers and a state-of-the-art stereo. And rows of French-doors and windows that look out over the rolling lawns, trees and canyons, towards the west, towards the setting sun, towards one red navigational light, set high up on the ridge of mountains, that burns constantly in the night time darkness.

    On Tuesday evening September 17th, 1985, as the sun set with a particularly dramatic flourish, Steve Jobs, 30 years old, founder and resident visionary of Apple Computer, for ten years the primary worldwide evangelist for the coming of the personal computer age, an orphan and all-around mythic American figure, turned in his letter of resignation to the company he had founded. Composed on the Macintosh computer which he had muscled and cajoled into existence, printed on the Laserprinter that he had at first opposed then aggressively championed, he drove the three miles to fellow founder Armas Clifford (Mike) Markkula's nearby Woodside house to hand deliver it. It closed a remarkable chapter in American popular history.

It opened another.

Dear Mike,
This morning's papers carried suggestions that Apple is considering removing me as Chairman. I don't know the source of these reports, but they are both misleading to the public and unfair to me.

You will recall that at last Thursday's Board meeting I stated I had decided to start a new venture, and I tendered my resignation as Chairman.

The Board declined to accept my resignation and asked me to defer it for a week. I agreed to do so in light of the encouragement the Board offered with regard to the proposed new venture and the indications that Apple would invest in it. On Friday, after I told John Sculley who would be joining me, he confirmed Apple's willingness to discuss areas of possible collaboration between Apple and my new venture.

Subsequently the Company appears to be adopting a hostile posture toward me and the new venture. Accordingly, I must insist upon the immediate acceptance of my resignation. I would hope that in any statement it feels it must issue, the Company will make it clear that the decision to resign as Chairman was mine.

I find myself both saddened and perplexed by the management's conduct in this matter which seems to me contrary to Apple's best interests. Those interests remain a matter of deep concern to me, both because of my past association with Apple and the substantial investment I retain in it.

I continue to hope that calmer voices within the Company may yet be heard. Some Company representatives have said they fear I will use proprietary Apple technology in my new venture. There is no basis for any such concern. If that concern is the real source of Apple's hostility to the venture, I can allay it.

As you know, the company's recent re-organization left me with no work to do and no access even to regular management reports. I am but 30 and want still to contribute and achieve.

After what we have accomplished together, I would wish our parting to be both amicable and dignified.

Yours sincerely,
Steven P. Jobs

    Returning in his silver-blue Mercedes coupe down the winding overgrown lanes of the wealthy suburban cowboy's paradise that is Woodside, his closest allies had already hauled down the Apple flag that had been flying from his personal flagpole. In its place they ran up a new skull-and-crossbones, the same one that had flown over the Macintosh buildings several years earlier, and the buccanneering spirit was definitely the same. Surrounded by five loyal senior former Apple employees who had resigned en masse the previous Friday, the young pirate king of American computing was setting sail on a new journey. He was starting on the next leg in his journey.

    One of the big differences was that this time his adventure was being played out in bold headlines, on the nightly news, and it was the power of that free publicity which would catapult him to an even greater level of public notoriety. Over the years he had learned how to work the press to maximum advantage. When he returned to his mansion that afternoon, there was a phalanx of reporters waiting for him. He carefully read the letter of resignation into a forest of microphones, and then started fielding questions. He looked weary, there were circles under his eyes, yet he was exceedingly gracious. It was difficult not to see him as the aggrieved party, the wronged youthful founder cut adrift by the ungrateful corporation, which was exactly according to plan. His timing was impeccable - this staged event was in just enough time for the overnight deadlines of the big Eastern papers - and it quashed coverage of an enhanced Apple II product announcement. It was vintage Steve Jobs. He had hit the road running, and it was the world's media that carried the story his way.

    Could he do it again? And so soon? The stakes had changed drastically in the intervening ten years since he had co-founded Apple. The seas of personal computing were no longer uncharted, as they had been when Jobs and his friend Stephen Wozniak first decided to sell a homemade circuit board called the Apple, in 1976. An enormous industry had grown up around him - and while parts of it were definitely due to his influence, other developments had occurred in spite of him. The industry's meteoric growth was fuelled partly by his personal charisma, partly by the neat fit of a rapidly expanding technological capability with deep currents of America's psychic needs, and partly by a stroke of fortuitous timing and savvy packaging that catapulted the Apple II computer into the forefront of the personal computer age. His youth and good-looks, an ability to say the quotable thing, wealth beyond measure after Apple's stock offering, and an American public looking for a hero to forget the disastrous seventies, all coalesced in one slender, intense young man. In him we created a myth.

    Given his youth, the explosion of the computer field, the adulation, adoration and deification of him that the press spawned and supported, the power that he came to possess, and the particularly intriguing mix of machine and mind that personal computers represented, is it surprising that he came to believe the idolatry? At 23 he was a millionaire. At 24 he was worth $10 million. By 25 his net worth was over $100 million. He was the youngest person ever to make the Forbes list of the nation's richest people—and one of only a handful to have done it themselves, without inherited wealth. Here was a young man who had provided more than 4000 people with jobs—and who wielded the power to remove those jobs at will. A man who could breezily name a major computer, with millions of dollars in development and marketing behind it, after his illegitimate daughter Lisa—and just as arbitrarily close down that entire line when it took longer than projected to succeed and threatened to negatively affect his "baby", the Macintosh. A man who could unilaterally decree that there would be no letter-quality printer support for that Macintosh, even though the computer was ostensibly targeted at the business marketplace where those printers were standard—and even though excellent letter-quality driver software had been developed in his own labs, was thoroughly debugged, and standing ready to be shipped. How do you keep your head in the face of it? How could he not believe that it was he himself, his unique set of skills and insights that had almost single-handedly made the personal computer industry what it was on the day he resigned?

    Apple Computer captured the imagination of the world in a way that few companies or industrial products can ever hope for. Profit is the fundamental bottom line for business, but Apple was started because the founders wanted to have fun, to do something neat, and eventually, when they had the power and position to do so, to change the world. Making money was a nice side benefit, but they would have done what they were doing anyway - these guys weren't in it for the money because when they started, there wasn't any money. That difference in emphasis can't be overstated—it is absolutely fundamental to the attraction that the company, and its products, have for much of the world. The creators had personality, they were excited by what they were doing, they weren't calculating all the angles and caroms for every business decision they made: they were making choices based on the seat of their pants and what they wanted in a computer—which was both the company's great strength, and eventually, Steve Jobs' downfall. They were outlaws, renegades in a world of three-piece suits and marketing plans, pirates operating under their own set of rules. But like all pirates, returning to life on dry land was much harder than setting sail.

    Steve Jobs was the pirate king, the charismatic emblematic leader who could galvanize the troops within Apple, and who could be the front man, the point man, the visionary to the public. He was never the architect of Apple's success. Jobs was neither the careful business and marketing planner, which was Mike Markkula's role, nor the brilliant creator of the company's machines. This latter role belonged at first to Steve Wozniak or "Woz" as he is widely known, and then others of similar calibre who the company could attract with its unique blend of business and vision. But Jobs was the person who had the visions, then could translate those visions into profit, creating, marshalling, driving and spurring the company on to success while constantly reiterating, rephrasing, reformulating, readjusting the dream. He was the bridge between bottom-line profit and the top-of-the-mountain ideas of the computer visionaries that Apple always wanted to incorporate into their product line.

    But he retained enough of the sense of the naive user, even amidst the specialists he was surrounded with, that he could always provide vision to the brilliant engineers, a vision that spurred them. And then, when they had figured out how to make that vision come true, he could explain the vision, and give it a measure of value, to the public. To market it. And that is where his unique contribution lies.

    But was it simply blind luck that created the opportunities he seized? Was his marketing of technology, the development of Apple's remarkably successful products, and the packaging of computing to the public a product of his particular personality...or was it simply chance, circumstances and a quick and facile opportunism that threw him into the headlines? Could anyone have sold computers as well, given the go-go years the industry went through from 1978 to 1985?

    Is he the Henry Ford of the computer industry, as he has compared himself with? Possibly. His skill, his gift, his art, and it is important not to downplay it, was the ability to inspire engineers to superhuman feats. For what characterizes Apple is that its scientific staff always acted and performed like artists—in a field filled with dry personalities limited by the rational and binary worlds they inhabit, Apple's engineering teams had passion. They always believed that what they were doing was important, and most-of-all, fun. Working at Apple was never just a job, it was also a crusade, a mission, to bring better computer power to people. At its roots that attitude came from Steve Jobs. It was "Power to the People", the slogan of the sixties, rewritten in technology for the eighties and called Macintosh.

    Was he closer to Thomas Edison? Probably not - Jobs is not an engineer. He is technically competent enough to direct an engineering design project, but not as an engineer. Jobs is the studio boss, the producer. Not the scriptwriter who creates the ideas. Not the cameraman who engineers the film. Not the actors who perform the work. Not the man who directs the action. Steve knows what he wants, and knows how to motivate a team of exceptional people to accomplish it.

    And that leads to another of his character traits that has been essential to Apple's producing exceptional products: he has always been completely uncompromising in his demands. From the very start Jobs was the rejecter, the critic, the person willing to demand that something be done over, and over, until it was perfect. Over the years a phrase entered the Macintosh vernacular. It had to do with "having the chance to do something right", and if you didn't catch that spirit you didn't last. It came directly from Jobs and his uncompromising attitude. Nothing less would ever do, and he was willing to take the heat of making the tough decisions. Of course, as time went on and his power gelled, there was less and less doubt in his mind, and in the minds of those he surrounded himself with, that his point-of-view was the right one, the only way, the right and proper path. And since none had ever walked this road before with personal computers, there were no signposts, no guides to follow. Eventually, there were fewer and fewer people around willing to tell the emperor that he had no clothes on. His idea of the customer was to look in the mirror.

    By default Steve Jobs became the personal computer industry's guru. But pirates live by the rule of the sword. In a few short months between April and September of 1985 he was removed from a day-to-day role managing the fortunes of the empire he created. And that was completely by design.

    On a Monday of the Memorial Day weekend in 1985, four months before he would eventually resign, Steve Jobs hosted a small dinner at his hilltop mansion. Present were a handful of his most trusted lieutenants: Mike Murray, Macintosh marketing manager; Debi Coleman, Macintosh manufacturing manager; Susan Barnes, financial controller for Macintosh; Bob Belleville, head of Macintosh engineering; and Mike Markkula, the co-founder of the company. The evening was a carefully orchestrated effort to sway Markkula, the only other board member present to Jobs' side in a battle of wills that was taking place in the board room of Apple.

    The dinner consisted of whole wheat pizzas, at Steve's cavernous house, with some wine and sparkling water. Markkula wasn't comfortable. He hardly knew any of the young folks, the heads of the Macintosh groups that Steve headed in his division. They were a generation apart from him, ten turbulent years younger. All but Belleville were born around the year 1955. And the engineer Belleville was in the worst trouble.

    By that Memorial Day weekend of 1985 Apple was indisputably an empire. In the early 1980's it had been the fastest growing company in the history of Wall Street. Its initial stock offering on December 12th 1980 was the most eagerly anticipated event in the securities business for years. By 1985 the company had five thousand employees, and plants in Texas, Ireland, Singapore and California. Over the intervening years they had produced the Apple II, which was the best selling personal computer ever manufactured. More than 2 million had been sold by mid 1985 and even then, eight years after its introduction, the machine, in its latest enhanced versions the IIc and IIe, was still a very hot item in the marketplace. There had been a couple of major failures along the way, but neither had permanently damaged the company.

    The Macintosh had been announced in 1984 to an enormous amount of attention and extraordinarily high hopes within the insulated enclave at Cupertino called Apple Computer. It was Steve Jobs' baby, from the time he was bounced out of the LISA development team for meddling in 1981, to the day he left the company four years later. The Mac contained many of the same graphics based ideas as its more expensive ancestor, but in a package that sold for less than half the cost. And because its champion was Chairman of the Board, the Macintosh had a way of receiving all the attention and resources of the company, while the LISA was relegated to the back seat.

    But then the Mac too fizzled in the marketplace as the juggernaut that was IBM continued to capture business market share with its no-nonsense PC. By 1985 the promise that was Macintosh was not fulfilled and some of the key players at the company were growing concerned. Products were slow in reaching the market and internally the Macintosh division, headed by Jobs, was floundering. Engineering projects were months behind schedule. Products were abruptly cancelled, then reinstated. Marketing strategies were being reformulated constantly, in a frantic effort to find the formula that could savage IBM. But nothing was working.

    John Sculley knew he had to do something. The question was how to do it. Sculley had been hired by Apple in May of 1983 from PepsiCo, where he had shown his marketing skills by guiding number two Pepsi to challenge Coca-Cola in the ruthless beverage industry. He was brought in to run Apple as a professional manager, the president to Jobs' chairman of the board when it became clear that Mike Markkula wanted to back out of day-to-day operations, and that Steve Jobs was not ready to take the helm of the company while Macintosh was still an unannounced product...or perhaps ever.

    For two years Sculley had bided his time, learning the business, formulating his plans. But chaos in the Macintosh division finally forced his hand in May of 1985. Sculley, egged on by powerful board member Arthur Rock a legendary venture capitalist, decided that he had to reorganize the company. His decision was to structure it not by individual products, which was how Apple's adversary internal product group relations had developed in the first place, but by overall business divisions, i.e. marketing, sales, manufacturing, support, as opposed to Apple II, Macintosh etc. And furthermore, he realized that he would never be able to control a manager under him who was also Chairman of the Board. His reorganization plan removed Jobs as the head of the Macintosh group and put him in charge of "New Product Development". It was the same role the headstrong chairman had taken at the beginning of Apple, nearly ten years before.

    As soon as Sculley presented the ideas to the Board of Directors in mid-May, Jobs rebelled. Realizing that he was being passed over, at least in terms of what he saw his role at Apple as, he tried to enlist support from the board and the executive staff for his own move to take over the company and oust Sculley. The president caught wind of it and confronted Jobs with his own machinations the following morning at an executive staff meeting. That afternoon, in tears, Jobs gathered his faithful and announced that he was leaving Apple. They physically restrained him and convinced him that he could do more good at Apple than outside. He agreed to think it over. That weekend he decided to try one last effort to convince Markkula to back him. It didn't work. The dinner at his house was the last ditch effort. But Markkula had already decided to throw his support solidly to Sculley. As he saw it, it was for the good of Apple. The next evening Sculley called Jobs to tell him that he had the votes necessary to go ahead with the reorganization and there would be no operating role for the founder within the new structure. Ten years after starting the company, Steve Jobs was a victim to the monster he had created. Over those years the friendly, cheery, amateurish world of computing had changed. In 1985 it was the big leagues. The game was hardball. Apple was playing in the World Series. And they had just fired their star pitcher.

    Steve Jobs went home to his mansion on the hill to think things over. Was it the end of the journey? Four months later, when he resigned and started the new company, his answer was clear. It was only the beginning. It was the journey that was the reward, not the destination.

    From today's perspective it is difficult to remember just how enormous a change had been wrought over those first ten years of Apple. The words "personal computer" were not even coined until 1976. The first reference listings for that heading in the New York Times' Index showed up in 1979. Today those two words are ubiquitous and every grade school child knows them, not to mention who and what Apple is. By 1982 the "Personal Computer" was Time Magazine's "Man of the Year". Today personal computers are standard issue in most offices, there are dozens of different makes and models, and entire companies have risen...and fallen. By 1986 the "Personal Computing” listings in the Times filled 10 pages. The industry was estimated to be worth $4 billion a year in the United States alone, and was considered the world's second largest business after agriculture - which has been around considerably longer. In ten short years the idea of a personal computer had entered the collective consciousness of the world, and especially the United States, with a vengeance. Then a decade later, along came the Internet and the combination of computers and information rewrote the equation of modern life.

    But why? What is it about a personal computer that is so entrancing? The answer must lie in the same constellation of qualities that made the automobile so important: personal freedom and control. For what both the personal computer, and the car, did was to free the individual from the limits imposed by others. The appearance of the Model T let every shop clerk and factory worker roar down the roads - any road, a road chosen freely by the driver, not by a railroad or transit company - with the top down and the wind in their hair. It was the exhilaration of choice, the freedom and independence that the car provided to "Everyman" that made it such an exceptional product and allowed it to fundamentally alter the character of the country.

    The personal computer with the Internet has that same quality about it. Sitting at a desk, tapping madly at a keyboard, limited only by the strength of your mind, the personal computer has the power to give back to the individual some measure of control. It's a heady, seductive thrill - more cerebral than the appeal of an automobile certainly - but in the same tradition. And just as the car fundamentally changed the fabric of American life, so the personal computer did in its first ten years.
"Basically Steve Wozniak and I invented the Apple because we wanted a personal computer. Not only couldn't we afford the computers that were on the market, those computers were impractical for us to use. We needed a Volkswagen.

    "The Volkswagen isn't as fast or comfortable as other ways of traveling, but the VW owners can go where they want, when they want and with whom they want. The VW owners have personal control of their car."

    One person. One computer. It was Steve Jobs' religion. It took him a number of tries to find it.

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