Editor’s note: This article was first published in August 2011; it was written on 27 August 2011, days after Steve Jobs stepped down as Apple CEO and handed over to Tim Cook. Jobs died on 5 October 2011, so the present tense and the wish for a peaceful retirement reflect that moment.
Steve Jobs has always been someone we’ve admired for his constant fight in business, because everything he achieved he earned through hard work and on his own merits. In another article we covered the early days of Steve Jobs and Apple. Today it’s time to talk about what we might call Steve’s dark side.
Like every genius, inventor and creator, he has his quirks. In Jobs’s case, he has lived for and through business. According to his biographer, Leander Kahney, Steve has only ever loved one thing in his life, and that thing is a company called Apple. As a CEO, however, he’s probably the last person you’d want to work for: adjectives such as “lacking manners”, rude, lunatic and paranoid come up readily when you ask people who have dealt with him. We take a look at the CEO who lived inside this business genius and at some details of how Apple works internally.
A temper that’s hard to handle and hard to bear
Steve Jobs is a very difficult person to deal with and impossible to manage. That’s how some of his former employees, and even some who are still at the company, describe him. If being a perfectionist is a virtue in business, in Jobs’s case it was one of his biggest flaws, because sometimes even he didn’t know how he wanted things done.
Steve knew that something wasn’t right or could be better, but he didn’t know what was wrong or how to improve it, so he handed the task to his staff and nobody went home until it was solved. He shouted, insulted people and threatened every 10 minutes to fire the whole team for incompetence. If workplace-climate surveys had been common back in ’83, Apple would have failed them.
This video shows the presentation of the Mac, where we see a Steve Jobs proud of his creation. It’s said that the team in charge of preparing the details of the presentation worked for 50 hours straight, and that “heads rolled” just hours before the event.
Watch: Steve Jobs presents the Macintosh
The Steve Jobs with no manners who “loses it”
Steve Jobs lived in constant, unnecessary stress. His executives didn’t want him to negotiate in person, because they knew that at times he lost his head and put both Apple’s image and the negotiation itself at risk.
Some say the film Pirates of Silicon Valley exaggerated Jobs’s character, but people who have worked under him insist it fell short, because Jobs could be much worse.
He liked to sit in on job interviews, or to walk in halfway through, in order to humiliate the candidates. He didn’t hesitate to ask them at what age they had lost their virginity, how often they masturbated, or whether they shouldn’t get some exercise to lose weight, because obese people supposedly don’t think clearly. Nobody ever found out why he asked such questions, whether he simply did it for fun or to let off steam.
During a negotiation at a restaurant, he completely ignored the executive sitting across from him and turned his attention to the man’s wife, asking her whether she was really a natural blonde. Unsurprisingly, the negotiation didn’t end well, and when he was asked to explain himself, Steve argued that his company didn’t work with ill-tempered people.
How Apple works inside
Apple operates much like the CIA, because Jobs is meticulous about secrecy. Apple executives feed false information to their employees to find out who’s leaking outside the company. Naturally, each person gets a different rumor, so it isn’t hard to identify the employee who leaked it.
Cameras and microphones are in every corner, and it’s even been said that when Apple is working on a new product, security is stepped up: the company hires security staff to watch every camera for any movement inside the building and, if necessary, to search employees so that nobody leaves with a disk full of information.
Apple’s teams work toward objectives, and sometimes nobody leaves the building until the project is finished. The pressure is constant, Steve’s shouting is frequent and the atmosphere in the company is always tense.
Apple stopped donating to philanthropic causes when Steve returned to the company in 1997. At the time, some advisers told him this wasn’t right, since his rival Microsoft donated part of its income. Jobs’s answer was very clear: Bill Gates needed to clear his conscience, and he didn’t. Jobs has always maintained that Gates copied his idea. Later on, however, Apple went back to making donations.
When Steve Jobs went looking for inner spirituality
Steve Jobs knew and admitted that he had a problem with his temper. He knew he lived under constant stress and that, just as he took it out on his employees, he also spoiled the atmosphere at home and among his friends. There came a point when Jobs couldn’t count on anyone, because nobody wanted to get close to him after the constant public humiliations he subjected them to. It’s said that he slept in his office at Apple for 15 days without leaving it even to get some fresh air.
Steve first tried yoga, but he was still stressed and bad-tempered, until on a trip to India he discovered a way of life that relaxed him: Buddhism. After a short stay in India, Jobs came back with his head shaved. Since then, according to people who deal with him, he shouts less, is calmer and is easier to get along with. However, at a time when everything seemed calmer, and when Apple was already among the top companies by stock market capitalization, Steve Jobs received the news that he had pancreatic cancer.
We all know the rest of the story. After a string of successes, his illness has forced Jobs to step away from the business world and spend more time with his family, handing his post over to Tim Cook.
Even if a little “monster” hides inside this genius, the truth is that Steve Jobs has millions of followers around the world and has won the hearts of a great many people, to the point that some users would literally sell a kidney to buy one of his products. Jobs was the person who paved the way for what we now call technology.
We hope he enjoys a peaceful and happy retirement. His professional career is already on record, and he will always be an example in the history books whenever people talk about the greatest entrepreneurs and inventors.
Further reading
Featured image: Carol Rukomii Holladay, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
