Inside Steve's Brain

by Leander Kahney

  • Include everyone. Design isn’t just for designers. Engineers, programmers, and marketers can help figure out how a product works.

  • Avoid a serial process. Jobs constantly passes prototype products between teams, not one team to the next.

  • Generate and test. Use trial and error—creating and editing— to make an “embarrassing” number of solutions to get to one solution.

  • Don’t force it. Jobs doesn’t try to conciously design a “friendly” product. The “friendliness” emerges from the design process.

  • Respect materials. The iMac was plastic. The iPhone is glass.

  Their forms follow the materials they are made from.

  Chapter 4

  Elitism: Hire Only A Players, Fire the Bozos

  “In our business, one person can’t do anything anymore. You create a team of people around you.”

  —Steve Jobs, Smithsonian Institution Oral and Video Histories

  Steve Jobs has a reputation as the boss from hell, a terror-inspiring taskmaster who’s forever screaming at workers and randomly firing hapless underlings. But throughout his career, Jobs has struck up a long string of productive partnerships—both personal and corporate. Jobs’s success has greatly depended on attracting great people to do great work for him. He’s always chosen great collaborators—from his Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak to the London-born design genius Jonathan Ive, who’s responsible for the iMac, iPod, and other iconic designs.

  Jobs has successfully struck up working relationships with some of the most creative people in his field, relationships that frequently last for many years. He’s also forged (mostly) harmonious relationships with some of the world’s top brands— Disney, Pepsi, and the big record labels. Not only does he choose great creative partners, he also brings out the best in them. Through judicious use of both the carrot and the stick, Jobs has managed to retain and motivate lots of top-shelf talent.

  Jobs is an elitist who believes that a small A team is far more effective than armies of engineers and designers. Jobs has always sought out the highest quality in people, products, and advertising. Unlike a lot of companies that recruit more and more staff as they get bigger, Jobs has kept the core of Apple relatively small, especially the key A team of select designers, programmers, and executives. Many of Jobs’s A team have worked at Apple, and for Jobs, for years. After he returned to Apple, most of the company’s top management were executives he brought with him from NeXT. It’s not easy working for Jobs, but those who can weather it tend to be loyal.

  Jobs’s strategy is to hire the smartest programmers, engineers, and designers available. He works hard to maintain their allegiance with stock options, and fosters the identity of small working groups. “I always considered part of my job was to keep the quality level of people in the organizations I work with very high,” said Jobs. “That’s what I consider one of the few things I actually can contribute individually to—to really try to instill in the organization the goal of only having ‘A’ players. In everything I’ve done it really pays to go after the best people in the world.”1

  In Jobs’s view, there’s not much difference between a bad taxi driver and a good one, or a bad restaurant cook and a good one. Jobs has said that a good taxi driver is maybe two or three times as good as a bad one. In the taxi-driving profession, there aren’t that many levels of skill dividing good from bad. But when it comes to industrial design or programming, the difference between good and bad is vast. A good designer is one hundred or two hundred times better than a poor one. In programming, there are many, many levels of skill separating great programmers from mediocre ones, Jobs believes.2

  Jobs is the kind of person who wants the best—the best car, the best private jet, the best pen, and the best employees. “He does tend to polarize things,” Jim Oliver, Jobs’s former personal assistant, told me. “People are geniuses, or bozos. There was a Pilot pen that was his favorite. All the others are ‘crap.’ ” When working on the Mac, everyone not on the Mac team— even inside Apple—were “bozos.” “There was a lot of elitism at the company,” said Daniel Kottke, a close friend of Jobs’s who traveled with him around India. “Steve definitely cultivated this idea that everyone else in the industry were bozos.”3

  Jobs’s first partner, and perhaps the most important, was his high school friend Steve Wozniak. Wozniak was the nerdy hardware genius who made his own PC because he couldn’t afford to buy one. It was Jobs who thought of making and selling Wozniak’s designs, and arranged for them to be assembled by their teenage friends in a garage. He also arranged for them to be sold at a local hobbyist electronics store. Jobs was soon recruiting outside talent to grow the company and develop its products. True to form, Jobs tried to persuade the two top design firms in Silicon Valley to design Apple’s early computers, but couldn’t afford them. Since then, Jobs has followed the same modus operandi—recruit and retain the best, from the original Mac team to the storytellers at Pixar.

  Pixar: Art Is a Team Sport

  Jobs’s dedication to building an A team is best illustrated by Pixar, the animation studio he sold to Disney in 2006 for $7.4 billion. In 1995, Pixar released Toy Story, the first feature-length, computer-animated movie, which went on to become the highest grossing film of the year and won an Oscar. Every year since 1995, Pixar has released one hit after another—A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo. The movies have earned $3.3 billion and won a clutch of Oscars and Golden Globes. It’s a remarkable record, unrivaled by any other studio in Hollywood. Even more remarkable, it was achieved by flipping Hollywood’s traditional working method on its head.

  Pixar is headquartered in several smoked-glass-and-steel buildings on a leafy campus in Emeryville, a former port town across the bay from San Francisco. The campus has a relaxed, collegial atmosphere. It boasts all the perks of a high-tech, twenty-first-century workplace: swimming pools, movie theaters, and a cafeteria with a wood-burning stove. Everywhere there is whimsy: full-size statues of animated characters, doorways disguised as swinging bookshelves, a reception desk that sells toys. Instead of cubicles, the company’s animators work in their own private huts, literally garden huts assembled in a row, like a string of beach huts, each idiosyncratically decorated—a tiki hut, for example, could be next to a mini medieval castle with a mock moat.

  Pixar is run by Ed Catmull, a friendly, soft-spoken pioneer of CGI, or computer-generated imagery, who invented some of the key technologies that make computer animation possible. Since the acquisition of Pixar by Disney in January 2006, Catmull has become president of the combined Pixar and Disney Animation Studios. The storytelling heart of the company is John Lasseter, Pixar’s Academy Award-winning creative genius. A big, avuncular man who normally dresses in colorful Hawaiian shirts, Lasseter has directed four Pixar blockbusters: Toy Story 1 and 2, A Bug’s Life, and Cars. Lasseter is now the chief creative officer at Disney, where he’s charged with spreading some of Pixar’s magic around the tarnished Disney animation division.

  At Apple, Jobs is a hands-on micromanager. But at Pixar, Jobs pretty much stays away, leaving the day-to-day running in the capable hands of Catmull and Lasseter. For years, he was pretty much a benevolent benefactor who cut checks and negotiated deals. “If I knew in 1986 how much it was going to cost to keep Pixar going, I doubt if I would have bought the company,” Jobs complained to Fortune in September 1995.

  “I refer to those guys as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” jokes Brad Bird, director of Pixar’s The Incredibles. “Ed, who invented this cool medium and is the designer of the human machine that is Pixar, is the Father. John, its driving creating force, is the Son. And you-know-who is the Holy Ghost.”4

  According to authors Polly LaBarre and William C. Taylor, who profiled Pixar for their book Mavericks at Work, the culture of Pixar is the opposite of Hollywood, which is based on hiring moviemakers under contract. In Tinseltown, studios hire the talent they need to make a movie on a freelance basis. The produ
cer, the director, the actors, and the crew all work under contract. Everyone is a free agent, and as soon as the movie is wrapped, they move on. “The problem with the Hollywood model is that it’s generally the day you wrap production that you realize you’ve finally figured out how to work together,” Randy S. Nelson, the dean of Pixar University,5 told Taylor and LaBarre.

  Pixar functions on the opposite model. At Pixar, the directors, scriptwriters, and crew are all salaried employees with big stock option grants. Pixar’s movies may have different directors, but the same core team of writers, directors, and animators work on them all as company employees.

  In Hollywood, studios fund story ideas—the famous Hollywood pitch, the big concept. Instead of funding pitches and story ideas, Pixar funds the career development of its employees. As Nelson explains: “We’ve made the leap from an idea-centered business to a people-centered business. Instead of developing ideas, we develop people. Instead of investing in ideas, we invest in people.”

  At the heart of the company’s “people investment” culture is Pixar University, an on-the-job training program that offers hundreds of courses in art, animation, and filmmaking. All of Pixar’s employees are encouraged to take classes in whatever they like, whether it’s relevant to their job or not. At other studios, there’s a clear distinction between the “creatives,” the “techies,” and the crew. But Pixar’s unique culture doesn’t distinguish between them—everyone who works on the movies is considered an artist. Everyone works together to tell stories, and as such, everyone is encouraged to devote at least four hours of the workweek to class. The classes are filled with people from all levels of the organization: janitors sit next to department heads. “We’re trying to create a culture of learning, filled with lifelong learners,” said Nelson.6

  At Pixar, they say “art is a team sport.” It’s a mantra, oft repeated. No one can make a movie alone, and a team of good storytellers can fix a bad story, but a poor team cannot. If a script isn’t working, the whole team works together to fix it. The writers, the animators, and the director all pitch in without regard to their official role or job title. “This model tackles one of the most enduring people problems in any industry: How do you not only attract wildly talented people to work in your company, but also get those wildly talented people to continuously produce great work together?” said LaBarre.

  The answer is that Pixar has created a nurturing, fun place to work. In Hollywood, filmmakers spend a lot of time jockeying for advantage, stabbing collaborators in the back to gain advantage, and constantly worrying whether they are in or out. It’s hypercompetitive, insecure, and burns people out. At Pixar, the process is all about collaboration, teamwork, and learning. There’s pressure, of course, especially when movies approach deadlines, but the workplace is generally nurturing and supportive. The opportunity to learn, to create, and, most of all, to work with other talented people is the reward. Plus the generous stock options, of course. At Pixar, the animators are getting rich and having fun, too. As the Latin inscription on the Pixar University crest says Alienus Non Diutius, Alone No Longer.

  As a result, Pixar has poached some of the best animation talent in Hollywood. Other top Pixar animators include Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo), Brad Bird (The Incredibles, Ratatouille), and Pete Docter (Monsters Inc.) who have all been aggressively headhunted by competitors. For many years Lasseter had a standing offer from Disney to jump ship, which he resisted because of the unique creative work environment at Pixar. None of the other studios could compete, not even Disney. As Jobs boasted: “Pixar’s got by far and away the best computer graphics talent in the entire world, and it now has the best animation and artistic talent in the whole world to do these kinds of film. There’s really no one else in the world who could do this stuff. It’s really phenomenal. We’re probably close to ten years ahead of anybody else.”7

  The Original Mac Team

  At Apple, Jobs takes a similar view: the talent on staff is a competitive advantage that puts the company ahead of its rivals. Jobs tries to find the best people in a given field and put them on the payroll. When Jobs was conducting his product review after returning to the company, he “steved” most of Apple’s products, but he made sure to keep the best talent on staff, among them designer Jonathan Ive. When Jobs wanted to open a chain of Apple retail stores in 2001, the first thing he did, the very first thing, was find the best person in retail to advise him. Jobs was afraid of getting burned, and so went looking for an expert. ”We looked at it and said, ‘You know, this is probably really hard, and really easy for us to get our head handed to us,’ ” Jobs told Fortune magazine. “So we did a few things. No. 1, I started asking who was the best retail executive at the time. Everybody said [Millard] Mickey Drexler, who was running the Gap.” Jobs recruited Drexler to sit on Apple’s board and advise the company as it got Apple’s retail chain off the ground (more on the stores later).

  Jobs’s first A team—Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, Burrell Smith, et al.—was assembled in 1980 to build the original Mac and they worked under a pirate flag at Apple HQ.

  The core of the Mac team was assembled by Jef Raskin, the original Mac team leader, but Jobs did a lot of the recruiting himself. He pulled in talent from all over Apple and Silicon Valley, without regard to job title or experience. If he judged someone fit to contribute, he did everything he could to recruit them. Bruce Horn, for example, a programmer who created the Mac’s Finder—the heart of the Mac’s operating system—didn’t initially want to work at Apple, until he was seduced by Jobs. Horn had just taken a job with another company, VTI, which promised him a $15,000 signing bonus, a large sum of money at the time. Then Jobs called.

  Horn recalled: On Friday evening, I got a phone call. “Bruce, it’s Steve. What do you think about Apple?” It was Steve Jobs. “Well, Steve, Apple’s cool, but I accepted a job at VTI.”

  “You did what? Forget that, you get down here tomorrow morning, we have a lot more things to show you. Be at Apple at 9 a.m.” Steve was adamant. I thought I’d go down, go through the motions, and then tell him that I’d made up my mind and was going to VTI.

  Steve switched on the Reality Distortion Field full-force. I met with seemingly everyone on the Mac team, from Andy to Rod Holt to Jerry Manock to the other software engineers, and back to Steve. Two full days of demos, drawings of the various designs, marketing presentations—I was overwhelmed.

  On Monday I called Doug Fairbairn at VTI and told him I had changed my mind.8

  Once he’d assembled his team, Jobs gave them the freedom to be creative and shielded them from the growing bureaucracy at Apple, which tried several times to shut down the Mac project because they viewed it as an unimportant distraction. “The people who are doing the work are the moving force behind the Macintosh. My job is to create a space for them, to clear out the rest of the organization and keep it at bay,”9 Jobs wrote in a 1984 essay that was printed in the inaugural issue of Macworld magazine. Hertzfeld put it more bluntly: “The most important thing Steve did was erect a giant shit-deflecting umbrella that protected the project from the evil suits across the street.”10

  As well as recruiting the best talent, Jobs is quick to get rid of those who don’t measure up. Hiring only insanely great employees and firing the bozos has been one of Jobs’s longest held managerial principles. “It’s painful when you have some people who are not the best people in the world and you have to get rid of them; but I found that my job has sometimes exactly been that—to get rid of some people who didn’t measure up and I’ve always tried to do it in a humane way. But nonetheless it has to be done and it is never fun,” Jobs said in a 1995 interview.11

  Small Is Beautiful

  Jobs likes to work in small teams. He didn’t want the original Mac team to exceed one hundred members, lest it became unfocused and unmanageable. Jobs firmly believes that small teams of talented employees run circles around larger groups. At Pixar, Jobs tried to ensure that the company never grew to more than a fe
w hundred people. When asked to compare Apple and Pixar, Jobs attributed much of its success to its small size. “Apple has some pretty amazing people, but the collection of people at Pixar is the highest concentration of remarkable people that I have ever witnessed,” Jobs told Fortune in 1998. “There’s a person who’s got a Ph.D. in computer-generated plants—3-D grass and trees and flowers. There’s another who is the best in the world at putting imagery on film. Also, Pixar is more multidisciplinary than Apple ever will be. But the key thing is that it is much smaller. Pixar’s got 450 people. You could never have the collection of people that Pixar has now if you went to two thousand people.”

  Jobs’s philosophy harks back to the old days when he, Wozniak, and a few teenage friends assembled computers by hand in a garage. To some extent, Jobs’s preference for small development teams at Apple today is the same thing: a simulation of a garage startup inside a big company with more than 21,000 employees.

  On returning to Apple in 1997, Jobs set about assembling an A team to resurrect the company. Several of the top executives he appointed had worked with him before at NeXT, including Jon Rubinstein, who he put in charge of hardware; Avie Tevanian, who headed up software; and David Manovich, who was put in charge of sales. Jobs has a reputation as a micromanager, but at NeXT he had learned to trust these lieutenants. He no longer oversees every decision the way he used to. At Pixar, Jobs delegated almost everything to Catmull and Lasseter. At Apple, Jobs cedes much of the day-to-day management to Tim Cook, the chief operating officer, a master at operations and logistics who is widely considered the number two at Apple. When Jobs took six weeks’ sick leave in 2005 after his cancer operation, Cook took over as acting CEO. Ron Johnson, head of retail, manages almost everything to do with Apple’s chain of retail stores; while chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer handles finances and deals with Wall Street. Delegation at Apple frees up Jobs to do what he loves best—develop new products.