Inside Steve's Brain

by Leander Kahney

  Hewlett-Packard hired Goodby Silverstein, another superstar agency. The ads were interesting and very well done, but they never had the strength of personality of Apple’s ads, because the company doesn’t have the strength of personality. No matter how the ads tried to personalize HP the corporation through celebrities like Jay Z, it still felt like a company. Apple is more of a phenomenon than a company. Hewlett-Packard can never be quite as magical because it doesn’t have a personality. The same thing happened to Apple when Jobs left in 1985. “When Steve left, Apple became a company again,” said Berger. “The advertising was good, but it didn’t have that magic. It didn’t look like the same company. It wasn’t a phenomenon. It didn’t feel like a revolution. It was just trying to stabilize things.”

  Between the big, bold, brand-building campaigns, like “Think Different” and the iPod silhouettes, Apple mixes in more traditional product advertising. These product promotions focus on specific products, like the “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” campaign, which dramatized why it makes sense to buy an Apple computer.

  The campaigns represented the rival Mac and Windows platforms as two people. Up-and-coming actor Justin Long personified the effortlessly cool Mac, while comedian and author John Hodgeman represented the nerdy, accident-prone PC. In one spot, Hodgeman has a cold. He’s contracted a virus. He offers Long, the Mac, a handkerchief, which he politely declines because Macs are largely immune to computer viruses. In thirty seconds, the spot cleverly and economically conveyed a message about computer viruses. The ads create a memorable, dramatic situation—more so than HP’s individuals showing the contents of their computer.

  Like “Think Different,” the campaign had a big impact. It enjoyed a high profile and was widely parodied—a good measure of a campaign’s cultural impact.

  “They create this stuff that gets into the culture,” said Berger. “Soon enough people are talking about it, and he gets into others’ advertising. You see the same layouts, the same motifs, in other ads, in magazine and newspaper layouts. There’s a whole graphic design look; suddenly other advertisers have embraced it. The ‘Think Different’ posters. People put them on their wall. That’s really successful advertising. The ads became a phenomenon. You didn’t have to pay people to pass it around.”

  Not everyone loves Apple’s advertising. Seth Godin, author of several best-sellers about marketing, said Apple’s advertising has often been mediocre. “I’m underwhelmed by most of Apple’s advertising,” he told me by phone from his office in New York. “It’s not been effective. Apple’s advertising is more about pandering to the insiders than acquiring new users. If you have a Mac, you love Apple’s advertising because it says ‘I’m smarter than you.’ If you don’t have a Mac it says ‘you’re stupid.’ ”26

  The “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” ads have been described as unbearable smug. Many critics couldn’t stand Justin Long’s self-consciously hip Mac character, who had the poise and self-assurance that annoys some people. The stubble and a casual hoodie added to the irritation. Many in the target audience identified more with Hodgeman’s nebbish PC character, who was endearingly bumbling.

  “I hate Macs,” wrote British comedian Charlie Booker in a critique of the ads. “I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don’t use Macs but sometimes wish they did.... PCs have charm; Macs ooze pretension. When I sit down to use a Mac, the first thing I think is, ‘I hate Macs’, and then I think, ‘Why has this rubbish aspirational ornament only got one mouse button?’ ”

  Booker said the campaign’s biggest problem is that it “perpetuates the notion that consumers somehow ‘define themselves’ with the technology they choose.”

  He continues, “If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that ‘says something’ about your personality, don’t bother. You don’t have a personality. A mental illness, maybe— but not a personality.”27

  Conversely, the “Switchers” campaign, which ran in the early 2000s, was ripped for portraying Apple customers as losers. The campaign, shot by Oscar-winning documentarian Errol Morris, featured a series of ordinary people who had recently switched from Windows computers to Macs. Looking straight into Morris’s camera, they explained the reasons they switched, the problems they had been having with Windows, and rhapsodized their new love affair with the Mac. Trouble was, most seemed like they were running away from their problems. They couldn’t cope, and they had given up.

  “Apple couldn’t have picked a starker collection of life’s losers with which to promote the Macintosh,” wrote journalist Andrew Orlowski.28 “The message is a mass of conflicting signals. Having portrayed the Mac as the computer for over-achievers, it’s now suggesting that it’s a kind of refugee camp for life’s most bitter losers.”

  The “Think Different” campaign was criticized for using noncommercial figures, people who patently didn’t believe in commercial culture. It even included committed nonmaterialists like Gandhi and the Dalai Lama, who actively opposed commercialism. These figures would never endorse a product in a commercial—and here Apple was using them to endorse products. A lot of critics couldn’t believe Apple’s chutzpah and thought the company had stepped over the line.

  In Apple’s defense, Clow told the New York Times that Apple intended to honor the subjects of the campaign, not exploit them. “We’re not trying to say these people use Apple, or that if they could’ve used a computer, they would’ve used Apple. Instead, we’re going for the emotional celebration of creativity, which should always be part of how we speak about the brand.”29

  Allen Olivio, an Apple spokesperson at the time, said: “We would never associate these people with any product; it’s Apple celebrating them versus Apple using them. To say that Albert Einstein would have used a computer would cross the line. Why would he need one? But it’s different to say he looked at the world differently.”30

  Berger, the ad critic, said he loved the “Think Different” campaign. “American culture is very commercial. This stuff gets jumbled up. Quentin Tarantino talks about Burger King. Apple makes a poster of Rosa Parks. That’s our culture. People are free to use anything from wherever they want.”

  Lessons from Steve: • Partner only with A players and fire bozos. Talented staff are a competitive advantage that puts you ahead of your rivals.

  • Seek out the highest quality—in people, products, and advertising.

  • Invest in people. When Jobs axed products after returning to Apple, he “steved” a lot of projects, but he kept the best people.

  • Work in small teams. Jobs doesn’t like teams of more than one hundred members, lest they became unfocused and unmanageable.

  • Don’t listen to "yes” men. Argument and debate foster creative thinking. Jobs wants partners who challenge his ideas.

  • Engage in intellectual combat. Jobs makes decisions by fighting about ideas. It’s hard and demanding, but rigorous and effective.

  • Let your partners be free. Jobs gives his creative partners a lot of rope.

  Chapter 5

  Passion: Putting a Ding in the Universe

  “I want to put a ding in the universe.”

  —Steve Jobs

  At every turn of his career, Steve Jobs has inspired employees, lured software developers, and snagged customers by invoking a higher calling. For Jobs, programmers don’t work to make easy-to-use software; they’re striving to change the world. Apple’s customers don’t buy Macs to work on spreadsheets; they’re making a moral choice against the evil monopoly of Microsoft.

  Take the iPod. It’s a cool MP3 player. It’s a great blend of hardware, software, and online services. It’s driving Apple’s comeback. But for Jobs, it’s primarily about enriching people’s lives with music. As he told Rolling Stone in 2003: “We were very lucky—we grew up in a generation where music was an incredibly intimate part of that generation. More intimate than it had been, and maybe more intimate than it is today, because today there’s a lot of other alternatives.
We didn’t have video games to play. We didn’t have personal computers. There’s so many other things competing for kids’ time now. But, nonetheless, music is really being reinvented in this digital age, and that is bringing it back into people’s lives. It’s a wonderful thing. And in our own small way, that’s how we’re working to make the world a better place.”1

  Get that last part: “that’s how we’re working to make the world a better place.” In everything Jobs does, there’s a sense of mission. And like any true believer, he’s passionate about his work. Yes, his commitment produces a lot of screaming and shouting. Jobs is no pussycat when dealing with underlings. He knows what he wants, and he’ll throw a fit to get it. Oddly, many of his collaborators like getting yelled at. Or at least, they like the effect it has on their work. They appreciate his passion. He pushes them to greatness, and, though they might burn out, they learn a lot along the way. Jobs’s secret: it’s OK to be an asshole, as long as you’re passionate about it.

  Making the world a better place has been Jobs’s mantra from the get-go. In 1983, Apple was six years old and growing explosively. It was transforming from a classic Silicon Valley startup run by young hippies into a big corporation with blue-chip customers. It needed a seasoned businessman in charge.

  Jobs had spent months trying to seduce John Sculley, the president of PepsiCo, to run the company. But Sculley wasn’t convinced it was wise to step down as head of a big established firm for a risky, hippie startup like Apple. Still, Sculley was tempted. Personal computers were the future. The pair met numerous times in Silicon Valley and New York. Finally, one evening, looking out over Central Park from the balcony of Jobs’s luxury apartment at the San Remo building, Jobs turned to the older man and brazenly challenged him: “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to change the world?”

  It’s perhaps the most famous challenge in modern business history: it’s an insult, a compliment, and a soul-searching, philosophical challenge rolled into one question. Of course, the question cut Sculley to the core. It unsettled him profoundly, and he fretted about it for days. In the end, he couldn’t resist the gauntlet Jobs had thrown down. “If I didn’t accept, I’d have spent the rest of my life wondering if I made the wrong decision,” Sculley told me.

  Ninety Hours a Week and Loving It

  The team that developed the first Mac was a ragtag bunch of ex-academics and technicians working on an under-the-radar skunkworks affair that had little chance of seeing the light of day—until Jobs took it over. Right from the get-go, Jobs convinced the team that they were creating something revolutionary. This wasn’t just a cool computer or a challenging engineering problem. The Mac’s easy-to-use graphical interface was going to revolutionize computing. For the first time, computers would be accessible to the nontechnical public.

  The Mac team members worked like slaves for three years, and though Jobs screamed at them, he kept up morale by instilling in them the conviction that they had a higher calling. The work they were doing was nothing less than God’s work. “The goal was never to beat the competition, or to make a lot of money; it was to do the greatest thing possible, or even a little greater,” wrote Andy Hertzfeld, one of the lead programmers.

  Jobs told the Mac team they were artists, fusing technology with culture. He convinced them that they were in a unique position to change the face of computing, and privileged to be designing such a groundbreaking product. “For a very special moment, all of us have come together to make this new product,” Jobs wrote in an essay for the premier issue of Macworld magazine in 1984. “We feel this may be the best thing we’ll ever do with our lives.”

  In retrospect, this turned out to be true. The Mac was a revolutionary breakthrough in computing. But this was perhaps an article of faith. The Mac was just one of dozens of competing computers being developed at the time. There was no guarantee it would be better, or even that it would get released to market. The team took Jobs’s conviction on faith. They joked that their belief in Jobs’s vision was the same kind of faith instilled by leaders of charismatic cults.

  But Jobs instilled in his team a passion for their work, which is critical when trying to invent new technologies. Without it, workers might lose faith in a project that takes several years to come to fruition. Without a passionate commitment to their work, they might lose interest and abandon it. “Unless you have a lot of passion about this, you’re not going to survive,” Jobs has said. “You’re going to give it up. So you’ve got to have an idea or a problem or a wrong that you want to right that you’re passionate about; otherwise you’re not going to have the perseverance to stick it through. I think that’s half the battle right there.”

  Jobs’s passion is a survival strategy. Many times when Jobs and Apple have tried something new, there have been a few true believers, but the wider world’s reaction has often been disdainful. In 1984, the first Mac’s graphical user interface was widely derided as “a toy.” Bill Gates was mystified that people wanted colored computers. Critics initially called on Apple to open up the iPod. Without a strong belief in his vision, a passion for what he was doing, it would be much harder for Jobs to resist the critics. “I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes,” Jobs told Rolling Stone. “I don’t know why. Because they’re harder. They’re much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you’ve completely failed.”

  Instilling employees with a passion for what the company is doing has a very practical application: staffers are generally happy to work extremely long hours, even by Silicon Valley’s workaholic standards. The Mac team worked long, hard hours because Jobs made them believe the Mac was their product. It was their creativity and work that was bringing the product to life, and he made them believe they would have a profound impact. What better motivator is there? At Apple, technology is a team sport. The Mac development team worked so hard that it became a badge of honor. They all got sweatshirts emblazoned with “90 HOURS A WEEK AND LOVING IT.”

  The Hero/Asshole Rollercoaster

  Many of Apple’s staff genuinely believe that Apple is making a dent in the universe. They strongly feel that Apple is leading technology, setting trends, and breaking new ground. To be part of that is very enticing. “People do believe that Apple is changing the world,” said one former staff member. “Not everyone believes it 100 percent, but they all believe it at least a little. As an engineer, what Apple is doing is very exciting. There was always something exciting about to happen. The company has incredible momentum.”

  At Apple, the corporate culture trickles down from Jobs. Just as Jobs is exceedingly demanding of the people who report to him, Apple’s middle managers demand the same level of high performance from their staff. The result is a reign of terror. Everyone is in constant fear of losing their jobs. It’s known as the “hero/asshole rollercoaster.” One day you’re a hero, the next you’re an asshole. At NeXT, Jobs’s employees called it the “hero/shithead rollercoaster.” “You live for days when you’re a hero and try to get through the days when you’re an asshole,” said a former staffer. “There’s incredible highs and there’s incredible lows.”

  According to several staffers I talked to, there’s a constant tension at Apple between the fear of getting fired and a messianic zeal for making a dent in the universe. “More than anywhere else I’ve worked before or since, there’s a lot of concern about being fired,” explained Edward Eigerman, a former Apple engineer. “You’d ask your coworkers, ‘Can I send this e-mail, or file this report?’ People would say, ‘you can do whatever you want on your last day at Apple.’”2

  Eigerman spent four years at Apple working as an engineer in a New York sales office. Everyone he worked with eventually got fired for one reason or another, he said, mostly for performance-related issues, like not meeting their numbers. But on the other hand, no one quit either. Even though working at Apple was demanding and stressful, everyone loved their job a
nd was extremely loyal to the company and to Steve Jobs.

  “People love to work there,” said Eigerman. “They are very excited to be there. There’s a lot of passion. People love the products. They really believe in the products. They are very excited about what they are doing.”

  Despite the zeal, employees are distinctly un-cultish. They consciously avoid the cultish types. At a job interview, the worst thing a prospective employee can say is: “I’ve always wanted to work at Apple,” or “I’ve always been a big fan.” That’s the last thing Apple employees want to hear. Staffers like to describe each other as “level-headed.”

  The stress of riding the hero/asshole rollercoaster would be intolerable if a lot of staffers weren’t giddy to work at Apple. As well as wanting to put a ding in the universe, several employees described other perks of working at Apple, including the high caliber of fellow employees, an outstanding corporate cafeteria, and the challenge of working on the cutting edge of technology.

  A Wealth of Stock Options

  One of the best perks is Apple’s employee stock options, which have become very valuable as Apple’s stock has surged a split-adjusted 1,250 percent since Jobs returned as CEO in 1997, according to Business Week. At Apple, there are few corporate indulgences. Jobs has his own personal Gulfstream V jet, but most officers and executives fly coach. There are no generous expense accounts. The lavish retreats of Apple’s early days— where hundreds of salespeople would be entertained at a Hawaiian resort for a week—are long gone.

  But most of Apple’s full-time employees have grants of stock options, which are awarded to them when they join the company. After a vesting period, usually a year, staffers are allowed to buy chunks of stock at a discounted price, typically the price of the stock when they were first hired. When they sell the stock, the difference between the purchase price and the selling price is kept as profit. The higher the stock rises, the more money they make. Stock options are a popular form of employee compensation in the technology industry. It’s non-cash compensation, which makes it cheap to issue, and it more or less guarantees that employees have to work like slaves to raise the stock price.