David Senra

June 29, 2021

Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader

Steve.jpg

My highlights from the book:

1. I kept coming back to the time that many have described as his "wilderness" years, the dozen years between his first tenure at Apple and his return. That era, from 1985 to 1997, is easy to overlook. Those years are in fact the critical ones of his career. That's when he learned most everything that made his later success possible.

2. To overlook those years is to fall into the per trap of only celebrating success. We can learn as much, if not more, from failure, from promising paths that turn into dead ends. The vision, understanding, patience, and wisdom that informed Steve's last decade were forged in the trials of these intervening years. The failures, stinging reversals, miscommunications, bad judgment calls, emphases on wrong values-the whole Pandora's box of immaturity-were necessary prerequisites to the clarity, moderation, reflection, and steadiness he would display in later years.

3. He craved the advice of mentors, and yet resented those in power. He dropped acid, walked barefoot, wore scraggly jeans, and liked the idea of living in a commune, yet he also loved nothing more than speeding down the highway in a finely crafted German sports car. He had a vague desire to support good causes, but he hated the inefficiency of most charities. He was impatient as hell and knew that the only problems worth solving were ones that would take years to tackle. He was a practicing Buddhist and an unrepentant capitalist. He was an overbearing know-it-all berating people who were wiser and immensely more experienced, and yet he was absolutely right about their fundamental marketing naïveté. He could be aggressively rude and then truly contrite. He was intransigent, and yet eager to learn. He walked away, and he walked back in to apologize.

4. Steve innately understood from an early age that the right words and stories could help him win the attention he needed to get what he wanted.

5. Steve's natural inclination was to position himself as the critic, the rebel, the visionary, the light and nimble David against the stodgy Goliath of whatever powers might be.

6. Steve developed a reputation as an egomaniac who wasn't willing to learn from others. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of the man.

7. While Steve looked to his elders at Apple for guidance, he also sought it out elsewhere. He didn't yet have the skills to build a great company, but he admired those who had pulled it off, and he would to great lengths to meet them and learn from them. 

8. "None of these people were really in it for the money," he told me. "Dave Packard, for example, left all his money to his foundation. He may have died the richest guy in the cemetery, but he wasn't in it for the money. Bob Noyce [cofounder of Intel] is another. I'm old enough to have been able to get to know these guys. I met Andy Grove [CEO of Intel from 1987 to 1998] when I was twenty-one. I called him up and told him I had heard he was really good at operations and asked if I could take him out to lunch. I did that with Jerry Sanders [founder of Advanced Micro Devices] and with Charlie Sporck [founder of National Semiconductor] and others. Basically I got to know these guys who were all go company-builders, and the particular scent of Silicon Valley at that time made a very big impression on me."

9. Some were heroes whom he only met once or twice, like Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid. Steve admired many things about Land, among them his obsessive commitment to creating products of style, practicality, and great consumer appeal, his reliance on gut instinct rather than consumer research; and the restless obsession and invention he brought to the company he founded.

10. There's a  wonderful extemporaneous quote from a New Yorker piece in late 1977 that offers rich proof of Steve's fully formed verbal mastery:

11. "People have been hearing all sorts of things about computers during the past ten years through the media. Supposedly computers have been controlling various aspects of their lives. Yet, in spite of that, most adults have no idea what a computer really is, or what it can or can't do. Now, for the first time, people can actually buy a computer for the price of a good stereo, interact with it, and find out all about it. It's analogous to taking apart 1955 Chevys. Or consider the camera. There are thousands of peopie across the country taking photography courses. They'll never be professional photographers. They just want to understand what the photographic process is all about. Same with computers. We started a little personal-computer manufacturing company in a garage in Los Altos in 1976. Now we're the largest personal computer company in the world. We make what we think of as the Rolls-Royce of personal computers. It's a domesticated computer. People expect blinking lights, but what they find is that it looks like a portable typewriter, which, connected to a suitable readout screen, is able to display in color. There's a feedback it gives to people who use it, and the enthusiasm of the users is tremendous. We're always asked what it can do, and it can do a lot of things, but in my opinion the real thing it is doing right now is to teach people how to program the computer."

12. Speaking off-the-cuff to a passing journalist from a decidedly nontechie publication, Steve finds so many ways to demystify for the average person the insanely geeky device that he and Woz had created.

13. He sympathizes with their ignorance. He offers several analogies to comforting examples they will understand: Chevys, typewriters, cameras. Indeed, he makes using a computer seem no more complicated than taking a photograph, going so far as to call the Apple II "domesticated." And yet he elevates both his company and its computer CC into something aspirational. He links this machine made a few months ago by some disheveled California misfits to Rolls-Royce, the seventythree-year-old paragon of sophisticated industrial manufacturing and elite consumer taste.

14. Each of Steve's informal outside mentors had been able to cleverly exploit his own idiosyncratic talents in a corporate setting. 

Edwin Land was a pioneer whose inventions were dismissed, and yet he'd created a great company by dint of pure stubbornness. 

Robert Noyce was charismatic and forward-thinking and had only been able to start Intel after leaving the shadow of the most imposing figure in semiconductor history, William Shockley. 

Andy Grove had been able to make his company one of the most creative places in Silicon Valley. 

These were well-rounded, complicated, deep, and fascinating men. 

15. They were comfortable with change, and they lived where Steve wanted to live himself-at the intersection of technology and something that was more like the liberal arts. They were people who played the corporate game by rules of their own devising.

16. When  I asked Bill Gates if there was anything Steve was terrible at, he laughed: "Sitting in meetings where he wasn't the person presenting, and the subject was something mundane. Steve was hopeless at that."

17. He visited the Graphics Group, made up of leading-edge computer graphics technicians who were working for film director George Lucas of Star Wars fame, and began to think that the possibilities for computing with high-end, 3-D graphic images were limitless. So he suggested that the Apple board might want to consider buying the group from Lucasfilm. “These guys were way ahead of us on graphics, way ahead," Steve later told me. "They were way, way ahead of anybody. I just knew in my bones that this was going to be very important." But the board wasn't paying much attention to Steve anymore, and they passed on acquiring what would eventually become known as Pixar.

18. Most great Silicon Valley startups start out lean and simple. The advantage they have over established companies is the focus they can bring to a single product or idea. Unencumbered by bureaucracy or a heritage of products to protect, a small group of talented folks is free to attack a concept with speed and smarts.

19. Steve couldn't distinguish between the extraneous and the critical. As CEO of a fledgling company, that was his key responsibility. At NeXT, he utterly failed to do this.

20. Again and again, Steve made choices that seemed justifiable in isolation but that damaged the company's critical mission. Steve did a poor job of evaluating these ideas against one another. He couldn't accept that it was impossible for him to have everything exactly the way he wanted it.

21. Pixar became the place where he really learned that sometimes the best management technique is to forgo micromanagement and give good, talented people the room they need to succeed.

22. What Steve didn't know in 1986 was that Pixar would give him something much more valuable than a technology to squeeze into NEXT. Although it would take almost a decade, Steve's Pixar adventure would help him rediscover his self-respect, make him a billionaire, and align him with people who would teach him more about management than anyone he'd ever worked with. Without the lessons he learned at Pixar, there would have been no great second act at Apple.

23. More important for Steve Jobs, overseeing this motley crew had turned Catmull into an expert, imaginative manager of creative people. For years Catmull found himself occasionally regretting his decision to abandon his dream of being an animator. But as he steered this odd and talented group past one crisis after another, he started treating management itself as a kind of art, and accepted that this was how he could best contribute. 

24. Later in his life, he [Catmull] would come to be recognized as one of the most extraordinary managers in the world. In fact, this quiet, bearded man with a measured, professorial demeanor knows more about managing and motivating creative people than anyone I've ever met, including Sony's Akio Morita, Inteľ's Andy Grove, Bill Gates, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Southwest Airlines' Herb Kelleher, among others. His success would prove a powerful example for Steve.

25. Pixar's revenues were stagnant, and Steve was writing one check after another to keep the thing afloat. The world's most famous computer entrepreneur was in danger of drifting into the middling obscurity that has enveloped so many other one-hit wonders of the technology world. Shutting down this expensive side project would have made enormous sense. And yet Steve persisted.

26. Steve's main reason for keeping Pixar alive was that he still believed in this little band of geniuses and their leaders. The business seemed to be going nowhere, but Steve still deeply respected Catmull and Lasseter. 

27. At our heart, we really are a content company. Let's transition out of everything else. Let's go for it. This is why I bought into Pixar. This is why most of you are here. Let's go for it. It's a higher-risk strategy, but the rewards are gonna be much higher, and it's where our hearts are.

28. By this time, Steve had invested close to $50 million in Pixar.

29. Even though nobody recognized it at the time. Bill was about to take the personal right out of personal computing Ironically, in so doing, he would leave an opening for Steve to fill eventually.

30. Steve had his own misgivings about Toy Story's commercial potential, mainly based upon what he was hearing from Disney's marketers.

"Disney came to do a big presentation to us about the marketing. They told us they had a big promotional plan with Sears. Steve looks around the room and goes, 'Has anybody in this room been into a Sears lately? Anybody. No one raises a hand. “Then why are we making a deal with Sears? Why are we not going for products we like? Can't we be doing a deal with Rolex? Sony high-end audio equipment?' And their answer was basically, 'Um, um, this is what we do!' He poked holes in every one of their ideas. He was just so logical. Why associate ourselves with products we can't stand?"

31. Pixar could not have succeeded without him. “We should have failed. "But it seemed to me that Steve just would not suffer another defeat. He couldn't sustain it."

32. "But how can he be a turnaround expert," Steve asked me, "when he eats his lunch alone in his office, with food served to him on china that looks like it came from Versailles?" (On Gil Amelio)

33. Once, while talking to a group at a dinner party that included Larry Ellison, Amelio tried to put his company's problems in perspective for the other guests. "Apple is a boat," he said. "There's a hole in the boat, and it's taking on water. But there's also a treasure on board. And the problem is, everyone on board is rowing in different directions, so the boat is just standing still. My job is to get everyone rowing in the same direction." After Amelio walked away, Ellison turned to the person standing next to him and asked, "But what about the hole?" That was one story Steve never got tired of telling.

34. “You can't go to the library and find a book titled The Business Model for Animation," Steve explained. "The reason you can't is because there's only been one company [Disney] that's ever done it well, and they were not interested in telling the world how lucrative it was."

35. When Steve called on Gates, he kept things simple. "It was classic," remembers Gates. "I'd been negotiating this deal with Amelio, and Gil wanted six things, most of which were not important. Gil was complicated, and I'd be calling him on the phone, faxing him stuff over the holidays. And then when Steve comes in, he looks at the deal and says, 'Here are the two things I want, and here's what you clearly want from us.' And we had that deal done quickly."

36. I watched Bob Dylan as I was growing up, and I watched him never stand still," Steve would tell me in a circuitous attempt to explain why he finally dived back into Apple. "If you look at true artists, if they get really good at something, it occurs to them that they can do this for the rest of their lives, and they can be really successful at it to the outside world, but not really successful to themselves. That's the moment that an artist really decides who he or she is. If they keep on risking failure they're still artists. Dylan and Picasso were always risking failure. This Apple thing is that way for me. I don't want to fail, of course. When I was going in I didn't know how bad it really was, but I still had a lot to think about. I had to consider the implications for Pixar, and for my family, and for my reputation, and all sorts of things. And I finally decided, I don't really care, this is what I want to do. And if I try my best and fail, well, I tried my best."

37. Apple had shelled out more than a half billion dollars to rehire Steve Jobs.

38. Where's your annual reviews and all that? I told him that I'd never had an annual review! Steve didn't believe in reviews. He disliked all that formality. His feeling was, 'I give you feedback all the time, so what do you need a review for?’

39. One day I asked him if he had come to enjoy the process of building companies, now that he was trying to do so for a third time. “Uh, no," he started, as if I were a fool. But if he didn't enjoy building companies, he sure had a thoughtful and convincing way of describing why he kept doing it. "The only purpose, for me, in building a company is so that that company can make products. One is a means to the other. Over a period of time you realize that building a very strong company and a very strong foundation of talent and culture in a company is essential to keep making great products.”

40. Out of all the various aspects computing, Steve was always most fascinated with the contact point between a person and a computer. There were good reasons that Steve found this point of interaction so critical. If the point at which a person interacted with a machine was complicated, he or she would likely never unlock its secrets. Steve understood the profound importance of this from the very beginning of his career.

41. Steve said: Who cares where the good ideas come from? If you're paying attention you'll notice them." 

42. Something I learned at Pixar. On almost every film they make, something turns out to be not quite right. And they have an amazing willingness to turn around and do it again, till they do get it right. It's not about how fast you do something, it's about doing your level best."

44. One critic after another pointed to the fact that Gateway had recently shut down its own chain of more than one hundred retail stores because of poor sales. But just as Jobs had no use for typical market research when formulating product strategy, he dismissed Gateway's misadventure as irrelevant. "When we started opening stores, everyone thought we were crazy," he told me. "But that was because the point of sale had lost its ability to communicate with the customer. Everybody else was selling computers that were the same thing-take off the bezel or company nameplate and it's the same box made in Taiwan. With so little differentiation, there was nothing for the salespeople to explain except the price, so they didn't have to be very sophisticated, and those stores had tremendous turnover in their sales force."

45. Steve was the best delegator I ever met. He was so clear about what he wanted that it gave you great freedom.

46. As a great marketer, Steve understood that every interaction a customer had with Apple could increase or decrease his or her respect for the company. As he put it, a corporation "could accumulate or withdraw credits" from its reputation, which is why he worked so hard to ensure that every single interaction a customer might have with Apple was excellent.

47. A wonderful phrase to describe an essential characteristic of great leaders: deep restlessness.  

48. Collins believes this restlessness is far more important and powerful than simple ambition or raw intelligence. It is the foundation of resilience, and selfmotivation. It is fueled by curiosity, the ache to build something meanIngful, and a sense of purpose to make the most of one's entire life.

49. The things he was trying to do, were always hard. Sometimes those things beat him up. But the response to fighting through that suffering can be tremendous personal growth.

50. I don't know that I can convince people that a tablet is a product category that has real value. But I know that I can convince people they need a better phone. 

51. "If you look closely at how he spent his time," says Tim Cook, "you'll see that he hardly ever traveled and he did none of the conferences and get-togethers that so many CEOs attend. He wanted to be home for dinner."

52. I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. 

53. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. 

54. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. 

55. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma-which is living with the results of other people's thinking. 

56. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice.

57. Bill Gates was astounded by what Steve had been able to negotiate. "When he has the upper hand, he's good at using time," says Gates. "You know, he would wait people out. Just look at how much of the resulting company ends up being owned by this fairly small-and yes, very high tech, very studio. They end up owning a very substantial percentage of the entire Disney-ABC-ESPN entity. It's owned by a little animation studio! That took three rounds of negotiations, and by the time the acquisition is being done, Disney is just flat on its back saying, "Take me.' Because of the political dynamics of Disney at the time, they needed that win, and Steve knew they needed it."

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About David Senra

Learn from history's greatest founders. Every week I read a biography of an entrepreneur and tell you what I learned on Founders podcast