Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugar water or do you want a chance to change the world?
That was Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, in 1983 and all of 28 years asking John Sculley, the celebrated president of PepsiCo if he wanted to join as CEO. Sculley took the bait. The world didn?t change much in a year, but Apple definitely did. Within a year, Sculley ousted Jobs from Apple, assuming full charge. He rapidly scaled up operations, boosting sales by ten times. But profits crashed, and Sculley himself was gone by 1993. The new CEO, Gil Amelio, was tasked with resurrecting the company, but for Apple, death was nigh.
Where was Jobs when Apple was being run to the ground? He had set up NeXT, which sold computers to the education market without much success. He later bought out George Lucas? animation studio, naming it Pixar. Pixar?s story-tellers and animators were infinitely creative, but the company was deep in losses. Jobs paid Pixar salaries from his pocket?the money from selling his Apple shares. Things looked pretty bleak until Toy Story, the first fully animated film made by Pixar for Walt Disney. It was a tremendous hit, and changed the fortunes of Pixar?and NeXT and Steve too?forever.
Apple had, meanwhile, become a bureaucratic mess. The flagship Macintosh desperately needed a new operating system. NeXT made a strong pitch and won the deal in 1996. Soon after, Apple acquired NeXT. Jobs became an informal advisor to the CEO, earning him a title from the media?the Svengali of Silicon Valley. In a replay of 1984, the Apple board sacked Amelio as CEO, and put Jobs in charge. The wheel had turned full circle.
The rest is history. Steve rescued Apple from the brink of definite irrelevance and possible bankruptcy. First came the revolutionary iMac, followed by a hit parade of the MacBook, iPod, iPhone and iPad, besides hot-selling, if less known, products like the Mac Mini and the Apple TV. Apple is now the world?s largest technology company, with a market capitalisation of $330 billion?far ahead of HP, Google and Microsoft. It is the world?s 2nd largest company by market-cap, preceded only by oil giant Exxon Mobil. Apple has sold 300 million iPods in less than a decade?the 2nd largest gadget sales in history?closing in on Sony which notched up 350 million Walkman sales in 15 years.
Apple?s amazing success has inspired a stream of books about the company and its CEO. The latest is The Steve Jobs Way: iLeadership For A New Generation, by Jay Elliot, Apple?s HR chief from 1980 to 1986. The book is co-authored with William L Simson. iLeadership follows the 2008 book Inside Steve?s Brain by Leander Kahney, a journalist with Wired.com. Both attempt to find out how Jobs engineered the survival and turnaround of Apple, trying to distill management lessons.
Peppered with anecdotes, iLeadership scores in terms of readability. When he ran into Jobs in 1980, Elliot was out of job, though much older and senior. Since he worked with Jobs in the formative years of the company, his observations are sharpest about the 1984 Macintosh. Jobs had separated the Macintosh team from the rest, running it as his fiefdom. By now, it is legendary how Apple pioneered the graphical user interface and how Microsoft spread it far and wide. Jobs had hit upon the interface during a visit to a Xerox lab, where an experimental computer was running it. Says Elliot, who was part of the visit: ?I got my first whiff of his passions on that visit… For the rest of the experience, I kept reliving the experience… This was passion in its most raw form, the passion for an idea. For Steve, it was already shaping into a passion for the product.?
Jobs? passion bore fruit in 1984, when the first Mac rolled out, the first mass-produced computer with a graphical interface. The course of computer history had changed, though Jobs wouldn?t be part of Apple anymore.
Elliot traces many events of Apple?s early days, in a first person narrative. Jobs went over and over through the details of Mac, attempting to perfect it as a piece of art. Deadlines were routinely broken. For Jobs, there was no compromise on quality, and he would raise hell if things weren?t working out. In his universe, there are only two types of people, the bright ones and the bozos. Those who worked on the Mac were the bright ones, while all others were ?bozos.?
The first Mac exploded on the computer scene as a revolutionary machine. However, despite the dedication, brilliance and passion that went into it, Mac was a faulty machine. It had little processing power and memory was scarce. It did not have a cooling fan, leading to overheating. There were no expandable slots either. To top it all, the company made losses on each machine it sold, mainly because Apple decided to build a whole factory to make them. ?It probably cost about $20,000 to build each Mac that came out of the plant. The Macs were selling for about $2,000…. It was a tremendously costly decision and would contribute to a massive problem when the Macintosh early on did not sell well,? writes Elliot.
Elliot lays special stress on Jobs? ?product-driven? model. Upon his return, he axed hundreds of projects, focussing only on four specific products: two desktops and two notebooks. Elliot quotes Jobs as saying that Apple could not be profitable as a $12-billion company or a $10-billion company, but it could be profitable as a $6-billion company. With the unproductive projects and staff gone, Steve started rebuilding Apple.
Elliot?s insights thin to a trickle when he narrates the stories after Jobs second coming. By this time, Elliot had already left Apple. The author blames the iPhone 4?s signal reception issues on engineers, though it is highly unlikely that with his micromanaging ways, Jobs would have let the device pass without his approval. In fact, Bloomberg had reported at the time that Apple?s antenna division and the telecom carrier had warned Jobs about its flawed design early enough.
Inside Steve?s Brain, released before the iPad hit the markets, is another stab at decoding the Apple model. While iLeadership?s insights to a large extent revolve around Apple?s early days, Kahney focusses more on Jobs? second stint. Saying No saved Apple, he writes. This includes No to the hundreds of wayward projects, No to feature-creep (the tendency of companies to cram their products with features), No to ugly designs, and No to hierarchies. The Mac team, he says, had just 100 people, which helped Jobs keep close contact. Steve, says Kahney, is Apple?s one-man focus group, who feels that consumers don?t know what they want. They couldn?t have asked for an iPod in 2001, just the same way Henry Ford?s potential customers in 1908 could not have asked for a car. In both cases, the product had to be innovative and disruptive. Jobs, writes Kahney, is the ultimate customer at Apple.
Like iLeadership, Inside Steve?s Brain, too, waxes eloquent about Jobs? penchant for perfectionism. Over and over, we are told how Jobs micromanages the product from concept to retail sales, immersed in each and every part of the product and its design and packaging, the high drama associated with the product launch and customer experience elevated to an obsession at Apple Stores.
We are told how Steve hires his people, looking only for A players. Kahney tells us how Jobs takes inspiration from luxury cars to get design cues for new products and how he selected the concierge model for Apple Stores.
Both books on Jobs have two key deficiencies: one, neither writer has been able to talk to Jobs for the book. So, the quotes from Jobs are either from other interviews he has given before or from MacWorld addresses. Clearly, Jobs has given a cold-shoulder to both. Two, despite their wealth of information, both read like grovelling, sycophantic works from unabashed Apple fanatics. Apart from praising Jobs from cover to cover, both books try hard to discredit rivals?be they Microsoft, Dell or IBM. Truly great products?and many from Apple are in that category?do not need validation from the deficiencies of lesser rivals.
Books on Apple invariably tend to become books about Steve Jobs, and vice versa. This evidently attests to the genius of this non-programming, non-technical Buddhist who is convinced that he would have ended up in jail if he had not turned to computers at a young age. At the 100th anniversary of IBM, The Economist, in its June 9, 2011 edition, observed that companies which stand for an idea?not a product ?thrive, and predicted that Apple will live for 100 years. Interestingly, Microsoft did not make the cut, nor did Dell and Cisco. ?See you in 2111,? the newspaper signed off, cheekily adding ?provided The Economist (founded in 1843, with the idea of explaining the world to its readers) is still around too.?
Disclaimer: The author bought his first iPod Nano 4GB in 2005, replacing it with an 8GB Nano in 2010. The iPod Touch 16 GB was added in 2011. This article was composed on the first-generation 64 GB WiFi-3G iPad, which sits on its Apple Dock, wirelessly connected by the Apple Bluetooth keyboard. And the word-processing software? Pages, purchased for $10 from the Apple App Store!