Transcription
Jobs from Apple Computer. We're very glad to be here tonight. We're no longer on the verge of the personal computer revolution. We're right in the midst of it. Thank you. I'm glad you had a chance to see Macintosh. And he was like, generally regarded as an. It's not turning on here. It's called iPod with something we call iTunes. He thinks that Steve Jobs came along, became an icon. But the sad part of that narrative was he did not treat his employees well. Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. And are people willing to tell you you're wrong? That's calling it iPhone.
[Applause] [Music]
In 1981, a small team at Apple was working on a quirky personal computer project called the Macintosh. This team was being led by a man called Jeff Raskin. Raskin had the vision for a thousand-dollar personal computer for the masses, but had realized that his vision was being destroyed by someone without his approval. Out of frustration, he wrote a memo to Apple president Mike Scott. It read: "Working for with Steve Jobs, he is a dreadful manager. I have always liked Steve, but I have found it impossible to work for him. Jobs regularly misses appointments. This is so well known as to be almost a running joke. He acts without thinking and with bad judgment. He does not give credit where do very often. When told of a new idea, he will immediately attack it and say that it is worthless or even stupid and tell you that it was a waste of time to work on it. This alone is bad management, but if the idea is a good one, he will soon be telling people about it as though it was his own."
Shortly after writing this memo, Jeff Raskin would be removed from his role leading the Macintosh team and leave Apple, fading into obscurity. Steve Jobs would step up and take over the Macintosh project, and the memo would almost be forgotten from history. But eerily, it identified these dark behavioral patterns that would follow Jobs throughout his entire career.
Prior to the Macintosh, Jobs had several attempts at building out Apple's product line with the Apple IIe and then the Apple III, which was a computer designed for the business market. But unfortunately, it was riddled with errors and never took off. Then another computer with a fairly strange name. There's a computer called Lisa, and everybody wondered who the computer was named after. You know what coincidence is? Lisa. Like if you met someone, you made a new friend, and her name was Lisa too. That would be a coincidence. Lisa stands for Local Integrated Systems Architecture, L-I-S-A. It's coincidence. To make matters even worse, Jobs would deny that Lisa was actually his child, even though he had been in a relationship with her mother, Chrisann Brennan.
"When we were 17, and I was his first love, and I'm the mother of his first child and my only child. We knew, loved, and admired each other. And when things got difficult between us as Apple took off, I witnessed his incremental changes from sweet, mystic poet, super bright, goofy guy into a ruthless, stunningly successful business tycoon. Steve is so hugely successful, and yet he treated so many people so badly. How much of an ego do you have to be to be successful? What is the moral of the story here?"
It was around this time that a software engineer called Bud Tribble, who was working on the Mac, developed a term which would encompass much of Steve Jobs's strange behaviors. He called it the "reality distortion field." And he had to explain to me, "Well, it's Steve. And he told me that Steve had a reality distortion field, and Steve could convince anybody of anything." So, um, Steve did not accept a reasonable schedule at Apple. Working on the Mac, he was able to convince the team to meet impossible deadlines and push them past the point which they thought was possible. "He's a maniac. He's a maniacal genius. His job is to stir up everything. He's a muckraker in the classic sense of the word. He will not leave anything alone. He will not allow inadequacy or compromise to exist."
Jobs, his unconventional methods, the Mac was a hit. "Introducing Macintosh. It does all the things you'd expect a personal computer to do. It does a lot of things you wouldn't expect a personal computer to do. And it does some things no other computer has ever done before. This wasn't the first ever personal computer, but this was the one that changed the way we think about what computers are and what they can do. Welcome to Macintosh."
This 1984 Mac really did change everything. It's what made graphical user interface popular. The Macintosh meant owning a computer approachable and cool. Everyday people, not just tech nerds, could envision themselves using the Mac. After its release to the public in 1984, the Macintosh quickly became the new flagship product for Apple. But the Macintosh team had been pushed too hard, and they were burnt out.
"Lost my wife in that process. I lost my children in that process. I I lost the whole, the whole structure of my life was just changed forever by going and working on the Mac."
Coming off the success of the Macintosh launch, Jobs was put in charge of both the Macintosh and the Lisa team. And in a showcase of callousness, he fired 25 of the Lisa team, and he offered them no kind words, telling them that they had failed and they were B players. This was a team that Steve Jobs had led many years before and really believed in, so much so that he named this very computer after his daughter. But as Jeff Raskin had highlighted in that dark memo, Jobs was prone to acting without thinking, particularly when it came to the feelings of others around him.
History has a strange way of playing out, and in an interesting twist of fate, Steve Jobs would actually be ousted from Apple, the company that he helped found, 12 months later.
"Foremost tonight, we focus on an Apple. Apple, the computer, not the fruit. The once high-flying computer industry is having its troubles. Nationwide sales of the Macintosh and the Apple II have been slow since the first of the year. Despite a small upturn in February, many dealers are stuck with big inventories, both in the warehouse and on their shelves. Under forecast Mac sales put more stress on Jobs, and he became more and more volatile and started to clash with then CEO John Sculley. Steve Jobs's sometimes prickly attitude with both the business establishment and the press doesn't help. Jobs likes to deal with both on his own terms and on his own time. Catch me later."
This young Steve Jobs had so much visionary potential, but his personality was mean and volatile, and he clashed and caused distress with so many people that worked with him. The executive team just didn't know what to do with him, so they removed all power and just decided the best course of action would be to push him out. Steve would spend the next 11 years away from Apple, honing his skills as a CEO and a leader, and on his return, he would embark on potentially the greatest company turnaround in history.
During the 11-year period without Steve Jobs, Apple lost its way. "From the way I see it, I mean, Apple was a company that was based on innovation. When I left Apple 10 years ago, we we were 10 years ahead of anybody else. It took Microsoft 10 years to copy Windows. The problem was is that that Apple stood still. Even though it invested cumulatively billions in R&D, the output has not been there, and people have caught up with it, and its differentiation has has eroded. They released a series of dud products like the Newton, beat up Martin, well, the PowerBook 5300, which was plagued with issues, even occasionally catching fire and needed to be recalled. Apple was desperate, verging on bankruptcy. Bill Gates had to give him a loan, right? Michael Dell at the time was saying, shut down the company and give the money back to the shareholders. So this is not the company that you know, that people, oh my God, the iPhone came out. It's a very different level of confidence and financial situation that the company was in."
So desperate that they were willing to take a chance on a man that they had ousted 11 years before. Jobs wanted to make Apple bigger than just a computer company, and to get there, he would need only the best people. One of his first orders of business was to slash product lines like the Newton and in essence made one third of the company redundant. About 4,000 employees.
"Reorganizing some things a little bit differently, combining things in a few different ways, and in some cases, when the music stops, there'll be some people that don't have a chair."
Jobs was never one to shy away from firing people, and throughout his career, many people have commented on his lack of empathy in this department. In fact, he had quite a confronting and binary way of viewing people. They would fit into one of two buckets: gods or not.
"It was difficult working under Steve because there was a great polarity between gods. And if if you were a god, you were up on a pedestal and could do no wrong. Those of us who were considered to be gods, as I was, knew that we were actually mortal and made bad engineering decisions and farted like any person. So we were always afraid that we would get knocked off our pedestal. The ones that were who were brilliant engineers working very hard felt there was no way they could get appreciated and rise above their status."
Apple employees at this time were scared to use the elevators in the building for fear of meeting Steve in there and ultimately getting fired, as he decided they were not up to his high standards. On his return, he led Apple with a cocktail of equal parts fear, focus, and brilliance. One of the most inspired moves he made was to have a small team start working on a project for a portable music player.
"Once upon a time, Apple was just a computer company. And then came this. The iPod. Before the iPod, there really wasn't an easy way to take a lot of music with you on the go. It really set the stage for Apple to be the dominant player when it comes to mobile devices."
Throughout his life, Steve considered himself as an enlightened being, someone that was truly special, and he believed that he was really destined to make a big splash on the world. It may have been this confidence in himself that allowed him to gamble the whole company on a portable music player. iMac, iBook, iPod. But with big risk comes big reward. The iPod was easily the best music player on the market. It wasn't even close. It was so beautiful and well-designed, using a mechanical scroll wheel. Nothing like this had ever been built before. So it wasn't long before it became a cultural phenomenon.
One of the most genius design moves at the time was to make the headphones white, which were the opposite of all the other black and gray headphones that were out there. This became the signature look for the iPod, and Apple leaned hard into it for their marketing. It was at this point that Apple started to do something that very few other brands have been able to do. Their products started to transcend the hardware and the software, and they became statements of your identity. Owning an iPod said a lot about you as a person. It signaled to the outside world that you were creative and cool, and that you had your finger on the pulse. And Apple became more than a company. It became a movement. And all of this was architected by Steve Jobs.
The iPod would live on for six generations, so half a billion units, and it would fund the development of the most important product Jobs would ever work on. In 2007, Steve Jobs would unveil Apple's latest and most impressive creation.
"Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. And an internet communicator, an iPod, getting it. These are not three separate devices. This is one device. Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone."
Safe to say, the single most defining feature of the iPhone is the touchscreen. In 2007, the biggest phone manufacturing in the market was Blackberry, who actually used a physical keyboard. Jobs is always a stickler for simplicity. So the story goes that Apple invented the multi-touch touchscreen.
"And we have invented a new technology which is phenomenal."
"Claim that Jobs makes that Apple invented the multi-touch is just simply not true. Multi-touch had been developing for decades in many different iterations."
"I'm really, really excited to be here today because I'm about to show you some stuff that's just ready to come out of the lab, literally. And I'm really glad that you guys are going to be amongst the first to be able to see it in person because I really, really think this is going to change, really change the way we interact with machines from this point on. This thing allows you to have multiple points at the same time. They can use both my hands. I can use scrolling options. I can just go right up and use all 10 fingers if I wanted to go like that."
"Multi-touch sensing isn't anything isn't completely new. I mean, people like Buildbox and have been playing around with it in the 80s. I think who had teams of people working on this problem was aware of what was happening in the industry at that time."
This TED presentation was only minutes away from Apple HQ in California, and it gets worse. There are actually other accounts of Steve Jobs taking credit for other people's work, even people working with him inside Apple. The most disturbing and notable comes from Johnny Ive.
"I was the Chief Design Officer at Apple and worked there from 1992 to 2019. He's responsible for leading the design team that made some of the most iconic Apple products: the iMac G3, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad. Johnny Ive did it all. And Steve Jobs loved Johnny Ive. He was on the god side of the equation at Apple."
In a biography of Steve Jobs written by Walter Isaacson, Johnny Ive was candid about the pain he felt when Steve Jobs took credit for his work. "He will go through a process of looking at my ideas and say, 'That's no good. That's not very good. I like that one.' And later, I would be sitting in the audience, and he will be talking about it as if it was his idea. I pay maniacal attention to where an idea comes from, and I even keep notebooks filled with my ideas. So it hurts when he takes credit for one of my designs." Again, that memo comes into play where Raskin said Jobs would take credit for other people's work. It was something that happened in the early 80s and continued to happen throughout his whole career.
Regardless of who stole whose work, the iPhone was a major success. It would become Apple's most important product. The iPhone now is about 60% of Apple's revenue, so this has been a transformative product at the core. And Jobs would become the face of it, just like how he was the face of the iPod and the Mac before.
History is written by the victor, but looking back, there is an explanation that can help us understand what was going on in the mind of Steve Jobs all these years. Dr. Delroy Paulhus is a well-respected personality psychologist who works at the University of British Columbia. He has dedicated his life to understanding what he calls "dark personalities." In 2002, Paulhus created his flagship work, "The Dark Triad." The Triad is a theory of dark personalities consisting of psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism. Dr. Paulhus believes that Steve Jobs's bad behavior fits perfectly with the traits of someone that has narcissistic personality disorder.
"I wrote a paper on Steve Jobs for example, some time ago. It helps to be a genius, of course, but if you're a full narcissist who believes you have the right idea and the entire world is wrong about it, everyone disagreed with him, and he was right. Well, in fact, he was fired by his own company after having proved himself to be a genius and changing the world in so many ways. His own company said he was too obnoxious, so they let him go. Eventually, the company kind of faded out. They had to bring him back. But right, how can how can you be so super successful and fired by your own team? Uh, classic case. Narcissistic personality disorder is defined as a pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy beginning in early childhood and categorized by five or more of the following traits."
In a scientific paper titled "Transformational Leader or Narcissist," researchers Charles A. O'Reilly and Jennifer A. Chapman built on the work of Paulhus and they explored how many transformational leaders, including Steve Jobs, showed strong signs of narcissistic personality disorder. In the paper, they state that "Steve Jobs is often cited as a prototypical transformational leader, but in his biography, Walter Isaacson described how Jobs humiliated others, was impulsive, took credit for others' work, lied, used the reality distortion field, and believed that the rules did not apply to him, even routinely parking in handicapped spots." Jobs's girlfriend, after reading about narcissistic personality disorder, decided that the criteria applied perfectly to him.
It's clear that Steve Jobs was a complicated man. In my humble opinion, Apple wouldn't be the company they are today without Steve Jobs taking over and leading them from 1997 to 2011. I believe that in order to build a great company, you need to have a strong vision, and people need to be pushed outside of their comfort zone. Two things that Jobs was definitely fantastic at doing. But I also disagree with many of the ways that he treated people. I believe leading with fear is wrong. I believe categorizing your staff into labels like that is wrong. I also think, obviously, taking credit for others' work like he did with Johnny Ive is bad. Ultimately, though, his vision that he had for Apple was correct, and it continues to live on. More than a decade after his death, Apple is still pushing boundaries and not scared to take risks by building new products that will shape our future. And whether it's good or bad, many people won't remember Jobs for his personality, specifically the bad traits about his personality. They'll remember him because of the products he helped to give birth to: the Mac, the iPod, and the iPhone.