Live Chat!

Hi all, this is Bob Safian, the editor of Fast Company. I'm delighted to be here at Fast Company's HQ with the authors of the book Becoming Steve Jobs, Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli. We're in for a treat, because no one understands Steve Jobs the way these two gentlemen do. Their book is excerpted in the April issue of Fast Company, and it is available NOW in bookstores and on Amazon. And having read it, it is both fun and really intriguing. It changes your understanding of what makes Apple and Steve so distinctive. Thanks, guys, for sitting down with us.

Glad to be here!

There seems to be a bottomless appetite for stories about Steve Jobs, and in his success and actions over the years that begs deeper understanding. We chose to focus on how Steve grew and changed as leader.

Also, I think Brent's 25-year relationship with Steve, from covering him for the Wall Street Journal and Fortune, gave him a unique perspective.

There were qualities that he developed that are under appreciated. For instance, his patience. His ability to command a team. His willingness to follow his nose. These are all keys to Apple's success during his last 15 years, and they all run contrary to the stereotype.

He knew full well that he was going to need a transplant and had placed his name on lists in many different states to increase his chances of finding a transplantable liver that matched his rare blood type. He couldn't rig the system because it is basically anonymous. All he had to do was be able to arrive at a hospital within six hours of being notified. Since he had a private jet, that broadened the number of states where he would be eligible.

The stereotype of Steve has been so compellingly embraced in popular culture. Do you think he wanted to be perceived as a lone wolf, brash manager, pain-in-the-ass? In some way, he encouraged that view, yes?

Don't you think he was calculating about how he managed Apple's brand, and his own?

Thats is not the case.

He was a master impresario, and had a natural knack for pithy marketing. So yes he was very conscious of how anything he said or did would be perceived. His primary intent with all public statements, interviews, and other dealings was to push Apple's products and services. It was his only objective.

So his focus really was on Apple's brand, even if that meant people thought of him in unfair ways?

Yes. He didn't care what the public thought of him. At times, he was surprised to have hurt someone's feelings. Ed Catmull, president of Pixar, took this as a sign of an occasional social awkwardness, rather than an innate meanness.

One of the things I love about the book are the personal moments, when you're at his home, when he seems so natural and human. But that also raises questions. Here's one from Franc:

There's a big myth that journalists must always be "objective." The best you can hope to be is fair. When you write about a person over years and years, and that subject begins to know you and your work from the frequent encounters, you become more familiar with each other in an almost personal way. So inevitably you begin to see each other as simply people. Steve was a very engaging person, and I am not the only journalist who grew to like him personally, because he was stimulating and often fun to be around. He gave great interviews, and when they were over, he had other interesting things to say. As time went on, over the 25 years I knew him, he met my children and I got to know his family, but not as if we were neighbors or family friends. It just happened over the course of time, and allowed me to see how he behaved in contexts other than an interview or a business meeting. As I said, that's what happens when you interview and write about a person over decades.

If we had come to think about him as the Pixar guy, that would have been unfair to Ed Catmull and John Lasseter, who are the true "Pixar guys". Steve's role there was critical. But Ed and John are responsible for Pixar's success. I think the fair way to remember him, had he not returned to Apple, would have been as a brilliant, inspirational, magnetic leader who was so flawed as a businessman that he couldn't manage a company successfully over the long haul.

Ironically, what surprised me most in what we learned in the process of researching this book, was how many genuine, close and long-term friends Steve had. He only spoke publicly of being friends with fellow Silicon Valley billionare Larry Ellison, but in reality he had closer friends than Larry. They were an important part of his life, even though he didn't spend all that much time with them. But he always
maintained contact.

For some reason, Steve is treated as a static subject in most of what's been written about him. "Steve was X" or "Steve was Y", as if he was that way his entire life. The fact is that he changed deeply over time. He was certain ways as a young man, and he was different ways as an older man. Steve changed so much over time that my co-author, Brent Schlender, believed that Steve changed more than any businessman he covered. This is what I hope this book brings to the discussion about Steve: a realistic sense of how the man changed over time, of who helped that change along, and of how that change remade Apple.

I do not think Apple has lost its compass. Apple today is over twice as big as when Steve died. The challenges it faces are more intense. But the company has done a good job instilling an understanding of "why" Apple does the things it does. Apple U. is an under appreciated thing, something that really can help continue the decision-making process that has made Apple so successful. So there's continuity in management there, and continuity in culture. The Apple Watch addresses concerns that have always been important to Apple: it's a new window into the world of computer-enhanced information; it reduces a kind of friction we don't think about too much; it's an entirely new UI that may be enthralling. It may fail--I have no idea--but it is right out of the Steve Jobs playbook that people admired so much.

Steve and I talked about personal issues now and then, including when he had reacquainted himself with his birth sister Mona Simpson, and his birth mother. I never wrote about any of this, because I could always tell when something was a little too personal to share. He was careful not to reflect too much on the past, and so it wasn't often that he'd talk about such things. As for his spiritual side, we talked about it in general terms from time to time, and he would refer to how he had applied certain ideas and values he'd learned during his occasional deep dives into Buddhism over his adult life. That he wasn't a monk-like devotee says something in itself about Steve. He turned to it when he felt he needed it, mainly to recharge and reignite his strong aesthetic principles to help him make better strategic business decisions. But it also obviously acted as a personal gyroscope for him, in a quiet but consistent way.

He didn't think the leadership skills of the future would be all that different from the leadership skills of the past. You need to be willing to listen widely, to be an impresario who brings everything together into a brand new form. You need to be a great marketer, who can explain complex new ideas with a great, simple story. You need to be nimble--Steve reserved for himself the right to change his mind up to the very end. You need to lead, and look forward, not back--Steve was impressed that Pixar animators and storytellers always screwed up the development at some point, but still managed to create something brilliant by the end. That's a tenacity and a faith that needs to be maintained through the entire product development process, and that needs to be conveyed to the staff as a whole.

Steve spent months preparing for his product intros and other public appearances, and rehearsed them exhaustively. I once spent an entire day watching him run through multiple rehearsals of a single presentation, tweaking everything from the color and angle of certain spotlights, to editing and rearranging the order of the Keynote presentation slides to improve his pacing. He could get pretty petulant if some technical aspect went awry. In one instance that day, he just sat silently on stage with his chin in his hand, staring at the floor for nearly 15 minutes, out of frustration with a wrong lighting cue. He didn't yell this time, but just made everyone wait while he cooled down. Even before that stage, he would call journalists like me or Steven Levy who wrote for Newsweek and later Wired, to try out metaphors and lines he was thinking about using, just to see if we thought they resonated. This could be weeks and weeks before the actual event.

We have many anecdotes of Steve defying the common stereotype. One from his personal life is the fact that Steve, after he got sick, helped several Apple employees and friends when they or their loved ones developed cancer. He'd make up spreadsheets of the kinds of care available, he'd talk about the doctors who did the treatment, he'd talk about cost. A work example is from Pixar, where, when a movie was in trouble, Ed Catmull would call on Steve to have a personal conversation with the director. This wasn't a scolding thing. Steve and the director would just go on a walk together, and Steve would lay out--in his own, unvarnished, crystal-clear way--exactly where the movie had gone off the tracks. It was a punch to gut, but it was told in a way that made it clear that the failure was anything but personal. This is one of the complexities of Steve's criticism--it could injure those who didn't know him well, but it could be extremely valuable to those who did know him well.

I think that a lot of people look at Jobs and think being headstrong is the way to go, but they haven't understood the subtleties of his management skills. Headstrong is a small part of being a successful manager--in fact, it's not necessary at all. It worked for Steve. But that's no reason it should work for someone else. Steve's management style was very much in keeping with who he was, and that should probably be the first thing a manager asks himself--am I posing, or is this really me? If the answer is posing, it's time to find a new style.

Steve was motivated more than anything to feel he had made a solid and positive impact on the world during his lifetime. It was as simple as that. He would say "I just want to put a dent in the universe." The funny thing was, that wasn't hyperbole. He really meant it. But at the same time, Steve was an aesthetic idealist in a very particular way. It was more important to him to create the best product than to sell the most. There's a certain snobbishness and elitism to this notion, but the second time around at Apple, Steve rarely failed to live up to the high standards he set for himself and others. And there is no question that he left his mark on the world.

There were things I learned about Gates. The most important thing I came to understand was that his enormous success at creating a business Goliath opened up an avenue of success for Jobs. Gates depersonalized the personal computer, in order to make it cheap and effective for businesses. As a result, once Steve had stabilized Apple, he had a clear field in which to create brilliant products for consumers--no one had been doing that. And he did it so well that those personal consumer products infiltrated the corporate network, and transformed businesses in such a way that Apple became as dominant as it is.

Thanks for tuning in! This was really fun to do. The great thing about Steve Jobs as a subject is that he's still fascinating, and we're still trying to figure him out, even after the book is published!