The once and future Steve Jobs

How the comeback kid remade Apple -- from the "Think Different" campaign to a "loose lips sink ships" reign of terror.

By Alan Deutschman

Oct 11, 2000 | On Sept. 16, 1997, Steve Jobs announced that he would serve as Apple's "interim CEO." He moved into a conspicuously small office, close to the boardroom. He inherited Gil Amelio's secretary, Vicki, and told her that he didn't like the pens that Apple kept in stock. He would only write with a certain type of Pilot pen, which he proclaimed was "the best."

He took to walking around the Apple campus barefoot in cutoff shorts and a black shirt. One day he accosted Jim Oliver, a Wharton Ph.D. who had been Gil's assistant.

"What do you do here?" Steve demanded.

"I'm wrapping things up."

"You mean that in a while you won't have a job?" Steve shot back. "Well, good, because I need someone to do some grunt work."

What a strange way to motivate people, Jim thought. Then again, it was a chance to work for a legendary figure.

It turned out that the "grunt work" would give Jim a close-up view of Steve's deliberations about how to save Apple. The job was to take notes at the meetings where Steve would review every part of the company and decide what to keep and what to kill.

The gatherings were held in the boardroom, which was in the only high-rise office building on the low-slung campus. It had a panoramic view of the expanse of Silicon Valley. Steve would call in the head of a product team and all of its key players. Anywhere from a dozen people to three dozen would crowd around the long wooden table. They had to show Steve all of their existing products and expound in detail about their future plans. If they made physical products, like monitors, they had to bring models of their upcoming lines. If they wrote software, they had to run Steve through the features of their programs.

Steve's attitude wasn't confrontational. He wanted to absorb a vast amount of information before he took action. Still, there was always an undercurrent of tension, and Steve would occasionally upbraid people if they didn't seem to realize the urgency of the situation. Gil had made extensive cuts, but Steve was going to cut a lot more. Steve said that he would keep only the great products and the profitable products. If something were unprofitable but strategic, its managers would have to argue for its continued existence.

During the first review meeting with a group, Steve would listen and absorb. In the second meeting, he would ask a series of difficult and provocative questions. "If you had to cut half your products, what would you do?" he would ask. He would also take a positive tack: "If money were no object, what would you do?"

The series of group meetings helped Steve to get to know hundreds of people at Apple. And once he knew the players, he would deal with them directly. He had total disregard for the hierarchical chain of command. He would remember what several hundred people did and call on whomever he needed, always bypassing their managers. It was as though everyone in the company reported directly to Steve himself. "Steve has the ability to buffer so much in his head," Jim Oliver explains. "He can remember the last conversation and the last e-mail exchange that he had with 300 people."

He put especially intense pressure on the top executives. He tormented Heidi Roizen with constant calls to her office phone, home phone, cellphone and pager, starting at 7 a.m. almost every day. She was so unnerved by his interrogations and his frequent tirades that she decided the only way to preserve her mental health was to ignore his calls. She tried to communicate with him only by e-mail, which enabled her to consider the issues calmly and rationally, unaffected by the irresistible force of his compelling live presence.

Heidi talked with Bill Campbell, whom Steve had named to Apple's board of directors. Bill was a bona fide tough guy, a former college football coach, but he confessed that he, too, was unnerved by Steve's constant phone calls.

"Do what I do," she advised him. "Don't answer the phone."

"That's what my wife said. I tried that. But then Steve would come over to my house. He lives only three blocks away."

"Don't answer the door."

"I tried that. But my dog sees him and goes berserk."

Next Page: "Think Different" -- so beautiful, it made Steve cry

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