Earlier this week, I did a post to let everyone know that the free online book Make Something Wonderful was finally available. It is a compilation of a hodgepodge of emails, speeches, photos, and anecdotes related to Steve Jobs. I looked at all the pictures immediately, and in the evening I took the time to really read through the text. It was an absolute pleasure. The text starts off with this quote; I had never thought about how creating something is a way to “transmit” anything, but it makes abundant sense. As a person who has tried in his life to create a few ‘wonderful” things, it warms my heart.
The purpose of this post isn’t to go through the entire stack of memorabilia – – I couldn’t do it justice, and there would be no point. There are a few items that resonated with me particularly strongly.
One item is the email below, which he sent late in 1996 to the employees at Pixar. Apparently the company was hosting a black-tie waltz party in San Francisco, and since the kinds of people that worked at Pixar weren’t exactly the black-tie waltzing type, there was quite a bit of reluctance to participate. After all, a lot of these people were like nerdy 8th graders, so he offered the following encouragement………..
Of course, my main fixation was the miraculous return of Jobs to Apple. He had spent ten years in the wilderness – – from 1986 through 1996 – – and I’ve been so enamored with this tale I completed a full-length documentary about it. Reading these behind-the-scenes emails, it’s as if fate was absolutely DETERMINED to get Jobs back into the driver’s seat, in spite of his severe reluctance to do so.
The employee he’s referring to is Avie Tevanian, a friend-of-a-friend of mine (my patent attorney was his classmate). See, back in 1996, Apple was managed by total bozos (as Steve would call them). The CEO was Gil Amelio, who had all the charisma of a day-old cheese pizza.
And the Chief Technology Officer was – – how shall I say this? – – an old lady.
The above winner of the Janet Yellen lookalike contest was named Ellen Hancock and, ummm, she wasn’t exactly a visionary. Suffice it to say that Apple was facing bankruptcy at the hands of these layabouts.
Probably the only smart move Hancock made (besides, I’m sure, fabulous oatmeal cookies) was recommending Apple buy NeXT. (She actually wanted Solaris, but I guess they weren’t really for sale). Apple bought the company for about $425 million (by way of reference, that’s the market cap of heading-for-bankruptcy WeWork) and Jobs sent the email below to his Pixar employees. As you can clearly see, Jobs figured it would mean he would have even MORE time for Pixar based on this news. Little did he know!
Just to give you a sense as to the degree of bozo-level that Amelio was, below is literally his most respected and famous quote. Read it and think about it. This is his wisdom. Wouldn’t you figure that a ship with a hole in it should have its hole plugged first, and THEN you row? I guess this pratfall spoke volumes about how the man’s brain worked. Sheesh. What a clown.
Then there’s THIS pearl…..
Feel inspired? Now you know how Apple employees in the mid-1990s felt.
In sharp contrast to this, Jobs would conjure up the ancient Greeks as well, although to better effect:
After Jobs was integrated into Apple (as “interim CEO”), he found that the company was in utter disarray. The product line was full of weeds, many of the employees sucked out loud, and their attitude stunk. His software genius Avie wrote him at length about the situation, and he despaired that Jobs might as well just sell the company before it was worthless…………
Jobs understood the severity of the situation and was likewise tormented by the sorry state of his once-great organization.
Avie’s exhaustion was clear, even from his text………
Contemporaneous with all this angst, Jobs completely changed the company’s relationship with its remaining employees. Here is the first part of his email to them late in the summer of 1997:
Kindly note below, marked with an arrow, what Apple’s stock price was doing when Avie was telling Steve to just sell the place for scrap, and when Jobs was pleading with his employees to tough it out and rely on their stock options as a reward. Those who braved the storm became fabulously wealthy.
Reading his thoughts in real-time in contrast to what we know happened in the end is what makes this online book so interesting. He didn’t want to go back to Apple, but he was destined to do so. He thought he’d have more time at Pixar, but he’d have way less. And, tragically, he figured his cancer was eradicated, and he was (literally) dead wrong.
A few years before he died, Jobs was deemed “CEO of the Decade” by Fortune magazine, who also referred to his as the Beethoven of business. One of his board members sent him this congratulation. Steve Jobs’ reply speaks to his awareness of the transience of all things.
I was lucky to have a real hero in my youth. Because I’d much rather admire the likes of someone like this:
Instead of what today’s young men get.
