A story extract from his biography. Somehow this story helped me understand him better.
This is a good book to read on many counts. Easy to read. Rehashes the major events and personalities of Personal Computing story from 1970’s to 2014. A good source of how many Apple’s products birthed and evolved — interesting for any Apple fan.
The intent of the book however is to chart how Steve Jobs evolved from a reckless upstart into a visionary leader. And the reader sure gets an opportunity to see this as the pages smoothly flow.
On a cold December afternoon in 1979, Steve Jobs pulled into the parking lot of the Garden of Allah, a retreat and conference center on the shoulder of Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, north of San Francisco. He was tired, frustrated, angry, and late. The traffic on 280 and 101 had been at a standstill much of the way up from Cupertino, way down south in Silicon Valley, where the company he’d founded, Apple Computer, had its headquarters, and where he had just suffered through a meeting of Apple’s board of directors, which was chaired by the venerable Arthur Rock.
He and Rock didn’t see eye-to-eye on much of anything. Rock treated him like a child. Rock loved order, he loved processes, he believed that tech companies grew in certain ways according to certain rules, and he subscribed to these beliefs because he’d seen them work before, most notably at Intel, that he had backed early on. Rock was perhaps the most notable tech investor of his time, but he in fact had been reluctant to back Apple at first, largely because he’d found Steve and his partner Steve Wozniak unpalatable. He didn’t see Apple the way Jobs saw it — as an extraordinary company that would humanize computing and do so with a defiantly un-hierarchical organization. Rock simply viewed it as another investment. Steve found board meetings with Rock enervating, not invigorating; he had looked forward to a long, fast drive to Marin with the top down to get rid of the stale stench of seemingly endless discussion.
Bu the Bay Area was shrouded in mist and rain, so the top stayed up. Slick roads made the traffic stultifying, so much so that it took all the pleasure out of the drive in his brand new Mercedes 450SL. Steve loved the car. The car, in fact, was a model for what he thought computers should be: powerful, sleek, intuitive, and efficient, nothing wasted at all. But this afternoon the weather and the traffic had defeated the car. Consequently he was about half an hour late to the initial meeting of the Seva Foundation, a creation of his friend Larry Brilliant, who looked like a little Buddha himself, albeit in track shoes. Seva’s goal was pleasantly ambitious: eliminate a certain kind of blindness that affected millions of people in India.
Steve parked and got out of the car. At six feet tall and a trim 165 pounds, with brown hair that touched his shoulders and deep, penetrating eyes, he would have been striking anywhere. But in the three-piece suit he’d worn to the board meeting he looked particularly resplendent. Jobs didn’t quite know how he felt about the suit. At Apple, people wore wtahever they wanted. He often showed up barefoot.
Inside the mansion, one look at the crew gathered around the conference table would have told any casual bystander this was not your typical church gathering. On one side of the table was Ram Dass, the jewish-born Hindu yogi who in 1971 had published one of Steve’s favorite books, Be Here Now, a best-selling guide to meditation, yoga, and spiritual seeking. Nearby sat Bob Weit, the Greatful Dead singer and guitarist — the Dead would be performing a benefit for Seva at the Oakland Coliseum on December 26. Stephen Jones, an epidemiologist from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, was in attendance, as was Nicole Grasser. Brilliant and Jones had worked for Grasser in India and Bangladesh as part of WHO’s audacious — and successful — program to eradicate smallpox. The counterculture’s favourite trickster philosopher, Wavy Gravy, was there, too, sitting with his wife near Dr Govindappa Venkataswamy, the founder of India’s Aravind Eye Hospital, which eventually would help millions of people with an operation that repairs blindness caused by cataracts, a malady that then plagued the region. Brilliant was hoping to pull off something almost as audacious as wiping out smallpox. His goal for Seva was that it would support the work of people like Dr V by setting up eye camps throughout Southern Asia to restore sight to the blind in poor rural areas.
Steve had been invited to the gathering by Brilliant, whom he’d first met in India, five years earlier. After Friedland sent him a 1978 article detailing the success of the smallpox program and talking a bit about Brilliant’s next steps, Steve sent Brilliant five thousand dollars to help get Seva rolling.
It was quite a collection of people: Hindus and Buddhists, rockers and doctors, all accomplished, all gathered at the United Church of Christ’s Garden of Allah. Clearly, this was not a place for your traditional corporate cheftian, but Steve should have fit right in. He meditated often. He understood the search for spiritual fulfillment — in fact, he had gone to India specifically to learn from Brilliant’s guru, Neem Karoli Baba, also known as Maharaj-ji, who had died just a few days before Steve arrived.
Jobs felt a deep restlessness to change the world, not just build a mundane business. The iconoclasm, the intersections of different disciplines, the humanity present in that room, all were representative of what Steve aspired to. And yet for some reason he couldn’t settle in.
There were at least twenty people in the room Steeve didn’t recognize, and the conversation had not quieted or slowed much when he introduced himself. It seemed to him that many of them didnt even know who he was, which was a little surprising, especially in the Bay Area. Apple was already a phenomemon: the company was selling more than 3000 computers a month.
He sat down and started listening. The decision to create a foundation had already been made; the question now on the table was how to tell the world about Seva, its plans, and the men and women who would implement these plans. Steve found most of the ideas embarrassingly naive. The discussion seemed more appropriate for a PTA meeting; at one point, everyone but Steve heatedly debated the finer points of a pamphlet they wanted to create. A pamphlet? That’s the best these people could dream up? These so-called experts may have achieved notable progress in their own countries, but here they were clearly out of their league. Having a grand, bold goal was useless if you didn’t have the ability to tell a compelling story about how you’d get there. That seemed obvious.
As the discussion meandered, Steve found his own attention wandering. “He had walked into that room with his persona from the Apple board meeting,” Brilliant remembers, “but the rules for doing things like conquering blindness or eradicating smallpox are quiet different.” From time to time he’d pipe up, but mostly to interject a snide remark about why this or that idea could never fly. “He was becoming a nuisance,” says Brilliant. Finally, Steve couldn’t take it anymore. He stood up.
“Listen,” he said, “I’m telling you this as someone who knows thing or two about marketing. We’ve sold nearly a hundred thousand machines at Apple Computer, and when we started no one knew a thing about us. Seva is in the same position Apple was in a couple of years ago The difference is you guys don’t know diddly about marketing. So if you want to really do something here, if you really want to make a difference in the world and not just putter along like every other non profit that people have never heard of, you need to hire this guy named Regis McKenna — he’s the king of marketing. I can get him in here if you’d like. You should have the best. Don’t settle for second best.”
The room went silent for a moment. “Who is this young man?” Venkataswamy whispered to Brilliant. A handful of people started challenging Steve from different sides of the table. He gave as good as he got, turning the group discussion into a donnybrook, ignoring the fact that these were people who had helped eradicate smallpox from the planet, who were saving the blind of India, who negotiated cross border treaties so they could perform their good works in multiple, even warring, countries. In other words, these were people who knew a thing or two about getting things done. Steve didn’t care about their accomplishments. He was always comfortable in a fight. Challenges, confrontations in his limited experience, this was how you got things done; this was how the great stuff broke through. As the conversation heated up, Brilliant finally interjected: “Steve.” And then he yelled, “Steve!”
Steve looked over, clearly irritated by the interruption and anxious to get back to his argument.
“Steve,” said Brilliant, “we’re really glad you’re here, but now you’ve got to stop it!”
“I’m not going to,” he said. “You guys asked for my help, and I’m going to give it. You want to know what to do? You need to call Regis McKenna. Let me tell you about Regis McKenna. He — ”
“Steve!” Brilliant shouted again, “Stop it!” But Steve wouldn’t. He just had to get his point across. So he took up his argument yet again, pacing back and forth as if he’d purchased the stage with his five-thousand-dollar donation, pointing directly at the people he was adressing as if to punctuate his remarks. And as the epidemiologists and the doctors and Bob Weir from the Grateful Dead looked on, Brilliant finally pulled the plug. “Steve,” he said, sotto voce, trying to remain calm, but ultimately losing it. “It’s time to go.” Brilliant walked Steve out of the conference room.
Fifteen minutes later, Friedland slipped outside. He returned quickly, and discreetly crept over to Brilliant. “You should go see Steve,” he whispered in his ear. “He’s out in the parking lot crying”.
“He’s still here?” Brilliant asked.
“Yeah, and he’s crying in the parking lot.”
Brilliant who was presiding over the meeting, excused himself and hurriedly walked out to find his young friend, who was hunched over the steering wheel of his Mercedes convertible, sobbing, in the middle of the parking lot. The rain had stopped, and the fog had begun to settle in. He had put the top down. “Steve,” said Brilliant, leaning over the hood and giving the twenty-four-year-old a hug. “Steve. It’s okay.”
“I’m sorry. I’m wound up,” Steve said. “I live in two worlds”.
“It’s okay. You should come back in.”
“I’m gong to leave. I know I was out of order. I just wanted them to listen.”
“It’s okay. Come back in.”
“Im going to go in and apologize. And then I’m going to leave,” he said. And that is what he did.
This little anecdote from the winter of 1979 is as good a place as any to start the story of how Steve Jobs turned around his life and became the greatest visionary leader of our time. The young man visiting Garden of Allah that December evening was a mess of contradictions. He was a co-founder of one of the most successful start-ups ever, but he didn’t want to be seen as a businessman. He craved the advice of mentors, and yet resented those in power. He dropped acid, walked barefoot, wore scraggly jeans, and liked the idea of living in a commune, yet he also loved nothing more than speeding down the highway in a finely crafted German sports car. He had a vague desire to support good causes, but he hated the inefficiency of most charities. He was impatient as hell and knew that the only problems worth solving were ones that would take years to tackle. He was a practicing Buddhist and an unrepentant capitalist. He was an overbearing know-it-all berating people who were wiser and immensely more experienced, and yet he was absolutely right about their fundamental marketing naivete. He could be aggressively rude and truly contrite. He was intransigent, and yet eager to learn. He walked away, and he walked back in to apologize.
At the Garden of Allah he displayed all the brash, ugly behavior that became an entrenched part of the Steve Jobs myth. And he showed a softer side that would go less recognized over the years. To truly understand Steve and the incredible journey he was about to undergo, the full transformation that he would experience over his rich life, you have to recognize, accept, and try to reconcile both sides of the man.
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The unformed youth at the Garden of Allah could never have revived the moribund company he returned to in 1977, nor could he have engineered the slow and deeply complicated corporate evolution that led to the unimaginable success Apple enjoyed during the last decade of his life. His own personal growth was equally complicated. I can’t think of a businessman who grew and changed and matured more than Steve.
Personal change is, of course, incremental. As all “grown-ups” come to understand, we wrestle with and learn how to manage our gifts and flaws over a lifetime. It’s an endless growth process. And yet it’s not as if we become wholly different people. Steve is a great object lesson in someone who masterfully improved his ability to make better use of his strengths and to effectively mitigate those aspects of his personality that got in the way of those strengths. His negative qualities didn’t go away, nor were they replaced by new good traits. But he learned how to manage himself, his own personal miasma of talents and rough edges. Most of them, anyway. To understand how that happened, and how that led to the confounding resurgence of Apple later in his career, you have to consider the full range of personal contradictions Steve brought to the Garden of Allah that December afternoon.
altLearners 