Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs (8 page)

There are only two doors into the building and both have bag scanners and metal detectors, just like at the airport, and they’re manned by former Israeli commandos. We go inside and pass through the retina scanner and then into the security foyer. The Israelis glare at us and say nothing.

The iPhone is so secret that we refer to the project only by its code name, Guatama. We don’t use the word “phone” or “iPhone” in email or in conversation. To make things even more secure, three-quarters of our engineers aren’t even working on the actual iPhone. They’re working on FPPs. Even the engineers themselves don’t know if they’re working on real products or fake ones.

Mike leads me through the concrete maze to the building’s conference room. His engineers are in there gobbling pastries and slurping coffee, waiting for us and looking pissed off.

“Namaste,” I say to the engineering dorks, bowing slightly from the waist with my hands pressed together, pretending that I have great respect for their big math-loving brains. “I honor the Buddha inside you.”

They grumble and grunt. A couple of them do the “namaste” thing back to me. I’m pretty sure they’re taking the piss out of me. One thing I’d forgotten to mention: engineers are the world’s biggest assholes.

“So I pulled half of an all-nighter last night,” I tell them, “and I’ve come up with some ideas on the circuit board. We’re going to need a complete redesign.”

Groans all around, and Mike says, “Steve, before we get into the design review, I’d just like to say that we all have huge amounts of respect for your genius, but the board is designed the way it is because that’s the best way to move the signals through the circuit. It’s an optimized design. You can’t just change it because you don’t like the way it looks.”

I remind him that, first of all, I can do anything I want, and second, I know they want to kill me but they have to admit that I know how to design products, and I’m sorry but this circuit board for the iPhone is way too ugly.

“There’s no balance,” I say. “You’ve got this long piece on the left—”

“That’s a memory chip,” one of the engineers says, interrupting me.

“And you’ve got nothing on the right side to balance it out. And the big chip—”

“That’s the microprocessor,” the smart-ass says, interrupting me again.

I stop and look at him. He’s a fat guy with a ponytail and a little soul-patch juice-mop beard and a Dead Kennedys T-shirt.

“The
big chip,
” I say, “should be right in the middle, not off-center. The two little gold pieces on the right should be lined up straight. You’ve got all these little skinny lines on one side then big fat lines on the other, with loads of space. Come on, guys. Go back and redo this. I want it perfectly symmetrical.”

Mike says if we arrange the chips the way I’m suggesting, the circuit won’t work. “We’ll get signal bleed,” he says.

“Just try it,” I say. “Do it and let’s see.”

The know-it-all guy says, “With all due respect, we’re electrical engineers, okay? I think we might have a little insight into what we’re doing.”

He gets up out of his chair and goes to the whiteboard and starts trying to give me a lesson in how electric current flows through a circuit. I know he thinks he’s being the big hero, standing up to the tyrant boss. What he doesn’t notice is that all of the other guys are staring down at their hands, like a little herd of sheep averting their eyes when one of their fellow sheep is about to be picked off by a wolf.

I press my hands together in my prayer position. I go all very weird and quiet. When he’s done with his lecture, I say, in the softest voice I can produce, “Excuse me, but what is your name?”

“Jeff,” he says.

“Jeff. Good. Jeff, please put down that marker and leave the building. Drop your badge at the security checkpoint. Mike will process your paperwork this afternoon.”

“What? I’m fired?”

“You know,” I say, “you pick things up fast. You must be an engineer, right?”

Later in the day Mike Dinsmore comes to see me and tells me Jeff didn’t mean to be rude but he’s having a tough time at home, his wife has some terminal illness and they’ve got three kids and one of them is in a wheelchair and needs a special van, blah blah blah.

“Oh,” I say, “I had no idea.”

He stands there. I let him wait.

Finally he says, “So?”

I go, “Mike, who’s your supervisor?”

“Ted Reibstein.”

“Okay. Hold on.”

I press my speakerphone and buzz Ja’Red and tell him to get Ted Reibstein from engineering on the phone.

When Ted picks up I say, “Ted, this is Steve. I’m here with Mike Dinsmore. I’m sending him down to your office so you can fire him and process his paperwork. And there’s a guy who works for him, Jeff something, who also needs to be fired. Mike will explain.”

“Sure thing,” Ted says.

Mike stands there with his jaw hanging open. I spin around in my chair, facing away from him, and start checking my email. When I turn back he’s still standing there, towering over my desk like some freako red-haired giant from
Lord of the Rings,
clenching and unclenching his fists.

I call Ja’Red again and tell him to have security send up Avi and Yuri. “Tell them to bring their Tasers,” I say. That sends the big freak running.

I’m often asked
about my management style, especially since I gave that amazing commencement speech at Stanford and everyone realized what an incredibly deep thinker I am. I’ve seen those Internet rumors about how I didn’t really write that speech, how I hired some ghostwriter. All I can say is: Please. The guy fixed some grammar errors and punched it up a bit. But I’m the one who spent half a day in Longs Drug Store reading Hallmark cards to gather material.

Like everything else at Apple, my management approach is a little bit different. I never subscribed to the conventional wisdom of the East Coast management experts like Jack Welch. For example, Welch says do a lot of reviews and always let people know where they stand. I say, No way. In fact, quite the opposite.
Never let people know where they stand.
Keep them guessing. Keep them afraid. Otherwise they get complacent. Creativity springs from fear. Think of a painter, or a writer, or a composer working furiously in his studio, afraid he’s going to starve to death if he doesn’t get his work done. That’s where greatness comes from. Same goes for the people at Apple and Pixar. They come in every day knowing it could be their last day. They work like hell; trust me.

Because you know what?
Fear works.
Look at the crappy cars that get made in Detroit, where nobody ever gets fired. Compare that to the stuff that gets made in Vietnamese sweatshops. Or to the bridge in
The Bridge on the River Kwai.
Please don’t say that bridge was awesome because the Brits were such amazing perfectionists. Come on. I love the Brits, but these are not people who are known for the quality of their workmanship. Ever owned a Jaguar? Enough said. No, what motivated those lazy, stupid Brits was their fear of the efficient, vicious Japanese. You put people’s lives in danger, and they do their best work.

Obviously we can’t
literally
put our employees’ lives at risk. But we have to make them feel that way. This requires a lot of psychological manipulation on our part. But look at the result. We never could have made OS X so reliable if our engineers didn’t believe in their hearts that every time a bug surfaced one man was going to be killed.

Which leads me to my next management tip.
You don’t have to hire the best people.
You can hire anyone, as long as you scare the shit out of them. That’s the key. The fear. This applies not only to assembly line and factory workers but to all of your staff, including top executives and even the board of directors. A corollary to this rule is this:
Only promote stupid people.
But not just any stupid people. You have to find the certain type of stupid people who actually believe they’re super brilliant. They make insanely great managers and are incredibly easy to manipulate. It’s easy to spot them. Former McKinsey consultants are top candidates.

The MBAs say you should set high standards, let people know what’s expected of them, and hold them to that. I do a little twist on that and say, Hold people to an
impossibly
high standard, but here’s the twist—
don’t tell them what that stan
dard is.
And fire them if they fall short. You know what that does to people? Makes them crazy. And guess what? Crazy people are more creative. And more productive. Every shrink in the world knows this.

Another MBA rule that I never follow is where they say a CEO or manager should be consistent and predictable. I say the opposite.
Be inconsistent and unpredictable.
Be random. One day say something is great and the guy who made it is a genius. The next day say it’s crap, and he’s a moron. Watch how hard that guy will work now, trying to impress you.

Management gurus also tell you to reward performance, and dole out loads of praise. I disagree. My motto is this:
No praise. Ever.
You start praising people and pretty soon they start thinking they’re as smart as you are. You cannot have this. All employees must know at all times that you are better in every way than they are. Repeated criticism, in the most humiliating fashion, is one way to accomplish this.

The best way to keep people’s spirits broken is
to fire people on a regular basis for no reason.
Fly off the handle, shout at people, call them names, then fire them. Or better yet, don’t fire them. Let them believe they survived for a few days. Then, when they’re relaxed, call them in and fire them. It’s all part of creating and maintaining the culture of fear.

Another tactic, but one that should only be used in extreme circumstances, is this:
throw tantrums.
I mean literally cry and scream and roll around on the floor like a three-year-old, slapping your hands and kicking your feet. This is great when someone won’t let you have your way. It works because it freaks people out to see a grown man crying and screaming. They’ll do anything to make it stop. Brilliant.

Another tactic involves a verbal technique based on neurolinguistic programming. In the middle of a meeting, when someone else is talking, I’ll sit there nodding my head, as if I’m agreeing with everything they say. But then at some point I’ll suddenly stand up and go, “No! No! That’s stupid! What is
wrong
with you? Did someone drop you on your head when you were a baby? I can’t fucking
believe
this!” Then I’ll stomp out of the room, slamming the door.

Another trick is I’ll get on the elevator with some Apple employees, and smile, or say hi. They’re usually nervous, and usually they’re so scared that they just don’t talk at all, and I have to admit, I dig that. But sometimes they do carry on a conversation with each other, one that does not include me. When that happens I’ll wait until we get to my floor, and then, as the door opens, I’ll turn and say, “What you just said is completely wrong. You know not whereof you speak. Please go clean out your desk, and turn in your badge at the HR department.”

This freaks people out, believe me.

I’ve described these management techniques in presentations at business schools, and I always get the same blowback. People go on and on, telling me that using fear and psychological manipulation doesn’t work. They say it works better to be nice to people and treat them with respect. Last time this happened was at Stanford and the guy giving me grief was the professor. Perfect. I hate professors. I was like, “Look at Apple. Look at our amazing success. Especially our success since I took over the company. Compare that to the abject failure under my predecessors. Now compare that to whatever company that you built with your bare hands into a multi-billion-dollar empire using your techniques. What’s that? You don’t have a company? You never started a company or ran a company? You’ve never been a CEO? Huh. Okay. So you’re, what, a teacher? In a college or something? Okay. The prosecution rests.”

It’s dawn on the Fourth of July.
I’m in my backyard, facing the back wall and the flower garden. During the night a low fog has rolled in over the hills from the Pacific. I’m standing in the foggy mist, wearing shorts and an old Reed College T-shirt. I’m facing east. For a long time I am absolutely still. I listen to my breathing. I feel my heart beating, the pulse in my neck and wrists and ankles. Slowly, I raise my arms over my head and begin my sun salutation sequence. From this I shift into my T’ai Chi workout, focusing on my breath energy, which is incredible this morning, really off the meter.