As much as he depended on Tribble’s and Tevanian’s skills, Steve could not resist managing them ferociously. “Early on,” remembers Tribble’s wife, Susan Barnes, “Bud would complain to me about the fact that Steve kept pushing to see what he was working on in action, on a screen. ‘Steve can yell that the sun shouldn’t rise in the east,’ Bud would tell me, ‘but it’s going to rise in the east, and it’s going to take time to get this software to the point where you can see something visually on the screen. I know he’s a visual learner, I know he can see that way, and I know it’s frustrating for him to look at lines of code. But that’s life!’ ”
“The company was so small,” says Tevanian, who looks like a professional soccer player, with his dark curly hair, deep-set eyes, and athletic frame, “that everybody knew everyone else. I’d be working late at night and Steve would come by and I’d show him what I’m working on, and then he’d yell and scream at me, tell me how terrible it was and all that kind of stuff. But in the end, there was a bunch of stuff that I knew that he didn’t know. He knew that he didn’t know it, so we developed this mutual respect where I could tolerate some of his criticisms because he would also actually listen to me when I had something to say. We made it work.”
EARLY ON AT NeXT, Steve said the most important thing he could do was “architect a great company.” This potentially noble sentiment became a half-baked and confused endeavor, and yet another distraction. Sometimes Steve’s good intentions could lead to a deep intellectual self-deception, in which trivial issues loomed larger than life and fundamental realities were swept under the rug.
He did try to be a good boss. For example, Steve hosted annual “family picnics” for his employees in Menlo Park. They were kid-oriented Saturday affairs, featuring clowns, volleyball, burgers and hot dogs, and even hokey events like sack races. At his invitation, I attended one in 1989 with my daughter, Greta, who was five years old at the time. Steve, who was barefoot, sat with me on a hay bale and chatted for an hour or so while Greta wandered off to watch the Pickle Family Circus, a Bay Area comedic troupe of acrobats and jugglers that Steve had hired. NeXT staffers would come up from time to time, thanking him for throwing the bash. We talked about his business a bit, but mostly Steve rattled on about how important families were to NeXT, and about how many families there were over at Pixar, the small graphics computing outfit he’d acquired from George Lucas. Some of it was hot air, but some of it was a reflection of the fact that Steve really was wrestling with the issue of paternal responsibility. Down deep, he ached for a family of his own. He was spending more and more time with his daughter Lisa, a reconciliation process that was never entirely successful, but that would eventually lead to her living with him during her high school years. I had the feeling that he looked at those picnics as evidence that he could in fact be a good father, if not to his daughter, then at least to his employees. “I think he looked around those gatherings and thought, ‘Oh God, I’m not just carrying all these employees, I’m carrying their families, too,” says Barnes. “It added to the pressure he felt.”
Steve’s budding paternalism carried over into his efforts to develop friendships with some of his closest executives. When Tribble and Barnes had their first child, Steve snuck into the hospital after hours to visit. “Steve so much wanted to be a father figure,” remembers Jon Rubinstein, who joined NeXT in 1991 and eventually replaced Rich Page as the lead hardware engineer. “He’s just a year older than I am. But he had this father-figure thing going that was very funny because, you know, he thought he knew more about life than anyone else around him. He always wanted to know about my personal life.”
But when he tried to intellectualize or institutionalize his paternalistic feelings, he often did so in shallow, poorly designed ways. As part of “architecting a great company” Steve tried to implement an idealistic social experiment he called the “Open Corporation.” Salaries were set by category, so that everyone with a certain job title would be paid the same amount. And every employee’s salary information would be available to everyone else. It was, Steve once claimed to me, an example of his commitment to treating everyone at the company fairly. Then he launched into the “heartfelt” soliloquy he’d prepared for that particular moment:
“It’s people who make our factory work. It’s people who write the software, who design the machines. We’re not going to have to out-scale our competitors, we have to out-think them. Every time we hire somebody, we put a brick into building our future.
“Hiring the right people is only the beginning—you also have to build an open corporation. Think of it this way: If you look at your own body, your cells are specialized, but every single one of them has the master plan for the whole body. We think NeXT will be the best possible company if every single person working here understands the whole basic master plan and can use that as a yardstick to make decisions. Sure, there is some risk with giving everybody access to all the corporate information, and potentially some loss. But what you gain vastly surpasses what you lose.
“The most visible sign of the open corporation at NeXT is our policy of allowing everybody to know what salary everybody else is making. There’s a list in the finance department, and anyone can go look at it. Why? In a typical company, a typical manager might spend three hours a week on compensation issues. Most of those three hours a week is spent defusing false rumors and talking in caged terms about relative compensation. In our company, the manager still spends those three hours, but we spend them defending in a very open way the decisions we made and explaining why we made them, and coaching the people that work for us about what it will take for them to achieve those levels of compensation. So we tend to look at those three hours as an educational opportunity.”
Talking about the Open Corporation gave Steve a way to cast a sheen of moral exceptionalism on NeXT. But his actions soon contradicted his words. By the time he was telling me this, the practice had already been exposed inside the company for the twaddle it was. That’s because Steve was always hell-bent on hiring the very best people in the world, especially engineers. “In most businesses, the difference between average and good is at best 2 to 1,” Steve once told me. “Like, if you go to New York and you get the best cabdriver in the city, you might get there thirty percent faster than with an average taxicab driver. A 2 to 1 gain would be pretty big. In software, it’s at least 25 to 1. The difference between the average programmer and a great one is at least that. We have gone to exceptional lengths to hire the best people in the world. And when you’re in a field where the dynamic range is 25 to 1, boy, does it pay off.”
The hiring process at NeXT was rigorous, with multiple interviews. In many cases, even one interviewer’s “No” could blackball a candidate. And there were candidates aplenty, vying for the chance to work with Steve. But of course, even at NeXT it wasn’t possible to hire the best of the best without strong financial incentives. So Steve started making exceptions for certain hires. Some folks got extraordinary signing bonuses. Others were simply granted higher salaries than their category would mandate. And when these backdoor deals started to make their way onto that list in the finance department, well, all of a sudden that list became a lot harder to find.
Not only was the Open Corporation logistically and managerially unrealistic; it was emotionally out of synch with the reality of a Steve Jobs workplace. He would repeatedly undermine the vision of harmony, peace, and equality he had promised to foster with his irascible temper and anger and his penchant for using passive-aggressive methods to drive his people harder and harder. Steve was as erratic and verbally abusive at NeXT as he was anywhere else during his career. Moreover, he was an equal-opportunity abuser, yelling not only at his engineers but also at his executive team and his own personal administrative assistants on a regular basis.