Part of what makes the Stanford speech so powerful is that it elucidates the very personal, and hard-earned, values Steve brought to his later leadership of Apple. Each of its three stories contains guidance that Steve could only really understand as a mature man. He was always glib, and he perhaps could have said these things as a younger man. But he wouldn’t have really known what they meant.
You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. The young Steve would have had none of this statement from the story about dropping out of Reed College. In the decade after founding Apple, Steve was hell-bent on shaping the future to his vision. He believed he could connect the dots as he moved forward. Time and again, his engineers found themselves hamstrung trying to fit their work into his sometimes brilliant, sometimes misguided, specifications. That first time around at Apple, and again at NeXT, Steve had been convinced he could do just about everything better than the people working around him. But when he returned to Apple, he really did “have to trust that the dots [would] somehow connect.” Again and again during his second act, the specifics of Apple’s next big things arose from unlikely sources. The iMac was concocted from the design of the eMate, a product that Steve killed. The iPod and iTunes were the direct result of Steve’s misguided interest in movie-editing software. Now Apple was developing a phone because five disparate teams knew that they had Steve’s backing to explore widely, and their work had led him to decide against pursuing the product he really wanted to build, a tablet. Steve had grown comfortable with only seeing the connections between the dots after the fact. Maturity, and the extraordinary talents of the team he had built, made that possible.
Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.… The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking.… As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. Steve discovered what he loved to do early in his life. But what gave these words—from the second story in the speech, the section about love and loss—such power in 2005 was the fact that the love he had for his work had survived so much, and resulted in so much. It took lots and lots of time—all those years of struggling at NeXT, of reconfiguring Pixar, of stabilizing Apple—for things to get “better and better.” Now he could speak with the confidence of someone who had worked on relationships—with Laurene, with the executive team at Apple, and even with his first daughter, Lisa. Steve’s struggles, and everything that he had learned as a result, were essential to Apple’s ability to again and again create products that people loved. No other huge company, save Disney perhaps, creates products that engender such emotional responses, even from otherwise skeptical journalists. After one product announcement, the New York Times ran a wrap-up story with the headline “The magic in Apple’s devices? The heart”—and this was three years after Steve’s death. The company, like its boss, had many faults. But it worked with a sense of mission that was different from other companies in its industry.
Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Without the proof of Apple’s success, these words from the speech’s final chapter could be misread as the kind of callow cheerleading intoned by high school valedictorians. But what gives them strength and power is that they come from someone who had proved their value in a corporate setting. Just as Steve thoroughly deviated from the norm, Apple deviated from the norm of its industry, and in many ways from all of corporate America. Steve had learned how to modulate the potential solipsism of “follow your heart.” Early in his career, “intuition” had meant a shuttered confidence in the inventions of his own brain. There was a stubborn refusal to consider the thoughts of others. By 2005, intuition had come to mean a sense of what to do that grew out of entertaining a world of possibilities. He was confident enough now to listen to his team as well as his own thoughts, and to acknowledge the nature of the world around him—as he had when learning about the movie industry at Pixar, or in evaluating the openings for Apple upon his return to the company—as he moved toward a course of action. Apple didn’t steer toward the iPhone as a result of focus groups or market research. It headed that way because of intuition, but an intuition that was deeper and richer than the selfish preferences of the young man who had founded Apple.
WHEN I FIRST read the speech online, I remembered an interview I’d conducted with Steve in 1998. We had been talking about the trajectory of his career when, in a rambling aside not unlike the road on the back cover of the last issue of the Whole Earth Catalog, Steve told me about the impact that the Catalog had had upon him. “I think back to it when I am trying to remind myself of what to do, of what’s the right thing to do.” A few weeks after that interview had been published in Fortune, I received an envelope in the mail. It was from Stewart Brand, and it contained a rare copy of that final issue. “Please give this to Steve next time you see him,” Stewart asked. When I did, a week or two later, Steve was thrilled. He’d remembered the issue for all those years, but had never had the time to locate a copy for himself.
The end of the Stanford speech focuses on the Catalog’s back-cover motto, “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish,” but my favorite line about the catalog in Steve’s speech is when he describes it as “idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.” This is, in fact, a lovely description of Steve’s companies at their best. He was an empathetic man who wanted these graduates to head off on foolish, hungry pursuits, and who wanted to give them neat tools and great notions as they began their winding journey. Like Jim Collins, I had gotten close enough to Steve to see beyond his harshness and the occasional outright rudeness to the idealist within. Sometimes it was hard to convey this idealism to others, given Steve’s intensity and unpredictably sharp elbows. The Stanford commencement speech gave the world a glimpse of that genuine idealism.
Chapter 14
A Safe Haven for Pixar
On Saturday, March 12, 2005, Bob Iger, then president of the Walt Disney Company, picked up the phone to make a few calls from his home in Bel Air, California. He called his parents, his two grown daughters from his first marriage, and Daniel Burke and Thomas Murphy, his two most important professional mentors. Then he called someone he’d only met a couple of times: Steve Jobs.
Iger had big news to share: The following day, March 13, Disney would announce that he would become the next CEO of Disney, replacing Michael Eisner. Eisner had been CEO since 1984, and had followed a great first decade with a second one that can only be described as mediocre and turbulent. By the end, he had disappointed shareholders and alienated just about every stakeholder who had a vested interest in the company. One of those was Pixar’s CEO, who disliked Eisner so much that he had publicly announced that the company would find a new distributor once its existing contract with Disney ended in 2006.
“Steve,” said Iger, “before you read it in the paper tomorrow, I’m calling to let you know I’m going to be named the next CEO of the company. I don’t fully know what that’s going to mean in terms of Disney and Pixar, but I’m calling to tell you I’d like to figure out a way to keep this relationship alive.”