What Would Steve Jobs Do? How the Steve Jobs Way Can Inspire Anyone to Think Differently and Win Read Online Free PDF Page A

product and diluting the vision. It wouldn’t work for a product-driven company that thrived on innovation.
    In a scathing comment during that same interview, Jobs claimed, “John Sculley ruined Apple, and he ruined it by bringing a set of values to the top of Apple which were corrupt and corrupted some of the top people who were there, drove out some of the ones who were not corruptible, and brought in more corrupt ones and paid themselves collectively tens of millions of dollars and cared more about their own glory and wealth than they did about what built Apple in the first place—which was making great computers for people to use.”
    Sculley, for his side of the matter, wrote in his memoir
Odyssey
that Jobs “was a zealot; his vision so pure that he couldn’t accommodate that vision to the imperfections of the world.” He went on to discredit Jobs’s vision as a “lunatic plan,” as “high tech could not be designed and sold as a consumer product.”
    Sculley and Jobs were clearly like oil and water, although they may have given some balance to each other for a while. It was definitely a learning experience for Steve, and it probably strengthened his resolve to take a different path, for instance, in setting up his own retail store channel instead of vying for shelf space in the existing channels.
    Despite their differences, Sculley and Jobs eventually began to recognize each other’s contributions to Apple’s legacy. They occasionally exchanged e-mails. When Jobs resigned, Sculley sent a note: “Steve, I owe you a lot. Because you cared so much, the universe is a little bit different. You did it with taste, design, addictive user experience, and no compromise products that make us all smile…. John.”
    John Sculley and the rest of the world may not have felt this way when Jobs left in 1985. But after gaining two more business experiences and returning to Apple in 1996, Jobs started down a path that would make Sculley’s sentiment speak for most of us.

CHAPTER 2
BORN AGAIN
     
I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.
—Steve Jobs
, NBC Nightly News,
2006
     

 
    According to most accounts, Steve initially didn’t handle his departure from Apple very well. But, as we’ll soon see, it was a maturing experience. Never one to give up, Steve soon started another company, NeXT Computer, sort of a high-end Apple, with the idea of producing a sort of high-end Macintosh. He used a considerable amount of his own personal fortune to launch NeXT, which largely turned out to be a flop. He also got the chance to buy the computer animation and graphics arm of Lucasfilm, which became Pixar. But instead of selling expensive graphics workstations, it serendipitously morphed into a full-length feature film producer through a surprise arrangement with Disney.
    With both companies, but especially with Pixar and Disney, Steve got a chance to work with the big boys and to match his creative energies with some powerful business and market forces. In the case of NeXT, he mostly failed, but he took away some good experiences and learned a lot about interconnectivity, software, and other building blocks that would ultimately shape the next generation of Apple products. At Pixar, he learned a lot about managing large technical teams in a creative environment, and about “big business” dealings from working with Disney.
    When Steve made his “Cinderella” return to Apple in 1996, he found a total mess. The company was losingmoney and had largely resigned itself to occupying a very specialized and slowly shrinking market niche. He was now prepared to almost single-handedly transform the company from a backwater computer maker to the digital powerhouse we now know today. Most observers don’t think this would have happened without Steve’s 11-year hiatus. Steve would have agreed.
    In these years, his