The Kitchen Table

To people who value innovation and style, and especially to people in our own psychographic group who tend to inexplicably celebrate aloof, dismissive billionaire businesspeople who wouldn’t have the time of day for any of us, Steve Jobs is a serious god.

As he should be. He didn’t just dream about building a personal computer, as a lot of my friends did in college; he actually did it. Or maybe Steve Wozniak did, but it was Jobs who made us all stay up at night thinking about it. He knows how to make us want.

I can remember reading Tracy Kidder’s book The Soul of a New Machine, which chronicled the making of the Data General Eclipse MV/8000. And then there was the day I sat in the boardroom of Gavilan Computer in 1985, as whiz kid Manny Fernandez showed us what he said was the world’s first laptop computer.

Both are forgotten today, subsumed by the legend of Jobs’ white boxes. Data General’s guys all went to work for Microsoft, and we know what Jobs has done to them. Gavilan was exposed for good at the 1985 Consumer Electronics Show, when word leaked that their box was actually being run by a Mac II, hidden in the pedestal beneath it. (True story.)

I can vividly remember opening my first Mac II. It was actually my daughter’s first Mac II, bought for her at Christmas, but the moment I saw it, I knew it was destined to be mine too. Although I had used enormous IBM information processors at college, I had never used a laptop with a modern interface. The Mac actually came with a fat instruction book in those days, but like a true Apple acolyte, I bypassed it and dove right into the inscrutable Moby Dick whiteness of the machine.

Amazingly, it told me what to do next. In a day or two, I was a fluid MacWrite user, marveling at the way word processors made it possible for us to write as an automatic gesture, then edit later on, rather than editing first and then writing our words down. I played computer Monopoly with my daughter as she fell asleep, a sound that is still as sweet as virtual dice could get. And I realized how important these machines were going to be to all our futures.

They had already changed ours, as a company. While still working at Ogilvy & Mather, Andy Berlin, Rich Silverstein and I had taken on a freelance assignment with a computer-gaming company called Amazin’ Software. We changed the name to Electronic Arts (EA) and designed a whole new kind of packaging based on record albums, and the place was taking off. (We were partially paid in Electronic Arts stock, which I sold to buy a grand piano about a year later. An executive there once told me what the stock would be worth today. Let’s just say it was a seven-figure number that didn’t start with one.)

It was our work on Electronic Arts that attracted Jobs to us the first time. Steve was friends with Tripp Hawkins, the founder of EA, Bing Gordon, the marketing guy, and Brook Byers, who had funded them out of the big venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. This was Jobs’ first stint as Apple’s CEO, remember, a time when he was very much in control, but nevertheless had embarked upon a few notable disasters like the Lisa desktop computer. It wouldn’t be long before his swashbuckling, abrasive style began to alienate the board there, and he would ultimately be replaced by PepsiCo CEO John Sculley, a guy Steve had hired himself (famously asking him whether he was “ready to stop making sugar water and start changing the world”).

During that same period, Jobs had started a second computer maker, NeXT, which pioneered a lot of the rich media and embedded e-mail structures we use today. He was in the early stages of marketing the NeXT machine when he visited us for the first time at our scruffy warehouse offices in 66 Broadway, the old United Seed Building.

The gathering started at 9:00 a.m., a time I have always found to be much too early for civil meetings. Indeed, I was pretty late getting to the office, and things had already more than heated up in the conference room that had a nice view of a parking lot under the old Embarcadero Freeway. I listened to the tone of the voices through the door and decided to meet Steve on the way out.

I learned later that our little plan for the meeting had backfired egregiously. But to understand why, you have to know a bit about Jobs’ management style.

People who have worked at Apple describe their relationship with Jobs as a binary one. You are either on his list of favorites or you are on your way out. There is no in-between. There is, in fact, a term for this Jobsian phenomenon: The Genius-Shithead Roller Coaster.

Apparently, our roller-coaster car had descended rather rapidly from genius to shithead that morning. We had launched into our standard presentation of the company—some anecdotal history, a reel, a few case histories—when Steve began using a technique I have seen used by other provocative company heads. We might call it the Ass-Tightening Question. The Ass-Tightening Question is the question at the end of a series of apparently polite interrogatories, the question that finally steps over the line into impolite and uncomfortable grilling.

Steve would watch a case history and listen patiently to our happy reporting of the successful results. Then, he would ask a polite but loaded question such as “So how much time passed between when you ran that advertising and when business turned up?”

You would answer that, and he would then ask a slightly less polite question such as “How do you know it wasn’t the new feature in the product that spiked sales, and not your advertising?”

You would sheepishly answer that one, and then he would ask the Ass-Tightening Question: “So are you sure that you didn’t just spend the client’s money on something that made no difference, really, and are here today taking credit for success you didn’t really create?” And then, for good measure, he would add some special sauce: “I mean, how do you know you had anything at all to do with these results?”
Coming from the Steve of 1985, these questions had a way of not so subtly suggesting the following: “I don’t believe what you are saying”; and “You are people of no substance”; and, of course, “Your business is founded on total bullshit.”And he would do this so forcefully, so well, that you began to wonder whether he wasn’t right.

As I say, I wasn’t there for this treatment firsthand, but I think this is a pretty accurate version of what happened. It rather fits what I saw as the meeting broke up.

After an hour or so behind the conference-room door, I heard it open up, and some footsteps hurried down the stairs toward the reception area. It was Jobs and a couple of his coworkers, with Berlin and Silverstein in a kind of vain pursuit. I am not sure what was said among them, but I remember well the moment as Steve passed by our very sweet Austrian receptionist, Heidi.

“Goodbye, thank you!” Heidi sang out, smiling.

Steve didn’t acknowledge her. He just kept walking right out the door.

“Wow,” said Heidi. Berlin and Silverstein looked stricken.

“That was fucking weird,” said Andy. “He hated us.” We all stood there in silence, wondering whether we should care.

It was about 11 years before we heard from Steve again. This time, his circumstances were different, and more precarious. He had been summarily ousted by the Apple board, only to return as the chairman and CEO, after what was seen to be the failed terms of John Sculley and Gil Amelio. All eyes were on him.

He called and asked whether we might come down to Cupertino to do a capabilities pitch. Warily, we accepted the invitation.

Steve was 45 minutes late. We waited in a conference room as his solicitous assistant offered coffee and drinks. Finally, Jobs showed up, in an uncharacteristic bow tie. He was apologetic and ingratiating. Winning. He had us.

We gave an overview of our agency. It seemed to go better this time than the last.

And then, over the next hour or so, Jobs proceeded to give what I think was the greatest business presentation I have ever seen.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began. “Our company is in shambles. The effort to sell Apple to businesses has failed. Our new product innovation is nonexistent. We are complacent and arrogant.” He showed us a series of charts about Apple sales faltering in many sectors. Things were indeed bad.

“How will we fix this? We will become a consumer brand. Not a business brand or a manufacturing brand or even a technological brand, but a consumer brand like Nike or Adidas.”

“To that end, I propose that we get out of all areas of business except two. We will make products for people like you—advertising people, designers, architects, fashionable and technologically savvy people. And we will make products for students.”

“We won’t make anything for anyone else. Nothing. Zero. No more desktops in offices. No more government contracts. These areas will be the core of our business.”

On the spot, we recognized how bold and interesting it all was. You couldn’t help it. Steve had his mojo back. Absence had made him stronger. There would be a competition for their advertising business, he said, and he wanted us to take part. After that performance, it was hard to say no.

Nevertheless, about two days later, I found myself calling his office to say exactly that.

When you call Steve Jobs, he has a way of making you feel very special by using your name when he answers the phone. His assistant put me through to him.

“Hello, Jeff Goodby!” Steve sang out. He sounded so happy to hear from me. Who could ever be displeased with this man?

I proceeded to explain that we had thought about the idea of pitching Apple and decided not to do it.

What’s more, I said, we didn’t even think he should hold a pitch.

“Why not just give the business to Chiat\Day?” I said. “You know and love Lee Clow from way back. He’s a great guy. He’s done inspirational advertising for you—‘1984’ and that iconic white look. Just hire them back and get going.”

“I’m sorry to hear this,” he said. “I’ll think about it. I’m just not sure whether that won’t be seen as going backward.”

It is, of course, exactly what he did. Along with a few other little things, such as inventing the iPhone, the iPod, the MacBook, the MacBook Pro and the iPad, opening spectacular stores, owning the sales of music at 99 cents a shot and creating a whole generation of consumers loyal beyond anyone’s imagination. With Lee working personally on the business, they adopted a new, ungrammatical tag line, “Think Different,” and applied it to film and images of iconoclasts and cultural rebels. In short, it has become a business school case study of success, and Steve is a Silicon Valley legend and the most admired CEO in the world.

I haven’t spoken to him since.