“Becoming Steve Jobs” co-author responds to Andy Hertzfeld

I really appreciate Andy Hertzfeld’s critique of Becoming Steve Jobs, because it raises serious, interesting issues about how Jobs will be seen as a historical figure.

Hertzfeld (who, I should point out, was interviewed several times by my co-author Brent Schlender over his 25 years of covering Apple) writes that “A reckless upstart can be a visionary leader — in fact, they’re usually the best kind.” It’s a fascinating point, and I think I know what he means. An “upstart” can often bring a “reckless” passion to the preposterous belief that a small group of individuals can shatter existing industry paradigms, a passion that can be so inspiring that the upstart can lead a team to greatness. And that certainly was true of Jobs in his first go-round at Apple, which helps explain why Hertzfeld and many others from the Mac team understandably “adore the early Apple.” It’s true, as Hertzfeld writes, that Jobs was “collaborative” in this way (our book points this out, too.) Far from belittling that period, we made every effort to communicate what a special, magical moment that was.

But the kind of collaboration that the young Jobs was capable of with Hertzfeld, Wozniak, and his other “passionate colleagues” had its limits. Jobs disparaged the Apple II, and the people who worked on it, creating a conflict that soured his relationship with Woz, and an unnecessary division in the company. He failed to guide the teams working on the Apple III and the Lisa to success, in large part because of his own insecurities. And even the Mac cannot be described as an unmitigated success. The first version was underpowered, and Steve wasn’t interested in pushing for the subsequent changes that were needed to make it the successful consumer product it eventually proved to be. Other people led that effort. This is not the kind of collaboration that leads to great companies. By the time Jobs was pushed aside, leading to his departure and the creation of Next, the company was stagnant and in need of a kind of leadership he had not shown.

Maybe Jobs would have become a great leader by staying on at Apple. As he would say, you don’t get to replay the experiment. But his success in his second tenure there is the work of a far more seasoned, considerate businessman, someone who was both far more “collaborative” than the first time, and much more of a “visionary leader.” During the so-called wilderness years between 1985 and 1997, he absorbed so much from his experiences at Pixar and NeXT. The net result is clear: by the time Jobs returned to Apple, he was a much more effective manager.

After 1997, Jobs succeeded at any number of things he had botched the first time around. He delivered a steady run of great products, rather than the one-time creation of breakthroughs. He managed a stable executive team, rather than gathering a band of gypsies for one thrilling run at a product. He was a more nuanced motivator, which helped him keep that executive team close for years. By applying what the company learned from making each new device, he moved the company forward incrementally.

And let’s not forget the execution he oversaw. Apple moved from making tens of thousands of computers a month to making millions of devices a month without much of a hiccup. The Apple of the early 1980s had a tough time meeting deadlines, created a machine that overheated when customers took it home, and repeatedly delivered products that were not ready for prime time. At the post-1997 Apple, these kinds of problems were few and far between, and those that did occur were tackled expeditiously.

What Jobs and Hertzfeld and Wozniak and the other Apple pioneers did was extraordinary, that’s true. But when we look back at the career of Steve Jobs, those brilliant moments early in his career aren’t what define his greatness. It’s his performance during the last 15 years of his life that truly defines him as a great visionary “leader.” He had grown into someone who could push an entire company to a methodical and spectacular success over fifteen years, a resurgence that’s unmatched in business history. That triumph required a set of managerial skills that Jobs had to learn, and that are still underappreciated.