21 Great Leaders: Learn Their Lessons, Improve Your Influence (7 page)

Clara taught Steve to read before he started school. Steve learned to tinker with electronics from his father, who was a carpenter by trade. Exceptionally bright, Steve had little patience for conventional schooling. Even after skipping a grade, he found school boring and unchallenging.

After graduating from high school in 1972, Jobs persuaded his parents to pay his way to Reed College, an expensive private liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon. Paul and Clara Jobs invested a big chunk of their life savings in Steve’s college education, only to see him drop out during his second semester. He continued to hang around campus, couch-surfing in dorm rooms and cadging free meals at the Hare Krishna temple.

At Reed, he befriended Robert Friedland, an eccentric who operated a 220-acre apple farm and hippie commune near Portland. Jobs spent a lot of time at the commune, where (in exchange for room and board) he pruned trees and crushed apples for the commune’s organic cider business. Friedland was heavily into Eastern mysticism, and Jobs looked up to him as the older brother he never had.

During his apple orchard days, Steve Jobs seemed like just another aimless, unmotivated hippie. He had no vision for his own life, much less the future of computing. By early 1974, Jobs was disillusioned with commune life—and with Robert Friedland. “It started to get very materialistic,” Jobs told writer Michael Moritz. “Everybody got the idea they were working very hard for Robert’s farm…. I got pretty sick of it and left.”
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Jobs moved back home with his parents and scoured the “help wanted” ads. The headline H
AVE
F
UN
, M
AKE
M
ONEY
intrigued him. It turned out the ad was placed by Atari, the electronic game company. Jobs strode into the lobby and announced that he wouldn’t leave until Atari gave him a job. Atari founder Nolan Bushnell admired Jobs’s brashness and hired him.

Steve Jobs had a theory that if he ate an all-fruit diet, plus a few vegetables, he would never have body odor and would not have to bathe regularly. When coworkers complained about his personal hygiene, Bushnell moved him to the night shift.

In mid-1974, Jobs went to India to seek enlightenment from Neem Karoli Baba (also called Maharaj-ji). Much of the 1960s hippie movement had already beaten a path to Neem Karoli’s ashram door. Jobs arrived late. Reaching the town of Vrindavan, he learned that the guru had died the previous year. Jobs joined up with Daniel Kottke, and they kicked around India for seven months. Jobs returned home in traditional Indian garb, with his head shaved. When his parents came to pick him up at the airport, his own mother didn’t recognize him.

Jobs returned to Atari, and Nolan Bushnell gave him a challenge: design a streamlined circuit board for the Atari arcade game
Breakout
, using fewer integrated circuits to save costs. Bushnell didn’t know that Jobs had no expertise in circuit design. Jobs accepted—but neglected to mention that Steve Wozniak would do the actual work.

Jobs gave the assignment to Wozniak, and Woz crafted a circuit board that reduced the number of integrated circuits (ICs) by fifty. Jobs presented the streamlined board to Bushnell as his own work, and Bushnell paid him $100 per eliminated IC—a $5,000 bonus. Jobs told Wozniak that Bushnell had paid him $750, and that Woz’s share was $375. Wozniak didn’t learn of Jobs’s deception until a decade later.
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Wozniak later reflected: “I think that Steve needed the money, and he just didn’t tell me the truth…. If he had told me he needed the money, he should have known I would have just given it to him. He was a friend. You help your friends…. I would rather let it pass. It’s not something I want to judge Steve by.”
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During 1975 and 1976, Jobs and Wozniak regularly attended meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club in Palo Alto. There they got to know the target audience for the Apple I computer, which they unveiled in July 1976.

Around that same time, Jobs approached his old Atari boss, Nolan Bushnell, offering him a one-third stake in Apple in exchange for a $50,000 investment. Bushnell said no. Had he said yes, his one-third ownership would be worth more than $40 billion today. Bushnell gave Jobs some names and phone numbers that ultimately led him to Mike Markkula, whose $250,000 investment funded the Apple II—the computer that changed the world.

Jobs and Wozniak produced about two hundred Apple I computers in the garage of Jobs’s parents’ home. To build Apple II, the company needed a headquarters, warehouses, a production line, and employees. The Apple II featured an “open architecture” that made it easy for computer users to customize their computers. The open architecture feature prompted VisiCorp, in 1979, to select Apple II as the standard desktop computer for its spreadsheet program VisiCalc. Apple II sales exploded.

In 1984, Apple launched the GUI-based Macintosh computer, announcing the product with a $1.5 million commercial during Super Bowl XVIII—the now-legendary “1984” commercial directed by Ridley Scott. With the introduction of the Mac, Apple came of age.

By 1985, Steve Jobs realized he was losing control of the company. Though Jobs had a charming public persona, behind the scenes he could be abrasive. His personality clashed with the leadership style of Apple CEO John Sculley, whom Jobs had recruited from PepsiCo in 1983. Sculley’s forte was managing product lines; Jobs’s forte was visionary innovation. Inventing the future is expensive, and Sculley (with the blessing of Apple’s board of directors) continually blocked Jobs’s expensive ideas.

In April 1985, the board authorized Sculley to strip Jobs of executive authority. Jobs responded by trying to oust Sculley, but the board sided with the more buttoned-down approach of John Sculley. Jobs was technically chairman of the company, but he had no duties. Frustrated, Jobs resigned and founded a new company called NeXT, Inc. The first NeXT computer went on sale in 1988, aimed at users in business and academia. Though sales of NeXT computers proved disappointing, the NeXTSTEP operating system would have a major impact on Apple.

After Jobs’s departure, Apple entered a decade-long period of decline. Bill Gates and Microsoft introduced a GUI-based operating system called Windows, which chomped hard into Apple’s market share. By the early 1990s, Apple clearly lacked the visionary leadership to launch a new wave of innovation.

In 1996, Apple acquired Steve Jobs’s NeXT Corporation—and with it, Steve Jobs himself. In 1997, the board made Jobs interim CEO. Instantly, Apple began innovating once more. In 2000, the board dropped “interim” from Jobs’s title, making him CEO of Apple Inc.

Steve Jobs went to his doctor in October 2003, complaining of symptoms he attributed to kidney stones. He underwent a CT scan, and doctors noticed a suspicious shadow on his pancreas. They diagnosed it as a gastroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine tumor (GEP-NET)—one of the rarest and least aggressive cancers known to science. If you must have cancer, this is a good one to get.

The good news: the cancer was at an early stage. In most cases, a simple surgical procedure called enucleation (removing the tumor plus a safe margin of surrounding tissue) eliminates the cancer.

The bad news: Jobs wouldn’t consent to surgery. Instead, he spent nine months pursuing “alternative therapies,” including a special diet consisting largely of fruit and fruit juices.
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Against the strenuous pleadings of his wife, doctors, and friends, Jobs delayed the surgery that probably would have saved his life. He said, “I didn’t want my body to be opened…. I didn’t want to be violated in that way.”
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Ever since his teen years, Jobs had been a fruitarian vegan, fanatically committed to a diet consisting primarily (at times, entirely) of fruit. Jobs’s biographer Walter Isaacson describes Jobs’s relationship with food as an eating disorder.
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From his teen years on, Jobs often went to unhealthy extremes, including bingeing, purging, fasting, and eating just one or two foods (typically apples or carrots or fruit juices) for weeks at a time.
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In Jobs’s youth, Isaacson said, he discovered “he could induce euphoria and ecstasy by fasting.”
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He achieved a drug-like endorphin high through malnutrition.

After Jobs was diagnosed with cancer, his eating disorder worsened, and he often subsisted on nothing but fruit smoothies.
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Fruits are healthful, rich in vitamins, minerals, and cancer-fighting antioxidants. Most of us don’t get enough of them. But Steve Jobs had an unhealthy obsession with fruit. In fact, his zeal to stay healthy and live longer may have significantly shortened his life.

Fruit contains fructose (fruit sugar), which the liver processes into a number of products, including artery-clogging triglycerides. Fructose in moderation is a healthy nutrient, but megadoses of fructose can be hazardous to your health in a number of ways, increasing your risk of diabetes and endocrine-related cancers—
such as a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor
.

Steve Jobs’s fructose-intensive diet may well have caused his cancer. Jobs continued bingeing on fruit even
after
his diagnosis. Research has shown that pancreatic tumor cells actually utilize fructose for cell division, so Jobs was probably
feeding
his cancer cells and
speeding up
the spread of his cancer. It’s a tragic irony that sweet, wholesome fruit may have been as deadly to Steve Jobs as cigarettes were to Walt Disney.

Walter Isaacson theorized that the reason Jobs rejected surgery was not fear of the knife, but a lifelong habit of “magical thinking.” He had always been able to charm people and alter circumstances with what he called his “reality distortion field.” Isaacson said, “I think that he kind of felt that if you ignore something, if you don’t want something to exist, you can have magical thinking. And it had worked for him in the past.”
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Jobs’s years of studying Eastern religion had convinced him that reality is an illusion you can alter with your mind. If he didn’t want the cancer to exist, he could make it magically disappear.

But the cancer refused to disappear. In fact, it spread. Nine months after his diagnosis, Jobs agreed to surgery. During his later interviews with Walter Isaacson, as his health was declining, Jobs talked about his hope for an afterlife. He wanted to believe that “when you die, it doesn’t just all disappear. The wisdom you’ve accumulated. Somehow it lives on…. But sometimes I think…[life is] just like an on-off switch. Click and you’re gone. And that’s why I don’t like putting on-off switches on Apple devices.”
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By 2009, it was clear that Steve Jobs was getting worse, not better. He went to Memphis for a liver transplant. He went to Switzerland for experimental treatments. Nothing worked. He was dying.

But even as Steve Jobs was dying, Apple was thriving. In July 2011, CNN reported that the company Steve Jobs cofounded in his parents’ garage had more cash on hand ($76.2 billion) than the US government ($73.8 billion).
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In August 2011, Steve Jobs resigned as CEO, having spent most of the year on medical leave.

On October 5, 2011, Jobs was at home, surrounded by family members. At one point, he seemed to look past his wife and children. Once again, he was seeing something only he could see. Then he said, “Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.”
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Minutes later, at about two in the afternoon, his heart beat one final time then went still.

Steven Jobs was one of the great visionary leaders of our time. He said his goal was to “make a dent in the universe.”
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He built, lost control of, then rebuilt the most successful company in history. Our world has been shaped by his vision and inventions. His vision has shaped not only the way we use computers, but the way we talk on the phone, take pictures, listen to music, read books, watch movies, and more. He created products that people didn’t even know they wanted until they saw them. That’s visionary leadership.

As a young man, Steve Jobs had no vision for his life. He had no formal training in engineering, industrial design, management, business administration, or leadership of any kind. Yet he became one of the great visionary leaders of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Let me suggest some lessons we can learn from this leader of vision:

1.
To sharpen your vision, absorb the lessons of failure
. Before Steve Jobs could achieve heights of unprecedented success, he had to pass through a time of exile and failure. He had to hit the reset button on his career. He had to spend a dozen years in the wilderness of NeXT before he could make his triumphant return to Apple.

Jobs once reflected, “I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”
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That statement is amazingly similar to one Walt Disney made after the 1923 bankruptcy of his Laugh-O-Gram studio in Kansas City. Disney recalled setting off for Hollywood feeling “free and happy” in spite of being broke. Disney added, “I had failed. I think it’s important to have a good hard failure when you’re young.”
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Steve Jobs suffered his “good hard failure” when he was booted out of Apple at age thirty.

During his NeXT years, Jobs lost sight of what it means to be a visionary leader. He became obsessed with petty details while neglecting strategic priorities. On one occasion, he kept a delegation of visiting retail executives waiting on the sidewalk for twenty minutes while he gave meticulous instructions about sprinkler heads to a landscaping crew.