Steve Jobs' personality, values inseparable from the Apple saga

Just as it was 20 years ago, it's impossible to talk about the Macintosh today without discussing the two faces of Steve Jobs.

There's Made-for-TV-Movie Steve, the celebrity action-figure who's gradually come to resemble a cross between James Taylor and James Bond. And there's the real working head of state for the Macintosh Nation. Apple Computer would not be alive today without both of them.

Apple needs Made-for-TV Steve because the company is not just selling computers and software. Apple has always been about the mass marketing of a set of values and a story line.

Over the years, in the many books and a TV movie, Jobs' personal story line has been distilled to a series of familiar drag-and-drop icons: the hacker-entrepreneur hatching an empire in a garage. Brilliant rebel turned youthful bazillionaire. The first CEO-as-rock-star. And now, at 48, the prototypical aging suburban boomer, hipster version.

Apple needs Made-for-TV Steve because the company's identity, direction and culture are indelibly wed to the personality and values of its leader. In that sense, Jobs is the last in a long line of Silicon Valley visionaries. William Shockley. Gordon Moore. Robert Noyce. Jerry Sanders. Andy Grove. Be they control freaks, bullies, gamblers or statesmen, their personalities were etched into the corporate motherboard from Day One.

Still standing

Now, in an era where bean-counters and marketeers call the shots and most valley CEOs wouldn't know a floating-point unit from a fish fork, Jobs is the last Big Kahuna still standing.

Not to overlook the fact that he took a big fall along the way. With Jobs, the humiliation of being driven out of Apple in 1985 became the first act in an operatic saga: The king betrayed by a trusted ally. Exile. And at long last, triumphant return and vindication.

Of course, we can't have a heroic figure without a fatal flaw. Jobs, who declined to be interviewed, exudes arrogance of a certain blast-furnace intensity that people find hard to overlook.

When you're worth $165 million at the ripe age of 25 and you can rightly boast that your products are changing the world, maybe that buys you the right to make some value judgments. But with Jobs, it was never enough to say ``We're right on this and they're wrong.'' No, it was always ``We're right, they're idiots.''

If there was ever an assembly of all the friends, employees and potential partners Jobs has alienated, they'd have to rent Flint Center to accommodate the mob. Jobs had a rather binary view of Apple when the Mac was being birthed by his team: Mac people were stars and everyone else was . . . something less than star quality. It was around this time that John Sculley and the Apple board began to see Jobs as a liability to the organization.

Today, Apple is indisputably his company and his vision writ large.

Internal culture

It's instructive to note that arrogance, Jobs' greatest personal weakness, became an organizational strength as a pillar of Apple's internal culture. In the life of every start-up, there comes a gut-check moment when everyone in the room must be dead certain that what they are doing is right and the rest of the world can go to hell. There is simply no way the Mac could have been born without that supreme confidence.

The Mac was not an instant hit. And if Apple had been customer-focused, if the company had been driven by investors' demands to hit a certain quarterly number, if the Mac team members had allowed themselves to be second-guessed, the Mac would not have survived past infancy.

Today, that arrogance -- or purity of vision, if you prefer -- is still evident in the pronouncements emanating from Infinite Loop, Apple's headquarters in Cupertino. At times the company seems to acknowledge that it lives in a world of market share and that Dell and HP are competitors. At other times, the implicit company line seems still to be: ``Let the world come to us. Let the PC makers fight among themselves. We have higher things to worry about.''

Taking the long view, Apple has every reason to turn a deaf ear to the rest of the world. The brightest moments in the company's history have come during periods when engineers ruled. And the darkest have come when Apple allowed itself to be swayed by outside expectations and the pressures of the market.

Back on track

When Jobs hit the road, Sculley, the former soft-drink salesman, made sure that the engineers still drove the company. By comparison, Michael Spindler and Gil Amelio were plodders, men with no vision who obsessed about sales and inventories and structures rather than innovation.

It took Amelio's ouster and Jobs' return in 1997 to put the company back on track. Within a year, it delivered the first truly great product in ages -- the iMac. Apple went from losing more than a billion dollars in fiscal '97 to a $309 million profit the following year. Market share increased for the first time in memory. Jobs rebuilt an engineer-centric organization and Apple went on to innovate itself out of the death spiral with more breakthrough hits, such as the titanium PowerBook and the iPod.

Wednesday, the company reported its best quarter in four years. Thanks to iBooks and iPods, the days of double-digit growth are back. The first duty of Jobs, as the Supreme Defender of the Macintosh faith, is to make sure Apple stays on message. And he's doing a magnificent job. The brand stands for exactly what it did on the day the first Mac shipped. Apple products are still elegant, intuitive and accessible. Above all else, they are still cool.