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At one point in the latest Steve Jobs biopic (directed by Danny Boyle and starring Michael Fassbender) Jobs recedes into the background after an argument with Steve Wozniak, who walks away saying, “It’s not binary. You can be decent and gifted at the same time.”
Jobs was not. By most accounts, he was half-genius/half-jerk. It’s this binary quality that drew — and continues to draw — >journalists and film-makers , entrepreneurs and management consultants to him. And they have tried to make sense of this contradiction in different ways.
Broadly, there are three views.
The first holds that Jobs was basically a good man — who did what he had to do. Yes, he pushed people hard; but that made them achieve things they never imagined they could. Yes, he couldn’t suffer fools; but kicking them out made his team stronger. He negotiated hard; but in business you have to be tough. He revelled in nasty arguments; but, without them, as Sir Jonathan Ive, Apple chief design officer, >said , “I just think it’s important to remember, you could have had somebody who didn’t ever argue, but you wouldn’t have the phones that you have now, and a whole list of other things. We wouldn’t have moved things forward.” You have to look at the impact Jobs had. Yes, it might have been tough on some people. But then, have a look at one of them here:
The problem with this view is that Jobs was not actually pushing people towards excellence, when he refused to pay for the upkeep of his own daughter, despite being a millionaire. He certainly wasn’t pushing Steve Wozniak to excellence when he cheated on him by pocketing a bonus from Atari all for himself. He was merely being a jerk.
The second view holds that Steve Jobs might have been a jerk, but he became better. Walter Isaacson’s magisterial biography of Jobs neatly divides itself to two parts — the first one unflattering, the second, admiring.
The Economist>wrote of the book: “Whereas Mr. Jobs might have thrown one of his tantrums after reading the first half of the book (which he never saw), he would have enjoyed the second.” A more recent biography, Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, >attempted to explain how that change happened: in the years between his first and second innings in Apple, Jobs evolved, learning how to manage creative people from wise men like Ed Catmull, one of the founding fathers of Pixar.
While it could have been a beautiful movie about redemption, it doesn’t explain Jobs' behaviour in the second innings. Backdating stock options is probably only a more sophisticated reflection of his Atari gig with Wozniak.
He might have been better at managing creative people, but human relations in the factories that produced the beautiful iPhones have been described as inhuman. And he continued to park his car (with no number plate) in slots marked for those who were handicapped.
The third view holds that Steve Jobs is basically a jerk — who was good at marketing and got some press because of Apple’s financial success — which for all we know might just be a piece of luck. After all, if Steve Jobs hadn’t come to Apple again, and if Pixar hadn’t happened, what would our assessment of Jobs have been? And let’s admit it, nothing can give a sheen to anyone like financial success can.
But, this view has problems too. The grief of the people who lit those candles, offered those flowers, spent those extra hours on their Macs and iPhones and iPads, shed a tear watching Steve Jobs videos on YouTube, or changed their profile pictures, was real. Steve Jobs had struck a chord with a lot of people — and that had little to do with the money in his bank or Apple’s coffers.
It’s also why even nuanced books like Isaacson’s came under fire from Jobs' close associates. They felt the popular depiction of him as a genius/jerk was wrong. Apple’s CEO Tim Cook, in a recent interview to media personality Stephen Colbert tried to explain both Jobs and his critics. “He was a joy to work with and I love him dearly, I miss him everyday,” he >said , “I think that a lot of people are trying to be opportunistic and I hate that, it’s not a great part of our world.”
When he said that, Cook was referring to both Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs, and Alex Gibney’s Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine. Purely in terms of information, The Man in the Machine doesn’t say anything new about Jobs. But to me, there were two takeaways that have helped understand his contribution and our perception.
The first relates the way Jobs tried to bring technology and humanities. Walter Isaacson’s book, Steve Jobs, explored that intersection — in part Jobs himself pitched the idea of his biography in those terms. At one point in the book, Jobs says, “I like that intersection. There’s something magical about that place. There are a lot of people innovating, and that’s not the main distinction of my career. The reason Apple resonates with people is that there’s a deep current of humanity in our innovation. I think great artists and great engineers are similar, in that they both have a desire to express themselves. In fact some of the best people working on the original Mac were poets and musicians on the side.”
Watching the documentary, I felt it was not just a question of hiring poets and musicians to the team. It went beyond that. What Jobs had in mind is almost a deeper connection between human beings and machines. We learn from the documentary that Jobs once knocked on the door of a Zen master, Kōbun Chino Otogawa to tell him that he felt enlightened. Asked to produce proof of it, Jobs returned with a computer chip. That’s how deep his connection was. Artists have explored this bond between machine and man, but Jobs felt that more deeply, and took the idea farther, than any other businessman did.
The second relates to our own relationship with our phones. Consider birthday alerts. Once we used our memory — what we choose to remember — to nurture human relationships. My mother seemed to know everyone one of our relatives’ birthdays and anniversaries by heart and my father, the more gregarious of the two, would make the calls. This formed a key element of their relationship. But then, those are moving to phones today.
We depend on them to tell us whom to call and when. At one point in the documentary, the camera focusses on that brief moment, when we see ourselves in the screen of our phones — before it switches on to life. Perhaps, in that hazy reflection we also see that what’s said of Jobs, is true for each one of us. We are all gifted in our own ways (there might not be a market for those gifts, and hence we might not be able to monetise them, but gifted each one of us are), and even the best of us act like jerks every so often, we struggle with our weaknesses. While journalists and writers and management consultants might want to resolve the binary, we know it exists, and we have to live with it. It’s the hard battle we have to fight.
And Jobs was only the symbol of that. The Man in the Machine is us.
