You…Complete Me
WHEN STEVE JOBS WAS ASKED TO RETURN to the helm of Apple in 1997, he was conflicted. Although still bitter from being ousted a decade earlier, he wanted to prove that he could run the company he had founded with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne in 1976. The question for him, however, was whether it was worth the headaches. He was in a better place in his life at that time, leading a fledgling animation company called Pixar, but also at home, where he was able to spend more time with his family. In 1997, Apple was a disaster, burning through CEOs and delivering one bad financial quarter after another, while Microsoft’s Windows 95 was flying off the shelves. It would take a monumental effort to not only return Apple to its former modest glory, but also to take it to the heights that Jobs had always envisioned.
It wasn’t the amount of work that would be required that caused Jobs to hesitate, it was the complexity. Untangling the mess that Apple had become required a mind that Jobs did not have. He was a perfectionist who loathed compromise and small thinking. Apple lacked a clear vision, which he could bring, but managing the uncertainty and the interim solutions were not anything he looked forward to. He would have no desire to sell the products Apple was making at the time because he hated them. And yet, he knew sales would be necessary to keep the company afloat until he could do big things. As Walter Isaacson writes in his biography of Jobs, “(he had a) tendency to see the world in binary terms. A person is either a hero or a bozo, a product is either amazing or shit. But he could be more stymied by things that were more complex, shaded, or nuanced.” Running startups, like Apple in 1976, or NeXT, or Pixar was easy for Jobs because the vision and opportunities of something new far outweighed the limitations of something old -like an established company with an established culture. Luckily, for Jobs, he was about to meet someone who would make his job and decision a whole lot easier.
A few weeks after accepting the interim CEO position at Apple in 1997, Jobs called a meeting of his top management officers to discuss his vision for the company and to evaluate the talent he would be working with. In the room was Jony Ive, the head of Apple’s design team who was on the verge of handing in his resignation. Ive was frustrated by the company’s emphasis on maximizing profit over product design and felt it was time for him to move on. That probably would have worked out fine for Jobs. Although he had never met Ive, Jobs was prepared to replace the entire creative team that had been responsible for producing the “garbage” he felt Apple was making. He would be surprised by Ive, however. After seeing the designs that he had been working on in the Apple studio, Jobs’ reaction was: “F#@$! You have not been very effective, have you?” It wasn’t an insult. Jobs was blown away by the creativity of the work, but amazed that no one else in the company’s leadership noticed it.
Jobs returned to Apple where his rude and demanding behavior was legendary but often misunderstood. Being a perfectionist meant that he had huge expectations for the products they were making and for the people making them. If neither one couldn’t meet his standards, he had no tolerance. This made the early years of Apple frustrating for Jobs and for everyone he worked with. While Wozniak and Wayne, and the handful of other twentysomethings who formed the Apple startup were just kids having fun building computers, Jobs wanted more. Not more of a business, necessarily, just more of what made him feel excited and fulfilled - and that was beautiful design. Jobs was not a designer or an artist, but he had a deep appreciation for both and wanted everyone around him to, as well. The challenge (and vexation) for Jobs throughout his first career at Apple was that no one appreciated simple, beautifully-crafted art the way he did. Not Woz, not his board of directors, and not any of the CEOs brought in to run the company. That would change when he returned in 1997 and met Jony Ive.
Ive was twelve years younger than Jobs and grew up in a different generation on another side of the world. He is shy and polite—a direct contrast to the charismatic, but discourteous, Jobs—but both men had a similar approach to work and a laser focus on goals. More than that, they shared a love of design and craftsmanship. Jobs and Ive grew up with fathers who could build things, leading their sons to become discriminating critics of the manufactured world and the way everyday items were made. The difference was that, while Steve could recognize what was beautiful, he couldn’t create it. Jony, on the other hand, could do both.
That was the piece Jobs had been missing, the element he needed to make Apple the company he knew and wanted it to be from the start. Steve Jobs earned his reputation as a relentless zealot of his own ideas—but a large part of that can be attributed to the fact that he never had anyone who could actually make what he could only envision. It frustrated Jobs and caused him to lash out. He didn’t understand why others didn’t care about beauty and simplicity and elegance the way he did. “It’s just a circuit board. Who is going to see it? Who is going to care what it looks like?” infuriated engineers would ask. But Ive never asked such questions. Like Jobs, he felt like everything that could be beautiful and simple should be.
Clean, simple, and beautiful was the North Star in Job’s life. Not just for the products his company would create, but in his personal life, as well. His Buddhist training gave him a Zen devotion to simplicity that was later supplemented by the design philosophy of the Bauhaus movement, which asserted that there should be no distinction between fine art and industrial design. He wanted that for Apple and all of its products and, with Jony Ive, he could make it happen. Jony Ive made life easier for Steve Jobs: to think and dream and imagine, and most importantly, to make bold moves. He allowed Jobs to focus on the future: What should each product do next? What new things should be developed? None of that would have been possible without the help of Jony Ive. Without finding that extension of himself, there is no reason to believe that Jobs would not have been as frustrated with Apple the second time around as he was the first. Before Ive, Jobs and his team created a string of duds that only the hardest core of computer geek would ever know or remember, such as the Lisa, the 2000 Power Mac G4 Cube and The Apple III. After Ive came the iMac, the iPod, iPhones, and iPad. Jobs—the visionary—was the same guy, but with Ive’s help, that vision was able to come to life.
A few years after Jobs made his triumphant return to lead Apple, Fortune Magazine’s editor-at-large, Peter Elkind, wrote a review of the “new Steve Jobs.” He has become a far better leader, less of a go-to-hell aesthete who cared only about making beautiful objects. Now he is a go-to-hell aesthete who cared about making beautiful objects that made money.” Elkind had it wrong. Jobs always wanted to make beautiful objects that made money. It wasn’t until he got the help he needed from Jony Ive that he actually could.
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The story of Steve Jobs and Jony Ive is a fairy tale, of sorts. Rarely do we serendipitously meet that one person who makes our life easier and helps us to overcome our greatest challenges; someone whose strengths are our deficiencies and who buoys us to become more than we could ever be alone. It happens, of course. John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger, Oprah Winfrey and Gail King are all examples of partnerships that magically connected. But those Hollywood-like scripts are more the exception than the rule. Most lasting relationships require work. Especially when it comes to making one’s life easier.
Helping someone get through this world—professionally or personally—requires empathy and insight and a deep level of understanding and support. It necessitates that we know how they work, what they like, what they need, what they lack, what they are afraid of, what they aspire to be or have.
Sometimes, we get lucky and discover that we are a natural complement to others. Like Jony Ive, we fill their gaps and strengthen their weaknesses by just being ourselves. But most of the time, forging a loyal relationship demands that we be deliberate. It means stepping back and identifying the areas where we can relieve their burdens and be most helpful. Not only what they want and need, but if and when they want it.