Seeing What Others Don’t

When Steve Jobs was playing the role of benefactor to an unconventional graphics company during an agonizing period of limited profitability, it was the worst possible time in his career to do so. He was burning through the fortune he’d accumulated when he was booted from Apple, and his reputation was on the line. He was in danger of becoming a one-hit-wonder of the tech scene; his much-publicized comeback move – founding NeXT, computers for the higher education space – was mired in delays and missing the mark on almost every level, from price to target market. Aside from some promising software, the perfect cube computer was shaping up to be a perfect failure. He couldn’t afford another one.

He shopped the computer graphics and animation company around, but deal after deal fell through – and some wondered whether he really wanted to let it go, even though he was covering its losses with his personal wealth. But why would he hold on? His first impulse – that its graphic techniques might deliver computer innovations – hadn’t materialized. This little spinoff of the Lucasfilm computer division no longer seemed to fit his interests in making revolutionary computers in any fashion. It didn’t have a business model that offered potential for significant profit, staying afloat through monthly checks from Jobs himself, which eventually amounted to a sum of nearly $50 million.

But Jobs didn’t pull the plug on the crew of quirky storytellers and programmers. He couldn’t bring himself to do it. He believed in them and their ability to make something marvelous, even when he wasn’t sure what that looked like. He knew that they did.

The result made movie history, with a storyline that became part of an entire generation’s collective childhood memories. That struggling company – Pixar – released “Toy Story” through Disney in 1995 and forever enlarged the scope of what an animated film could achieve. The endearing tale of boyhood toys competing for Andy’s affection became the first full-length feature film to be crafted completely of 3D computer animation. It was a technical milestone as substantial as the introduction of color. But it was a milestone in other ways, too.

Against pressure from Disney to include musical numbers and cater primarily to youngsters, Pixar dove deep into making the story’s main characters more engaging – flawed and loveable and funny – so their colorful conversation and anthropomorphic antics could appeal even to grownups.

Think of Buzz Lightyear, Andy’s arrogant and adventuresome new toy, and then his spiral of despair. His disillusion begins with seeing a commercial for Buzz Lightyear action figures and realizing that he is, as his new comrades had told him, just a “child’s plaything,” not a space ranger commissioned by Star Command.

Woody finds him wallowing in heartbreak, comforting himself with a cup of “tea” and the company of two headless dolls. It’s as if he’s a broken man, grappling bar-side with the reality of a ruined career or discovery of an unfaithful spouse. Life isn’t what he thought it was. He isn’t who he thought he was. By the time Woody finds him, he’s a bumbling fool, head down on a tabletop, clutching a tiny plastic mug.

Buzz: Gone! It’s all gone. All of it’s gone. Bye-bye. Woohoo. See ya!

Woody: What happened to you?

Buzz, wearing a church lady hat and swinging his arms in drunken fashion: One minute you’re defending the whole galaxy … and suddenly you find yourself sucking down Darjeeling with Marie Antoinette and her little sister.

Astute, Woody tells Buzz he’s had quite enough tea and walks him out of a little girl’s room, like someone escorting an inebriated pal away from a barstool. We laugh at the comparison, but we also feel compassion for this fellow who is struggling to come to terms with what others around him knew and what we already know: that he’s a toy. But of course, we also know but have momentarily forgotten that action figures don’t talk, or have feelings, or turn to drinking to numb the pain. But that’s the magic of Pixar’s storytellers. They suspended reality. It’s one thing to play with a child’s fertile imagination; it’s another altogether to spin characters so engaging that they revive adults’ imaginations, if only temporarily.

Suddenly, parents could actually enjoy the movie their kids wanted to pop in again and again, picking up new jokes tucked away each time, like a snarky Mr. Potato Head whispering to Slinky the dog that Woody’s got a case of “laser envy.”

It wasn’t just technical genius on display; it was comedic genius, too. That was one of the insights on the part of the technical and creative teams – and the leadership – at Pixar that paid off handsomely. “Toy Story” became the year’s top grossing film, and then the third all-time highest-grossing animated film ever, bringing more than $1 billion. When the company held its initial public offering the following week – and they needed a successful one to ensure financial stability and bargaining power with Disney – it was the biggest IPO of the year, raising an instant $140 million for production costs. Not bad for a startup that, previous to “Toy Story,” had no earnings track record.

And when Disney acquired Pixar in 2006, it came at a $7.6 billion price tag. Pixar made Jobs, the majority shareholder, a billionaire. It proved he could still turn an industry on its head. For the team at Pixar, it provided a stability and creative space to keep producing animated films that pushed boundaries and gave new perspectives on the ordinary, like “A Bug’s Life,” the follow-up to “Toy Story,” and sixteen others (so far).

It wouldn’t have happened if Pixar’s team hadn’t been able to see a greater potential in modern storytelling techniques, or if they hadn’t seen how new technology could augment a strong storyline with broader appeal in a way that others – like Disney, who had dominated animated filmmaking for a half century – couldn’t quite see. It also wouldn’t have happened had Jobs not seen something special in the crew.

By that point, Jobs had already made a name for himself as the wizard behind the personal computer, his vision of making a computer a “bicycle of the mind.” Offering the Apple II, the first mass-produced personal computer, in 1977, he took what was a domain reserved for industry and government and made something intuitive and appealing. It was, unlike its predecessors, meant for individual enrichment. He would go on to return to Apple and apply the same technique – taking existing technology to a new level of personal benefit to create a product people used and loved – to music with iTunes and then to cell phones with the iPhone. His range of imagining, sometimes ahead of its time or ahead of market demands, was so wide he became infamous among some for creating a “reality distortion field.” He could make a case for some seemingly impossible innovation or change that made sense when he said it – but didn’t seem to later, or on paper. Some used it as a negative attribute, a disconnection from reality, but Pixar President Ed Catmull, who wrote about his relationship with Jobs, said he saw it as more a refusal to be bound by existing limitations. He was able to see value where most couldn’t, and he’d fight for it.

In Pixar, he saw a team like none other he’d encountered. He saw John Lasseter in his Hawaiian shirt and office packed with toys – a dreamer at heart with a drive to tell stories in a fresh way. He saw Catmull, raised in technical discovery and a belief that movies could aim higher – and the careful guardian of a set of eccentric and capable creatives, people Jobs said were “this amazing collection of talent, doing work that no one has seen before.”

To make the business case, he turned to Lawrence Levy, a former technology transactions attorney acting as CFO for a Silicon Valley tech company. It was Levy who followed the trail of profitability and discovered there was none, save for a long-shot attempt at focusing the graphics company on making movies, hanging the company’s future on a blockbuster hit in the box office and in the market as a newly publicly traded company the week after the debut of “Toy Story.” Both results bested their greatest hopes.

Jobs, known for having a knack for anticipating what consumers wanted and needed, saw the potential, this time, not in the product, but in the people. Because he did, Pixar found a road to wild financial success and, more importantly, to the hearts of those who appreciated artistic, reimagined storytelling.

For a man who dedicated much of his career to making the world’s information fingertip-accessible, it might seem strange that Steve Jobs had only one book on his iPad 2 when he died. Of the volumes of commentary and analysis of Steve Jobs – his life, his flaws, his vision – one note that speaks to his unusual talents is the book that shaped him. That book, the one he carried around on the device his company created, was the “Autobiography of a Yogi,” the life story of an Indian monk and spiritual teacher who spread Vedic philosophy across the United States, from Boston to Los Angeles.

Jobs first encountered the book as a teenager, before his own soul-searching trek to India, where he read it again. He is said to have read it once a year after that for the rest of his life, and it became his parting gift, one boxed copy for each attendant at his memorial service. Of the technological innovations that democratized computers and his retooling of entire industries, this text and its stories of ancient wisdom, saints, and sages – of enlightenment, holy vibrations, and light-filled visions – was part of the legacy he hoped to leave. His final address.

Deeply influenced by spirituality and yet deeply entrenched in the material world. It’s fitting for a man who spent much of his career searching for crossroads. Art and technology. Business applications reconfigured for individual enrichment. Simplicity and functionality. Why did the search for spiritual sight matter? His seeking mentality parlayed into something valuable for his companies and for most of us, who enjoy the benefits of his trailblazing every day. As the authors of “Becoming Steve Jobs” put it, “This spiritual sensibility contributed greatly to the unusual breadth of his intellectual peripheral vision, which eventually led him to see possibilities – ranging from great new products to radically reinvented business models – that escaped most others.”

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Steve was someone who endeavored to see beyond the surface, beyond the most obvious. He wanted to see into things, to the needs they could satisfy, even when those needs weren’t articulated or understood yet. That was what was most revolutionary about his work. The word “visionary” has been cheapened by overuse, but the concept of extraordinary vision, seeing more - seeing possibilities where others don’t - is what made Apple products succeed, why people became fans and fanatics.

Like his autobiographical influencer who saw amulets or gurus materialize, Jobs saw what he believed could exist and what it could mean for the rest of us. Where others saw computers for business or government applications, he saw what could be created with effort and intention: devices to improve everyday life, outside of work. And he saw that it could be something beautiful and inspiring. Where others saw the music industry’s downturn, he saw what could be a rebirth – if only the industry could cater to what would suit end-users. People hadn’t lost interest in purchasing music, they just wanted to buy it in a different way. His defining talent was not the products he directed but the perspective behind them. Because he saw more value and new applications for existing ideas, he changed what technology means to the everyday man or woman.