Red Pill - Blue Pill: ...from FT, a different take - Visionary, genius, game-changer ... but also a freak

By Philip Delves Broughton

One of the strangest research trips I ever went on was to the Kannon Do Zen Center in Mountain View, California. It came at the end of a long day at Apple trying to understand what made the company tick. My office at the time was a stationery closet on the fourth floor of One Infinite Loop, Apple’s corporate headquarters, a makeshift space an iPhone’s throw from the senior executives including Steve Jobs.

It was late 2009 and I had been hired for a few months to do some writing for the then nascent Apple University, an internal programme intended to help rising executives within the company learn the business of Apple. But first I had to try to learn it myself, to find something to grip in a company that to the outside world seems as smooth as the glass facades of its shops.

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Trying to get the truth out of any successful organisation is a challenge. Failure is a far better teacher than success, and since the early 2000s, Apple had been on a tear. Almost every major product launch had gone well, its retail strategy had been a triumph and its share price was soaring. The embarrassments beetled in the shadows, the botched MobileMe service, the lengthy investigation into the backdating of stock options for senior executives, the fact that the iPhone, for many of its urban users at least, was a terrible phone.

Success tends to cast decisions in a dangerously rosy glow and make geniuses of executives. When you asked what made Apple Apple, the answers came back implausibly bland: focus, simplicity, great design, vision, Steve. Yes to all. But what about the rest? Under the hood, Apple was as corporate as it comes. It was a lesson Jobs had learnt in his exile, when he was building NeXT and Pixar. Companies, like products, can only bear so much innovation. No one wants a six-wheeled car. They want a four-wheeled car that goes faster.

Jobs did not do anything radical with the corporate form, but he did make it hum along more efficiently. He drove innovation from the top down, and applied intense pressure to his employees, believing it was required to elicit extraordinary achievement. This hero of American capitalism was an aggressive outsourcer of jobs to China. His legal department was kept busy fighting bruising patent battles. And there is an entire generation of record executives bearing Jobs’s teeth marks from the creation and rapid growth of iTunes.

We might prefer the politer terms of admiration, visionary, genius, game-changer, but purely as a businessman, Jobs was a freak and freaks make others behave oddly. He could take the dullest technical specification, the processing speed of a laptop, and make grown audiences whimper with pleasure. His eye for detail was the stuff of Silicon Valley legend, as were his rages if things were not done to his satisfaction. Behaviours which in another man might have been called delusional, obsessive or tyrannical were in Jobs seen as evidence of high standards and great leadership.

When most companies use the term “culture”, you may as well pull down the blinds and go to sleep. Not at Apple. It was impossible to think of its culture without thinking of the deeply paradoxical man at the top.

At Cafe Macs, Apple’s corporate cafeteria, you can sit in the California sunshine, drink a smoothie and gaze over at posters from the company’s Think Different advertising campaign, showing Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, Pablo Picasso and Martin Luther King, dead giants used to gin up Apple’s reputation for daring and creativity. It would be breathtakingly arrogant even today. But Jobs ordered this campaign in 1997, when he had just returned to Apple and the company was all but bankrupt. Was this evidence of a deranged idealism, a blind faith in the restorative power of Apple’s original counter-culture? Or was it marketing cynicism, a form of corporate pragmatism born out of failure?

Jobs knew better than anyone the fragility of business success. He had been the most famous entrepreneur in the world in his early 20s, and then fired from his own company at 30. But he had come back. Building a business, he would say, was not for the mentally sane. It was for the passionate and maddeningly persistent.

After weeks of thinking about Apple, I felt no closer to understanding it. It was both the most materialistic organisation, obsessed with the touch, feel and weight of its products and delighting in its ever-growing cash reserves, and the most immaterial, boasting of the magic and soul of its machines and the importance of acting out of love rather than money.

In this sense, it was the perfect expression of its founder. You can spend five minutes reading about Steve Jobs and discover that he could be the worst corporate bully, brimming over with grudges, but that he was also discreet and ordinary in his love for his family. In his public appearances, he could be PT Barnum one minute, banging the drum for a new operating system, and a sweet sixties hippie the next, guilelessly quoting Beatles lyrics. He was the 42nd richest American, yet lived, by Silicon Valley standards, quite modestly. As a negotiator, he left the toughest lawyers in the dust, and yet for years he had been fascinated by Zen Buddhism.

What I found at the Zen centre that evening was a barn-like meditation room filled with men and women of every age. We were told to sit cross-legged on a low cushion facing a bare white wall for 45 minutes. As each thought or worry entered our mind, we were advised to let it go, to let it waft away like a balloon, because for now there was nothing to be done. And so I did, wondering at first what Steve Jobs saw in all this, then eventually wondering about nothing at all.

To find someone so relentlessly focused on the present and future as Jobs eventually was, after a long quest of his own, is unsettling. For such people, the past is constantly cast aside. It does not matter. The old ties, old models are irrelevant. It can seem cruel and unfeeling. But it is attractive and in that most American way, dazzlingly optimistic.

The writer is author of ‘What They Teach You at Harvard Business School: My Two Years in the Cauldron of Capitalism’