Zen and the Art of the Project Status Meeting
BOOKS AND Concern
BOOKS AND Business; ZEN AND THE ART OF COMPUTING
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Oct 25, 1987
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Accidental MILLIONAIRE The Ascent and Fall of Steve Jobs at Apple tree Calculator. By Lee Butcher. Illustrated. 224 pp. New York: Paragon House. $xix.95. ODYSSEY Pepsi to Apple . . . A Journey of Run a risk, Ideas, and the Time to come. Past John Sculley with John A. Byrne. Illustrated. 450 pp. New York: Harper & Row. $21.95.
STEVEN JOBS is the very embodiment of the Silicon Valley success story. When he co-founded Apple tree Computer in the garage of his parents' home in 1976, he was unemployed and all of 20 years old. When Apple went public just over four years later, he was vice chairman of a company with more than than 1,000 employees and a market value of around $1.8 billion. At 25, he was personally worth $256 million.
Mr. Jobs as well became a modernistic folk hero. Representing the triumph of entrepreneurial vigor, he captured the attention of a nation demoralized by spiraling oil prices, the Japanese economic threat and the loss of industrial prowess. Public fascination with him was only intensified by his extreme youth, his proclamation of an egalitarian corporate-value system, his interest in Zen, even his vegetarianism. If Mr. Jobs was a hero, he was a New Historic period hero.
But these 2 books pretty thoroughly deflate the Jobs legend. In ''Accidental Millionaire,'' Lee Butcher maintains that Mr. Jobs - or at to the lowest degree the man who has been described as the soul of Apple -is a fraud. He was non a technician and had little to do with the invention of the start Apple figurer. And one time the company became a success, Mr. Butcher argues, he almost precipitated its plummet through immaturity, arrogance and mismanagement. To forestall disaster, Apple's directors turned non to an executive experienced with computers but to John Sculley, then the president of Pepsi-Cola. Mr. Sculley won the board-room boxing that prompted Mr. Jobs's resignation and reunited the company. ''Odyssey'' is his highly personal business relationship of his experiences.
The ii books complement each other nicely. ''Accidental Millionaire'' concerns itself largely with Mr. Jobs's background and counterculture mentality, the origins of Apple, its breathtaking success and the subsequent problems. ''Odyssey'' delves into the complicated relationship between Mr. Jobs and Mr. Sculley and the reasons behind its rupture, then follows the company up to the present. The books besides provide an opportunity to contrast the work of an independent reporter (but with no access to his principal discipline) with that of a participant who, for all the disclaimers, cannot help just bring his ain biases and motives to the chore.
Mr. Butcher, the editor of The San Jose Business Journal during the ability struggle that erupted between Mr. Jobs and Mr. Sculley, has written a crisp, provocative book. Relying on extensive interviews with past and present Apple employees as well every bit industry observers, he presents convicing bear witness to support his thesis. And he deftly describes figurer engineering and conveys the giddy spirit of Silicon Valley. His stated purpose is to unmask Mr. Jobs, who, he argues, was niggling more than a myth manufactured by Regis McKenna, a shrewd publicist. Mr. Butcher believes that Stephen Wozniak was the real guiding spirit at Apple. Later on all, he designed the starting time Apple computer and then the revolutionary Apple tree II. Mr. Jobs, Mr. Butcher writes, ''became important only by hanging onto Wozniak's shirt tails.''
BUT it was Mr. Jobs who recognized the commercial potential of the personal computer. When Mr. Wozniak began putting together the showtime Apple, he was simply out to test his abilities and impress friends. And while it was a clever auto, it was non an amazing i. At that time, any of the major figurer companies could have produced a similar personal calculator, had they wanted to. But they all idea there was no market for information technology. Mr. Butcher emphasizes that Mr. Jobs's just contribution to the actual creation of the figurer was to help design the example. But he goes on to say that information technology was Mr. Jobs who came up with the name Apple and who persuaded electronics stores to carry the automobile. Most important, Mr. Jobs then pursued the investors who put up the cash to enable the company to bring out the Apple tree Two. Mr. Wozniak is quoted as saying, ''Steve was the 1 who idea we could make money.''
Because Apple tree grew at such a phenomenal step during the late 1970'south - it reached the Fortune 500 faster than whatever other company - Mr. Jobs caused immense ability before having had the opportunity to mature. Different Mr. Wozniak, who was really designing computers, he lacked the technical expertise to presume specific responsibilities. Instead, his ego and impassioned manner made him ideal to represent the brash new company to the public. Internally, as Mr. Butcher puts it, he ''flitted in and out of the different divisions, criticizing and cajoling.''
The company'due south success, together with Mr. McKenna's aesthetic manipulation of the press, convinced Mr. Jobs he was a genius. He became, in Mr. Butcher's words, ''unpredictable'' and ''tyrannical.'' Many of those Mr. Butcher interviewed, including Mr. Wozniak, say that past the early eighty'southward Mr. Jobs was widely hated at Apple. Senior management had to endure his atmosphere tantrums. He created resentment amongst employees by turning some into stars and insulting others, often reducing them to tears. Mr. Jobs himself would oftentimes weep after fights with fellow executives.
Eccentricity in the powerful is fine if it is coupled with good judgment. In Mr. Jobs'due south instance, Mr. Butcher says, information technology was non. He contemptuously dismissed the threat posed by the I.B.Chiliad. personal computer and urged that Apple's computers compete with one another rather than seek out separate niches. By 1983, Mr. Wozniak had drifted away from the company, and Apple tree'south president, Michael Scott, had resigned. On top of that, Apple's products were beginning to falter. According to Mr. Butcher, all this was mainly attributable to Mr. Jobs's ineptitude and arrogance. Mr. Butcher may exist overstating matters when he claims that Mr. Jobs had picayune to do with Apple'southward success; Mr. Jobs was the i who turned Apple from a computer into a visitor. But ''Adventitious Millionaire'' is fascinating however. It reduces Mr. Jobs to homo proportions and makes him infinitely more interesting, if much less likable.
JOHN SCULLEY paints a more charitable picture of Mr. Jobs, whom he compares to Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and even Male monarch Arthur. The Steve Jobs of ''Odyssey'' is childish and conceited merely not fraudulent. He is energetic and enthusiastic, a visionary, according to Mr. Sculley, with charismatic appeal and a souvenir for rhetoric. Mr. Sculley himself was clearly one of the people Mr. Jobs inspired. Courted for months by Apple tree, Mr. Sculley says he finally decided to get out Pepsi when Mr. Jobs asked him: ''Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared h2o or do yous desire a chance to change the world?''
Mr. Sculley was hired not just to guide Apple tree into adulthood, but to groom Mr. Jobs to run the visitor 1 day. At beginning, he says, they were ''soul mates.'' Indeed, Mr. Sculley was and so taken with Mr. Jobs, and then enraptured with the notion that the personal reckoner would change the globe, that he did not initially see how destructive Mr. Jobs had become. Only after the failure of the offset Macintosh computer -the 1 Mr. Jobs himself actually developed - did Mr. Sculley wake upward. Mr. Jobs had grossly underestimated its cost and overestimated sales. Because of design specifications he insisted on, corporations - the intended customers - found the auto most unusable. However, it took stiff force per unit area from the board before Mr. Sculley relieved Mr. Jobs of his responsibilities for the Macintosh, a move that led to Mr. Jobs's bitter and highly publicized resignation.
Mr. Sculley says his rift with Mr. Jobs caused him considerable agony. Mayhap in an endeavor to counter his image as an unfeeling professional manager, he takes bully pains to describe his ain doubts and insecurities. Generous in assigning credit to colleagues and blaming himself for many of the mistakes that were fabricated at Apple, Mr. Sculley emerges as compassionate as well as smart.
''Odyssey'' also offers a comparative report of corporate cultures. Mr. Sculley describes the stiff, hierarchical temper at Pepsi, whose executives were as obsessed with status as with market place share. Apple, by dissimilarity, was a place of undergraduate anarchy. During ane of the first meetings Mr. Sculley attended there, he says various young managers shouted insults at one another while Mr. Jobs saturday barefoot on the flooring, playing with his toes.
THE book has flaws, however. Despite the assistance Mr. Sculley received from John A. Byrne, an editor at Business Week, ''Odyssey'' is severely overwritten. In the opening passage, Mr. Sculley'due south secretary catches him weeping after he has demoted Mr. Jobs. ''I slowly turned toward her,'' Mr. Sculley writes, ''revealing a inundation of tears from a pair of weary, reddened eyes.'' The book also alternates chapters of narrative with what Mr. Sculley calls ''tutorials,'' or discussions of management and marketing topics. These, he says, are ''multiple access points'' that will make reading the book like using a personal computer. Simply who wants a book to be similar a estimator?
Finally, toward the end of ''Odyssey'' Mr. Sculley begins to enthuse to such a degree nigh Apple's corporate structure and new products that one tin can't aid suspecting that his aim, in improver to telling his story, is to promote the visitor and its management. Still, ''Odyssey'' is an intriguing account of ane of the decade's nigh celebrated corporate crises.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1987/10/25/books/books-and-business-zen-and-the-art-of-computing.html
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