

Steve Jobs felt strongly about many things, including industrial materials.

Think of the translucent plastic on the pod-like first iMacs; the multi-colored anodized aluminum on the iPod nano; the glass — not plastic, though plastic would have worked fine — screen that makes the iPhone so striking. Jobs was obsessed with the look and feel of the products he was creating.


Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs is packed with such stories, and most of them leave you wondering: How did Jobs get away with that? How many CEOs would care that much about the floor of their stores? How many CEOs would have the clout to get a decision like that past the company bean counters? How many CEOs have had as much success converting fealty to his gut instincts into such consumer excitement?

At a leadership forum this week in Framingham, Mass., talk turned to Jobs’ leadership style. In business schools, he’s described as a “narcissistic CEO,” which is another way of saying an arrogant, obnoxious jerk.

Jobs was manic and headstrong. To him, every idea, every product, every person and every vegan smoothie was either perfect or worse than worthless. He could be gratuitously cruel, even to people he loved.

Yet he was an effective negotiator and a master of persuasion. How could someone so temperamental be so effective a leader?

Jobs was a perfectionist to a fault. Time and time again, he changed his mind about major projects, sending them back to the drawing boards while critical deadlines passed. He ordered the iPhone redesigned at the last minute because the casing distracted from the sheer glassy screen. At Pixar, he had “Toy Story” rewritten after he and his team decided Woody wasn’t likeable enough.

Jobs worried over every detail. While he was in a Memphis hospital, recovering from a liver transplant, he was choosing the font for the little “3G” on the iPhone 3G.

Back in the ‘90s, I had one of the first iMacs, that colorful desktop computer that looked like it fell out of the Jetsons. It froze up regularly, probably more because of the Microsoft software than the Apple hardware, and every time it happened, I had to stick a bent paperclip into a little hole on the back to get it up and running again. I remember blaming Jobs personally, assuming he had arrogantly refused to include a reset button accessible to users because his precious baby would never need to be reset.

I learned from Isaacson’s book that the feature probably was a Jobs decision. He hated on/off buttons and insisted his products be designed so no user could get at their insides.

Isaacson looks to his youth for clues as to the origin of Jobs’ personality, creativity and drive. Jobs took a lot of LSD as a young man, and even in middle age said acid trips were among his most important experiences. One reason Bill Gates designed crappy software, Jobs said, is that he didn’t do enough acid.

Jobs went to India to study Buddhism, and his affinity for Zen stayed with him, fostering a commitment to simplicity reflected in everything he did. When he returned to Apple after his 11-year exile, he stripped away excess products in the same way he demanded engineers remove excess buttons, features, icons and mouse-clicks from Apple devices. Zen minimalism is at the heart of his design sensibility.

Jobs enrolled in Reed College but dropped out after a year, preferring to audit just the classes that appealed to him. One of those was a calligraphy course, and he developed a lifelong love for typefaces. So when he built the MacIntosh, he demanded it come with multiple fonts, and he hired someone to design them.

People under 40 can’t remember a time when few people knew what a “font” was, let alone the difference between serif and sans-serif. Back in 1984, no focus group of potential computer buyers would have said they wanted to be able to choose from dozens of fonts for their word processing. But Jobs didn’t believe in market research, just in his own gut. And, more often than not, it worked.

Contradictions abound. The leader of what is now the nation’s richest company considered himself a rebel. All his life, he refused to get a license plate for his cars. In the interest of being egalitarian, he wouldn’t allow a parking space at Apple headquarters be reserved for him. Instead, he just parked in the handicapped spaces.

Jobs was happy to be the narcissistic CEO, putting his indelible imprint on every company he touched. But his largest goal, especially toward the end of his life, was to implant his DNA so deeply into Apple that it would long outlast his passing.

We’ll see. Jobs died in October 2011, but his final ideas and products are still in the Apple pipeline.

His legacy is all around us –– not just in our electronic devices, but in the way we live. He created the iTunes store, changing the way people buy music and, in the process, rescuing the music industry from file-sharing pirates. He created the apps store, changing the way people buy software in the post-PC age. Behind the iPad is a move to change the publishing industry, and there are reports his last project was an effort to change the way the world watches TV.

Now that he has become as iconic as his products (and the equally iconic advertising he used to sell them), everyone wants to be the next Steve Jobs. Every company wants to be the next Apple.

That’s probably impossible. There will always be pushy, narcissistic CEOs. There will always be individuals with exquisite taste in design and an intuitive sense of what consumers want. But bringing those things together in the right place and time, surrounded by the right people — folks like Steve Wozniak, the Mac’s other father, and Apple design master Jony Ive — is something that can’t be reproduced.

At the “Webby Awards” this week, Jobs was honored in a series of five-word tributes by the likes of Bill Clinton, Bono, Al Gore and Barack Obama. One of the best came from actor Richard Dreyfuss, who was the voice in Jobs’ “Think Different” commercial.

Jobs was “the exception that proves the rule,” he said.

Come to Apple, Jobs would tell those he wanted to recruit, and we’ll “put a dent in the universe.”

He did.
