One of the biggest fuckups in the history of American business was the firing of Steve Jobs by Pepsi executive John Sculley and the Apple board. The ensuing nose-dive almost put Apple out of business. On the 25th anniversary of that debacle, the Daily Beast dug up Scully and a few Apple board members to see what they thought. Some of their justifications are a hoot:
Board member Arthur Rock, a venture capitalist who helped found Intel, among other outfits, dubbed Jobs and his co-founder Steve Wozniak as “very unappealing people” in the early days. “Jobs came into the office, as he does now, dressed in Levi’s, but at that time that wasn’t quite the thing to do” […] “I’m not sure, but it may have been a while since he had a bath.”
Crisp recalled how undisciplined Jobs and the original Apple crew could be—enough so that they didn’t shrink at defacing the home of David Rockefeller. […] He says Rockefeller told him the following day that he enjoyed the party with Jobs and other top Apple managers, but added, “Next year, ask them not to put logos on the mirrors in the lavatory.” Some of the Apple faithful, it seems, had come armed with stickers of the company’s multicolored emblem.
I’m sure the author of this piece is playing up the cluelessness to get some clicks, but I’m not surprised to find very little regret in that piece. Titans of industry who drive their companies into the ditch apologize rarely and rationalize often, even if the rationalizations are as lame as Jobs’ habit of wearing jeans and smelling funky.
DougJ
Sic semper dirty fucking hippies.
mistersnrub
Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you the worst op-ed in the history of mankind:
Justice Clarence Thomas seems bored. Why doesn’t he run for president in 2012?
frankdawg
When the company does well it is the result of great management deserving of massive bonuses.
When the company does bad its always someone else fault – government interference, union demands, cheap competition, unforeseen events blah blah blah. And it would have been much worse without the management who should be rewarded with large bonuses.
mai naem
@mistersnrub: I can’t quite make out if the op=ed’s for real or snark but I think it’s an excellent idea. Thomas, a right wing nut, gives up a SC seat for Obama to reappoint to. There is no way, no how a black man would make it out of a Repub primary especially a black man who’s married to a white woman.
Cat Lady
OH NOES TEH STICKERS IN TEH JOHNS 111!111
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Come on, if you can’t judge a leader by how expensive his suit is and how short his hair is, or how short her skirt is, then you’d have to look at his abilities, and that would be hard for these board directors.
SiubhanDuinne
@mistersnrub #2:
Best line from that whole op-ed? This:
Come for the rape, stay for the courtroom speech.
gnomedad
Heh. And now Carly Fiorina wants to do for America what she did for HP.
El Cid
I hear George W. Bush Jr. was nicely shaven and clean when he was driving both companies and countries into the ground.
Tom Levenson
I wonder, in a rubbernecking a 216 car pileup on the I 80 east of Vallejo kind of way, how it feels for characters like Scully to know, somewhere deep in their remnants of souls, that they are the punchline to one of those “worst ever…” bar jokes.
I can’t imagine they ever have an uninterrupted night’s sleep; sometime around 3 a.m. every morning going “I did what?”*
Meanwhile, completely o/t — I’m listening to Garrison Keillor read Yeats “The Second Coming,” on The Writer’s Workshop on NPR. Amazing how he can take one of the most astonishingly bravura and almost cliche familiar works in the English language and render it as flat and still and lifeless as a former armadillo on I-10.** Now that’s talent.
*Not that they would ever speak such a thought in the hours of full consciousness of course. Can you imagine the effort required to maintain that waking denial for two decades and more? These are lives I’m glad I don’t have to lead.
**Gotta roll with the highway metaphor when you got it, no?
MattF
Well, Scully should have stuck to selling sugared beverages (and flavored potato chips!). He was good at that, actually.
Mr Furious
Sculley knew waaay ahead of time that Jobs and Apple were only going to produce overpriced and overrated “shiny” crap that could be purchased for FAARRRR less from their imitators months or years later.
Mr Furious
Plus, less than 10 percent of the PC market was never going to satisfy their corporate dick-measuring needs—and couldn’t possibly pull a big enough profit, either. Right?
Jobs just HAD to go.
Plus, he wouldn’t stop crowing about that stupid “mouse” thing, and he once even mentioned dumping the floppy drive—like THAT was ever going to fly…
pablo
It’s in their DNA, literally.
Once an authoritarian, always an authoritarian.
That’s why Republicans and their followers are also loathe to apologize for anything.
It’s genetic arrogance.
Daddy-O
Reading this post gave me as satisfying a feeling as I’m liable to feel today.
Not really a Jobs or an Apple fan, but I know one ‘paradox’ that has yet to be unproven: The Peter Principle is alive and well.
WereBear
An extraordinary point. I think it explains their trouble with rational thought; so many brain cells already occupied.
RAM
All those executives, though, would get along just fine in The Village. They sound like Village clones, in fact. Maybe “The Boys from Brazil” wasn’t fiction after all…
Daddy-O
Let’s get it straight, and for the record, IIRC: “Dirty Fucking Hippies” was coined by Atrios, was it not? That’s the first place I remember reading it.
It’s one for the ages.
Ash Can
Many, many — way too many — corporate executives get to the top not by being good for the company but by being buddies with the people who are already there. They’re smart enough to earn degrees from good schools and sound intelligent in conversations, but what really gets them to the top is knowing exactly what to say to whom. It’s a talent, to be sure, but one that has fuck-all to do with actually running the damned company. And that’s why companies fuck up, lose shit-tons of money, and fail.
Zifnab25
That’s the beauty of being the CEO. Succeed and give yourself a stack of money. Fail and give yourself a stack of money. Tread water and give yourself a stack of money. The helicopter out to Palm Beach on Tuesday, so you don’t miss your tee time.
Management at these firms has gotten incredibly shitty. There is no pressure to compete and no price for failure. Zero accountability capitalism. Unless the stockholders bust out torches and pitchforks. And shareholders are more notoriously disinterested than your average American voter.
DougJ
@Daddy-O:
Yeah, it’s Atrios, I think.
adolphus
Ever listen to students talk about their grades? It’s always “I got an A!” but “The teacher gave me a C!” Corporate executives never grow out of that. Healthy, mature adults learn to take responsibility and learn lessons from their failures and mistakes. But then, I’ll bet Scully et al aren’t worrying how they will pay for expensive dental work. I guess maturity is for losers.
New Yorker
Steve Jobs should start wearing thousand-dollar suits like Dick Fuld and Charles Prince. That’s what makes a great corporate leader.
WereBear
I just finished Bright Side, by Barbara Ehrenreich (get it through this blog and give John the pennies) and her chapter on corporate positive thinking was absolutely devastating. I remember a smart boss of mine saying he encouraged people to come in with bad news; it was the only way he would know what was really going on.
However, this has become a firing offense, so no one does. With obvious results.
And really, in a Darwinian sense, why should they care? Whether they screw up or not, they still get fat bonuses and multiple houses… this system utterly removes feedback.
arguingwithsignposts
@adolphus:
So true. I’m stealing that.
Steeplejack
@Tom Levenson:
I think the power of denial is incredibly strong. I worked at a small software company in the ’80s that was a leader in its market and had the potential to be a Lotus or an Intuit, i.e., completely dominant in its segment, with bazillions of dollars poised to rain down on everybody in the vicinity. And the founders/principals completely and utterly blew it, and ended up selling the company for a pittance to a much larger company that didn’t know shit but wanted to “get into the biz,” so to speak. They settled for six-figure buyouts (I think the president maybe got a million or two), and the little people got to keep their jobs. Good times.
My point is that, running into one or another of those principals occasionally over the years, I was always amazed at how consistently they had rewritten history in their minds. The (bad) decisions they had made were forced on them by circumstances, the venture capitalists, inexorable industry trends–anything but their own judgment. They did the best they could with what they had, yadda, yadda, yadda. Sorry it didn’t work out better. But, hey, they were minor celebrities in that sort of “You remember those guys who . . .” way.
The only analogy I can think of (and I don’t think this is true at all) would be if some second-tier actor like Bruce Campbell (and I like Bruce Campbell) passed up the career-making lead in Die Hard that went to Bruce Willis but managed to completely put that out of his mind while going around boasting, “Yeah, I was in Army of Darkness!” Ugh.
I feel like I should apologize to Bruce Campbell for using him in this analogy.
Anyway, my point is that very few of us will construct a narrative in which we are the goat or an idiot. And so you start clutching at straws–anything–to support the narrative you do come up with. “He smelled bad!” “They put decals on my mirrors!”
Mr Furious
d0n camillo
You absolutely positively should apologize to Bruce Campbell for comparing him to John Scully. Bruce is a lot more likely to own up to any mistakes he’s made than any CEO ever will.
Mr Furious
Well, Army of Darkness had a much cooler poster…
PeakVT
One of the biggest fuckups in the history of American business was the firing of Steve Jobs
Meh. There’s no guarantee that Jobs would have succeeded like he has if he’d been kept on. Though NeXT was a failure in the marketplace, Jobs learned some things that he probably wouldn’t have if he had stayed at Apple. And bringing in the BSD codebase as the base-layer operating system freed the Apple engineers to concentrate on the user interface. (I like to think of OS X as the GUI Unix had been waiting two decades for.) Would he have done that if he had stayed the whole time? Who knows.
sukabi
so they couldn’t stand having a DFH in their company? Talk about shortsighted and stupid… Everybody knows that most of the early over achiever DFH’s quickly turned into The Man… and Job’s and crew have taken that several steps further…
grumpy realist
Actually, the NeXT made a lot of us geeks quite happy for a long time. I loved the ability to flip back and forth between pictorial-pulling-with-the-mouse and coding-at-the-terminal modes, depending on which was more efficient. I had the power of a workstation at my fingertips but didn’t have to deal with the overhead. Also remember that the NeXT OS is what finally made it into the Mac several years down the road. Great machine, made a lot of starving physics/math grad students very very happy.
Cain
@Steeplejack:
So you worked for Amiga Inc? :) That was a computer man.. when people were still toiling in teh dark ages, the Amiga was doing stuff that only industry now have now in operating system. I loved my Amiga, it was the only way I could have a unix machine at home. Multitaskign while the mac and pc dudes were still doing one app at a time. *sigh*
My linux laptop now is da bomb. I’m in love with it… I wish I could put a little heart in this comment.
cain
Mnemosyne
As someone who’s used nothing but Apple products for the past 20 years, I actually think being fired was the best thing that ever happened to Steve Jobs. It forced him to actually learn to work well (or at least better) with others and accept that he was not, in fact, infalliable.
It was a bad move for Apple, but it was great for Jobs and allowed him to get the experience he would need to come back and make Apple what it is today. We wouldn’t have had the iMac or iPod or iPhone if Jobs hadn’t been canned.
jron
Shorter:
CEO sees his job as his own personal fiefdom and runs off people he doesn’t want to hang out with. Board members have no clue what is going on and just want to be treated like aristocrats by (highly skilled and motivated) worker bees.
Sadly, if it had gone the opposite way it would have made a story.
Nylund
They nearly bankrupted Apple because they didn’t like his outfit. Carly Fiorina, who nearly bankrupted HP, is now insulting Barbara Boxer’s hair. Are they running a company or re-enacting scenes from Heathers and Mean Girls? Maybe the obsession with looks and clothes in American Psycho wasn’t so far off after all. Tell me why again we should fear any of these people “going Galt?”
BC
This sounds so familiar to the Republicans who were in Congress during the Bush years and now – they just cannot admit that they fucked up the country. Guess if they did, they’d have to jump off the tallest building or a bridge . . .
Mr Furious
@Mnemosyne: Probably true. I’m sure there was plenty of “my shit doesn’t stink!” from all directions at the time.
I’m happy with the outcome, and I imagine so is Jobs. And Sculley will forever be known as the biggest jackass is early computing history…so it’s all good.
slag
Politics. It’s hard to imagine it getting worse than it is in our political system, but really, corporate politics are where the truly petty politics happen.
Especially when corporate leadership isn’t more invested in the product than in the prestige and salary. Incentives are a bitch.
Jon H
@New Yorker: “Steve Jobs should start wearing thousand-dollar suits like Dick Fuld and Charles Prince. That’s what makes a great corporate leader.”
I believe he did wear suits at NeXT when his best customers were investment banks.
Jon H
@PeakVT: ” Though NeXT was a failure in the marketplace, Jobs learned some things that he probably wouldn’t have if he had stayed at Apple. ”
This is true, about Jobs. I think shifting down into startup mode, not being able to rest on his laurels, and having to make the tough decisions like dropping hardware and adopting outside standards, were very good learning experiences for him.
And while NeXT was a failure in the marketplace, apart from some niches that could afford $5,000 per user (at least until Java came out), I would point out that among the three big OO factions of the early 90s, Taligent, NeXT, and Microsoft’s “Cairo”, NeXT fared best.
Taligent crumbled under its own weight.
A few minor aspects of Cairo have appeared since, like Win95’s UI. The big feature of Cairo was going to be an object-oriented file system.
It was supposed to be part of Vista. It still hasn’t shipped.
300baud
@PeakVT:
Absolutely. As an early Mac user and then a NeXT developer, I’d say there’s no reason to think that The Steve wouldn’t have screwed up just as badly if he’d stayed on at Apple.
Both with the Mac and with NeXT, he made the mistake of mainly building for himself. It’s only after the years in the wilderness plus the near collapse of NeXT that he seems to have learned how to focus on making what his audience wants.
El Cruzado
@Jon H: I think MS has finally declared surrender in their battle for an OO/DB filesystem. It probably wasn’t such a great idea but on paper anyway.
jethro
Scully’s not hiding his mistakes now, however.
I read a recent interview where he admitted it was a huge mistake to take him on as CEO of Apple, that he wasn’t talented enough to build products, and that the board should have put him into marketing and left Jobs as CEO.
srv
Jobs did not wear jackets at NeXT until he showed up at a gov’t agency in jeans and the black top. He got in with the jeans, but not until he put the salesman’s jacket on.
Jobs aggressively recruited Scully. So as much his fault as anyone elses.
Chris
Well, you can stake that claim
Good work is the key to good fortune
Winners take that praise
Losers seldom take that blame …
Cheryl from Maryland
@d0n camillo: The world would be a better place if Bruce Campbell was in charge.
Panurge
@Chris:
Am I the only other one here who knows that reference?
I’ve always tried to stay mindful of that (not that taking the blame for my life has exactly helped me). Funny thing–ISTR psychologist Martin Seligman reporting that optimists tend to avoid blaming themselves as such for their failures; they’ll come up with some external explanation rather than just “I suck”. This helps them get back in the game. So maybe that’s part of why such people keep making it to the top–they’re less likely to be discouraged by personal failures.
@Nylund:
Very, very much so–I could tell you that and I’ve only read a few paragraphs of American Psycho. Just think about the Hippie Wars of the ’60s and ’70s–they never really ended, it’s just that HIPPIES [*] are now getting crapped on by both REAGAN and PUNK. (Example in AP: Patrick Bateman prefers ’80s Genesis to ’70s Genesis.) Things had not changed for so long that they were regarded as features of the universe, so to speak; it was a real shock to millions of people to find out that they weren’t. So in order to fight that, an informal campaign was put together to frame HIPPIES as something worth rebelling against–and hey, what better vessel for rebelling against HIPPIES than REAGAN? So now you have a bunch of Bir
cthers with buzzcuts dumping on HIPPIES and imagining that they’re being bold, rebellious, and independent-minded.[*] This is just a catch-all name for a large, broad cultural current in Western society; I’m sure you can figure out what REAGAN and PUNK mean.
maus
@gnomedad:
Hello North American Union.