Benjamin franklin and albert einstein, this is the exclusive biography of steve jobs

Fortune.
“In 
meetings he’s known for long, uncomfortable pauses, when all you hear is the sound of his tearing 
the wrapper off the energy bars he constantly eats.”
At a meeting early in his tenure, Cook was told of a problem with one of Apple’s Chinese 
suppliers. “This is really bad,” he said. “Someone should be in China driving this.” Thirty minutes 
later he looked at an operations executive sitting at the table and unemotionally asked, “Why are 
you still here?” The executive stood up, drove directly to the San Francisco airport, and bought a 
ticket to China. He became one of Cook’s top deputies.
Cook reduced the number of Apple’s key suppliers from a hundred to twenty-four, forced them 
to cut better deals to keep the business, convinced many to locate next to Apple’s plants, and 
closed ten of the company’s nineteen warehouses. By reducing the places where inventory could 
pile up, he reduced inventory. Jobs had cut inventory from two months’ worth of product down to 
one by early 1998. By September of that year, Cook had gotten it down to six days. By the 
following September, it was down to an amazing two days’ worth. In addition, he cut the 
production process for making an Apple computer from four months to two. All of this not only 
saved money, it also allowed each new computer to have the very latest components available.
Mock Turtlenecks and Teamwork
On a trip to Japan in the early 1980s, Jobs asked Sony’s chairman, Akio Morita, why everyone in 
his company’s factories wore uniforms. “He looked very ashamed and told me that after the war, 

---

no one had any clothes, and companies like Sony had to give their workers something to wear 
each day,” Jobs recalled. Over the years the uniforms developed their own signature style, 
especially at companies such as Sony, and it became a way of bonding workers to the company. “I 
decided that I wanted that type of bonding for Apple,” Jobs recalled.
Sony, with its appreciation for style, had gotten the famous designer Issey Miyake to create one 
of its uniforms. It was a jacket made of ripstop nylon with sleeves that could unzip to make it a 
vest. “So I called Issey and asked him to design a vest for Apple,” Jobs recalled. “I came back 
with some samples and told everyone it would be great if we would all wear these vests. Oh man, 
did I get booed off the stage. Everybody hated the idea.”
In the process, however, he became friends with Miyake and would visit him regularly. He also 
came to like the idea of having a uniform for himself, because of both its daily convenience (the 
rationale he claimed) and its ability to convey a signature style. “So I asked Issey to make me 
some of his black turtlenecks that I liked, and he made me like a hundred of them.” Jobs noticed 
my surprise when he told this story, so he gestured to them stacked up in the closet. “That’s what I 
wear,” he said. “I have enough to last for the rest of my life.”
Despite his autocratic nature—he never worshipped at the altar of consensus—Jobs worked 
hard to foster a culture of collaboration at Apple. Many companies pride themselves on having 
few meetings. Jobs had many: an executive staff session every Monday, a marketing strategy 
session all Wednesday afternoon, and endless product review sessions. Still allergic to 
PowerPoints and formal presentations, he insisted that the people around the table hash out issues 
from various vantages and the perspectives of different departments.
Because he believed that Apple’s great advantage was its integration of the whole widget—
from design to hardware to software to content—he wanted all departments at the company to 
work together in parallel. The phrases he used were “deep collaboration” and “concurrent 
engineering.” Instead of a development process in which a product would be passed sequentially 
from engineering to design to manufacturing to marketing and distribution, these various 
departments collaborated simultaneously. “Our method was to develop integrated products, and 
that meant our process had to be integrated and collaborative,” Jobs said.
This approach also applied to key hires. He would have candidates meet the top leaders—Cook, 
Tevanian, Schiller, Rubinstein, Ive—rather than just the managers of the department where they 
wanted to work. “Then we all get together without the person and talk about whether they’ll fit 
in,” Jobs said. His goal was to be vigilant against “the bozo explosion” that leads to a company’s 
being larded with second-rate talent:
For most things in life, the range between best and average is 30% or so. The best airplane flight, the 
best meal, they may be 30% better than your average one. What I saw with Woz was somebody who 
was fifty times better than the average engineer. He could have meetings in his head. The Mac team was 
an attempt to build a whole team like that, A players. People said they wouldn’t get along, they’d hate 
working with each other. But I realized that A players like to work with A players, they just didn’t like 
working with C players. At Pixar, it was a whole company of A players. When I got back to Apple, that’
s what I decided to try to do. You need to have a collaborative hiring process. When we hire someone, 
even if they’re going to be in marketing, I will have them talk to the design folks and the engineers. My 
role model was J. Robert Oppenheimer. I read about the type of people he sought for the atom bomb 
project. I wasn’t nearly as good as he was, but that’s what I aspired to do.
The process could be intimidating, but Jobs had an eye for talent. When they were looking for 
people to design the graphical interface for Apple’s new operating system, Jobs got an email from 
a young man and invited him in. The applicant was nervous, and the meeting did not go well. 
Later that day Jobs bumped into him, dejected, sitting in the lobby. The guy asked if he could just 
show him one of his ideas, so Jobs looked over his shoulder and saw a little demo, using Adobe 
Director, of a way to fit more icons in the dock at the bottom of a screen. When the guy moved the 
cursor over the icons crammed into the dock, the cursor mimicked a magnifying glass and made 
each icon balloon bigger. “I said, ‘My God,’ and hired him on the spot,” Jobs recalled. The feature 
became a lovable part of Mac OSX, and the designer went on to design such things as inertial 
scrolling for multi-touch screens (the delightful feature that makes the screen keep gliding for a 
moment after you’ve finished swiping).

---

Jobs’s experiences at NeXT had matured him, but they had not mellowed him much. He still 
had no license plate on his Mercedes, and he still parked in the handicapped spaces next to the 
front door, sometimes straddling two slots. It became a running gag. Employees made signs 
saying, “Park Different,” and someone painted over the handicapped wheelchair symbol with a 
Mercedes logo.
People were allowed, even encouraged, to challenge him, and sometimes he would respect 
them for it. But you had to be prepared for him to attack you, even bite your head off, as he 
processed your ideas. “You never win an argument with him at the time, but sometimes you 
eventually win,” said James Vincent, the creative young adman who worked with Lee Clow. “You 
propose something and he declares, ‘That’s a stupid idea,’ and later he comes back and says, 
‘Here’s what we’re going to do.’ And you want to say, ‘That’s what I told you two weeks ago and 
you said that’s a stupid idea.’ But you can’t do that. Instead you say, ‘That’s a great idea, let’s do 
that.’”
People also had to put up with Jobs’s occasional irrational or incorrect assertions. To both 
family and colleagues, he was apt to declare, with great conviction, some scientific or historical 
fact that had scant relationship to reality. “There can be something he knows absolutely nothing 
about, and because of his crazy style and utter conviction, he can convince people that he knows 
what he’s talking about,” said Ive, who described the trait as weirdly endearing. Yet with his eye 
for detail, Jobs sometimes correctly pounced on tiny things others had missed. Lee Clow recalled 
showing Jobs a cut of a commercial, making some minor changes he requested, and then being 
assaulted with a tirade about how the ad had been completely destroyed. “He discovered we had 
cut two extra frames, something so fleeting it was nearly impossible to notice,” said Clow. “But he 
wanted to be sure that an image hit at the exact moment as a beat of the music, and he was totally 
right.”