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from Chapter 28
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.
Ed Woolard, his mentor on the Apple board, pressed Jobs for more than two years to drop the interim in front of his CEO title. Not only was Jobs refusing to commit himself, but he was baffling everyone by taking only $1 a year in pay and no stock options. “I make 50 cents for showing up,” he liked to joke, “and the other 50 cents is based on performance.” Since his return in July 1997, Apple stock had gone from just under $14 to just over $102 at the peak of the Internet bubble at the beginning of 2000. Woolard had begged him to take at least a modest stock grant back in 1997, but Jobs had declined, saying, “I don’t want the people I work with at Apple to think I am coming back to get rich.” Had he accepted that modest grant, it would have been worth $400 million. Instead he made $2.50 during that period.
At the January 2000 Macworld in San Francisco, Jobs rolled out the new Macintosh operating system, OSX, which used some of the software that Apple had bought from NeXT three years earlier.The fans at Macworld received the news with enthusiasm, of course, and they especially cheered when Jobs showed off the dock and how the icons in it could be magnified by passing the cursor over them. But the biggest applause came for the announcement he reserved for his “Oh, and one more thing” coda. He spoke about his duties at both Pixar and Apple, and said that he had become comfortable that the situation could work. “So I am pleased to announce today that I’m going to drop the interim title,” he said with a big smile. The crowd jumped to its feet, screaming as if the Beatles had reunited. Jobs bit his lip, adjusted his wire rims, and put on a graceful show of humility. “You guys are making me feel funny now. I get to come to work every day and work with the most talented people on the planet, at Apple and Pixar. But these jobs are team sports. I accept your thanks on behalf of everybody at Apple.” |
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