The Hero Returns: Steve Jobs’ real genius

1. Pixar co-founders (l to r): Ed Catmull, Steve Jobs, and John Lasseter
The Hero Returns: Steve Jobs’
real genius
As the three-year anniversary of Steve Jobs’ passing approaches
in October, complete lessons from his life and legacy are still far
from written or understood. Walter Isaacson’s biography Steve
Jobs, published soon after Jobs’ death in 2011, provided a
formidable starting point, yet we still have a great deal to learn
and understand about what made Jobs such a unique innovator
and leader.
In studying Jobs closely over the past several years, I’ve become
convinced that the common narratives we’ve heard neglect a
central aspect of Jobs’ of genius and success. And, it’s
something that we can all learn from, which is this: Steve Jobs
was a superb collaborator with the people who he respected and
trusted.
Now, we’re all familiar with the common narratives about Jobs’
unique talents and success: that his unique genius was in his
ability to foresee technology vectors and envision, design, and
execute truly brilliant products and platforms — from the
Macintosh to the iPhone to the iTunes to Apple stores (as well
as, it must be said, a host of ideas that failed miserably). As a

2. leader, Jobs’ sheer force of personality and charisma motivated
everyone involved — sometimes with a “reality distortion field”
— to achieve mind-numbing perfection with products, down to
every last detail of Apple’s packaging.
Yet, Jobs’ product genius and charisma cannot explain the
parallel — and simultaneous — breakthrough successes at both
Apple and Pixar Animation. Just contrast how Jobs led at Apple,
where he by all accounts made the final product and branding
decisions as the company’s “editor,” compared with the roles he
played at Pixar. At Pixar, where Jobs was the chairman and
primary funder during the company’s start-up years, Jobs played
the role of chief business strategist and leader yet was nearly
entirely hands-off from the creative operations and development
of Pixar films. For example, Jobs never once participated in a
story review session for a Pixar film.[1]
Instead, Jobs relied on John Lasseter, Pixar’s creative lead, Ed
Catmull, Pixar’s lead technologist and president, and a small
initial cadre of animators, including Pete Docter (who would go
onto direct Monsters, Inc. and UP) and Andrew Stanton (who
would go on to direct wall-e and Finding Nemo), to develop
Pixar’s ways of working and processes. Jobs, for instance, gave
Lasseter and company full leeway to establish Pixar’s approach
to developing new ideas, including exhaustive storyboarding, as
well as the company’s routine of animation “dailies,” the daily
meetings where animators discuss their works in progress each
day in order to advance and build-up or “plus” each others’

3. ideas.
Catmull, now president of both Pixar as well as Walt Disney
Animation (a position Catmull has held since Disney acquired
Pixar for $7.4 billion in 2006), was Jobs’ longest-running
colleague, a working relationship that spanned 26 years. Catmull
dedicates a chapter of his superb recent book Creativity, Inc. to
what it was like to work with Jobs. Catmull, who has the least
overt ego of any senior executive I’ve ever met, saw Jobs mature
enormously over time, especially in the development of personal
empathy and humility.
In fact, Catmull, sees Jobs’ life as having taken a classic Hero’s
Journey arc.
From his widely-reported immature and often arrogant youth,
Jobs by all accounts appeared to develop into a far more
empathetic human being and wise leader. But that personal
transformation would not have happened without what
leadership scholar Warren Bennis described as “crucibles” —
those personal crises and setback experiences that shape us
much like “medieval alchemists used in their attempts to turn
base metals into gold” — and, that allow for personal and
leadership metamorphosis.
Back to the beginning and how Pixar

4. became Pixar thanks to a brilliant
collaboration
Freshly fired from Apple at age 30, not even Jobs could have
envisioned what Pixar would ultimately become when he bought
the company from George Lucas in 1985. He had learned about
the nascent company from his friend Alay Kay, the legendary
technologist, on a walk along the railroad tracks in Palo Alto.
Kay had attended the University of Utah to obtain a PhD with
Ed Catmull, a brilliant technologist. Catmull, who wanted to do
something great with his life’s work, decided at Utah that his life
aspiration would be to make the first full-length digitally
animated film. Most everyone thought he was nuts.
A few years out of graduate school, Catmull was recruited by
George Lucas to run LucasFilms’ computer imaging division.
The company made hardware to support digital animation for
Lucas’ films, as well as other imaging technologies, such as MRI
imaging. But after a couple of years of R&D work, Lucas went
through a difficult divorce, and needed cash, so he had to sell the
company. Enter Steve Jobs, the lone bidder standing after Lucas’
efforts to shop the deal around.
Despite the unproven market potential of Pixar’s hardware, Jobs
had immediately fallen in love with the technology. In David
Price’s excellent history of the company The Pixar Touch, Jobs
originally believed the company would be the next great

5. hardware firm.
In fact, when he bought Pixar, Jobs never believed that the
company would ever make money on digitally animated films.
Pixar would become the HP of imaging, Jobs predicted.
The Pixar “Imaging Computer,” circa 1985 (credit: cgsociety)
As Price outlines, Catmull, Lasseter, and another early
cofounder, Alvy Ray Smith, had always focused their dreams on
making a full-length animated film despite the fact that the
technology required to do so was believed to be at least a decade
away. Jobs knew about their passion when he bought the
company from Lucas. (Lucas had even told Jobs that the team
was “hell-bent” on making animated films.) And, Jobs always
appreciated that passion, but he valued their skills and talents
even more. So, he allowed the team to make short animated
films in order to demonstrate the value of Pixar’s hardware.
Learning how to make short films extremely well was, in fact,
how Catmull, Lasseter, and company learned how to tell
animated stories, and to make the technology (software and
hardware) to eventually support making a full-length digitally
animated film.
It was an extremely difficult journey, and ultimately cost Jobs

6. $50 million in personal investment.
After the hardware wouldn’t sell in the marketplace, Jobs
pivoted Pixar’s vision and focus in the mid-1980s and let the
world know that Pixar was going to be a great software
company. That strategy lasted for an even shorter period of time.
Close to bankruptcy, Pixar had developed its digital animation,
technology, and storytelling capabilities and short films to the
point where the company won the Academy Award for its short
film Tin Toy in 1988. That was the clarion call Jobs needed. He
then pivoted the company again, to focus on animated
commercials, and soon enough, had a deal with Disney to
produce the first full-length film: Toy Story.
And, so, while not even Steve Jobs could have predicted that
Pixar would produce blockbuster digital films, Catmull and
Lasseter never would have gotten there without Steve Jobs as
funder, strategist, external negotiator and salesman. Given the
agonizing setbacks and toils along that path, and regular need
for capital, Catmull describes Jobs as “our protector.” It was a
brilliant collaboration, with each person performing the roles
best suited to their talents and experiences.
How to argue with Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs was obviously a extremely driven and demanding
collaborator. Yet, with the people he respected and trusted, such

7. as Catmull and John Lasseter, Jobs listened, shifted his positions
when convinced, and even valued collaborators’ personal
preferences. Catmull, for instance, described in an interview
about Creativity, Inc. at Stanford University how he and Jobs
would argue when making decisions.
Despite Jobs’ frequently confrontational style, Catmull says that
he and Jobs never once got into a yelling argument. That would
go against Catmull’s personal nature, something that Jobs
evidently respected. “The way it worked was,” Catmull
discovered, “That I would say something to him, and he would
immediately shut it down because he could think faster than I
could.” Catmull would then wait a week, give Jobs a
counterargument to what Jobs said, and Jobs might shut it down
again, and the pattern would repeat, sometimes for months, until
the two reached a resolution. Catmull reflected on how those
interactions unfolded:
In the end, one of three things happened:
About a third of the time, he [Jobs] said,
‘Oh, I get it. You’re right.’And that was
the end of it. And, there was another third
of the time when I [Catmull] would say,
‘You know what, actually, I think he’s

8. right. The other third of the time, where
we didn’t reach consensus, he just let me
do it my way. Never said anything more
about it.’[2]
Tellingly, over 20 years later, Catmull, Lasseter, Docter, Stanton,
and many others have stayed at Pixar, often turning down very
lucrative alternatives, and focused intently on developing the
next generation of filmmakers and company leaders. Jobs wasn’t
the visionary at Pixar, he was the glue.
The hero departs: If Steve Jobs (especially
“the younger” Jobs) didn’t respect or like
you, he gave the middle finger to
collaboration, and could be a massive
asshole
All of that said, Jobs’ often confrontational personality naturally
rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. For instance, Alvy Ray
Smith, a brilliant technologist, left Pixar during its formative
years following numerous personality clashes with Jobs, which
he describes in detail as well as to share his side of Pixar’s
history (revisited) on his website.
Meanwhile, during Apple’s early years, Jobs could be nothing

9. short of impossible. As his co-founder Steve Wozniak has said, a
lot of people who worked with the younger Jobs despised him.
“Some of my very best friends in Apple, the most creative
people in Apple who worked on the Macintosh, almost all of
them said they would never, ever work for Steve Jobs again,”
Woz recently explained in an interview with the Milwaukee
Business Journal, “It was bad.”
Wozniak explained that in his earlier years at Apple, Jobs
pushed people to bring products out before they were ready,
creating enormous strain on employees and creating rifts.
“He would directly confront people and almost call them
idiots,” explained Wozniak. “But you know what? When they
confronted him back and told him why they were right in
understandable forms, he was just testing and learning, and he
would respect those people and give them high privileges in the
company.”
“That was one thing he did respect — someone who believed
enough in their own ideas to speak for him, not just shut up and
be shy around him,” he said.
Again, while it must be said, we’ve all heard Jobs stories like
these, and this narrative. Jobs “the younger” leadership was
often destructive and counterproductive. But, according to all
accounts I’ve gathered, through a number of personal crucibles
— most notably getting fired from Apple — Jobs grew his
leadership and his ability to collaborate enormously.

10. The hero returns: Steve Jobs the remarkable
collaborator
Despite the fact that Jobs burned countless working relationships
with his style, especially early in his career, he developed a
remarkable number and array of productive collaborations
throughout his career with some of the most respected leaders in
their domains. Owing to some combination of pure results and
mutual respect, which included his willingness to listen to
people he respected and reconsider his views, Jobs was a magnet
for talented collaborators and partners.
A sampling includes: Pixar’s Catmull, the brilliant technologist
who grew into a strong manager and leader (Catmull is
frequently known inside Pixar as “The Pope”), as well as John
Lasseter, a once-in-a-generation creative leader, once fired from
Disney before he was hired by Catmull, and who is now Chief
Creative Officer for both Pixar and Disney Animation.
Meanwhile at Apple, Jobs forged a host of extremely effective,
long-running partnerships, notably with senior vice president of
Design, Jonathan Ive, who has led Apple’s design team since
1996, a partnership that has been well documented. Other very
strong collaborations included Scott Forestall, the mobile
software chief with whom Jobs partnered to design and
commercialize the iPhone, as well as retail chief Ron Johnson,
with whom Jobs worked closely to design and launch Apple’s

11. stores.
Critically, Apple’s long-time Chief Operations Officer Tim Cook
became the operational ballast to Jobs’ creative, marketing, and
product genius. Before becoming Apple’s CEO after Jobs’ death,
Cook led huge operational improvements and efficiencies
throughout Apple’s supply chain, such as reducing inventories
from 60 to 30 days. Not since Bill Hewlett and David Packard
has Silicon Valley seen a partnership with such effective balance
of innovation (Hewlett) and operations (Packard). (Mark
Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg have forged an impressive
partnership as well.)
Now that Cook is CEO, the biggest question that I (and many
others) have in the post-Jobs era at Apple is how well Cook will
be able to build and maintain productive collaborations.
While there is a notable absence of female collaborators in the
above list, perhaps Jobs’ most impressive partnership of all was
with his wife Laurene Powell, whom he married in 1991. After
years of relationships that exposed Jobs’ youthful arrogance and
weaknesses, including the birth of a child who Jobs failed to
initially acknowledge and support, Powell and Jobs forged what
was by all accounts a remarkable partnership, including raising
three children.
And, today, it is Jobs’ close collaborators who carry his legacy

12. forward: at Pixar, Apple, Disney, as well as within philanthropy,
which Powell leads admirably. Her current work includes
College Trak, a nonprofit based in East Palo Alto focused on
increasing high school graduation rates for underserved students,
as well as the Emerson Collective, which is focused on
supporting the entrepreneurial spirit including through
educational programs and reform.
And so, nearly three years after his passing, while Steve Jobs’
once-in-a-generation talents are gone, his dreams and values live
on through his collaborators. To me, that ability to forge
extremely strong and trusting collaborations was Steve Jobs’ real
genius, and one that we can all learn from.