Jobs' first boss Nolan Bushnell: 'Steve was difficult but valuable'
'To most potential employers, he'd just seem like a jerk in bad clothing.'
Posted in Management, 30th March 2013 00:53 GMT
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Steve Jobs' first boss, Atari cofounder Nolan Bushnell, has written a book in which he offers advice on how to find, hire, and retain visionary talent – even though such creative types can be as difficult to deal with as Apple's cofounder.
"The truth is that very few companies would hire Steve, even today," Bushnell writes. "Why? Because he was an outlier. To most potential employers, he'd just seem like a jerk in bad clothing."
And it wasn't simply that Jobs was an outlier. "Steve was difficult but valuable," Bushnell told the San Jose Mercury News. "He was very often the smartest guy in the room, and he would let people know that."
Bushnell, who has been involved in over 20 startups, including his most notable success other than Atari, the kids' arcade-cum-pizzeria Chuck E. Cheese's, knows something about hiring and motivating creatives, even when they're as "difficult" as Jobs.
His advice: ignore credentials, hire the obnoxious (but in limited numbers), celebrate and learn from failures, encourage staffers to make decisions by throwing dice, make work fun, provide toys, invent haphazard holidays – and let your precious creatives sleep on the job, if they want to. In short, act as businesses did during the hothouse heyday of the 1980s and 90s, and not as they do in today's buttoned-down, risk-averse atmosphere.
There's a lot more counsel in his 280-page book, written with the help of ghostwriter Gene Stone and entitled Finding the Next Steve Jobs: How to Find, Hire, Keep and Nurture Creative Talent, but not a lot more about Jobs.
In the book's introduction, however – which you can read here – he does recount a 1980 meeting with Jobs in Paris. During their leisurely day together, Bushnell recalls Jobs making a statement about companies copying Apple's innovations that presaged the Apple cofounders later "thermonuclear" distate for imitators. "There are parasites all over the computer world ready to take whatever we come up with," Jobs told Bushnell.
"Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose," as the Parisians would say.
Bushnell also has some advice for the company now led by CEO Tim Cook. "To really maintain the cutting edge that they live on," he told the Associated Press, "they will have to do some radical things that resonate. They probably have three more years before they really have to do something big. I hope they are working on it right now."
So do Apple's shareholders, Nolan, so do Apple's shareholders. ®
Bootnote
Speaking of shareholders: back when Apple was in its early days, Bushnell turned down an offer from Jobs to invest $50,000 in the fledgling company, an amount that would have given him a one-third ownership stake. Even after Apple's recent stock-price plummet, that investment would now be worth about $138.5bn; that's an ROI of about 280 million per cent.
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COMMENTS
Misplaced admiration
I'm surprised Bushnell has such reverence for a guy who had zero technical skills [1] and even fewer scruples, who passed his jobs onto Steve Wozniak then conned him [2] out of full payment.
[1] 'On the genius of Jobs, Isaacson is not dazzled. "He was never much of an engineer," "He didn't know how to code or programme a computer. That was Wozniak's job."'
[2] "Jobs returned to his previous job at Atari and was given the task of creating a circuit board for the game Breakout. According to Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, Atari had offered $100 for each chip that was eliminated in the machine. Jobs had little interest or knowledge in circuit board design and made a deal with Wozniak to split the bonus evenly between them if Wozniak could minimize the number of chips. Much to the amazement of Atari, Wozniak reduced the number of chips by 50. At the time, Jobs told Wozniak that Atari had only given them $700 (instead of the actual $5,000) and that Wozniak's share was thus $350."
Frankly I'm at a loss to understand exactly what Jobs' contribution was to, well, anything. It's not like Apple ever actually invented anything, and Jobs himself seemed to be little more than a sort of megalomaniacal spokesmodel.
Re: @Homer 1 (was:Misplaced admiration)
"Fella, nobody likes a name-dropper..."
It is in no way name dropping if you have shared time at the orginal Homebrew computer club with Steve Jobs and you say so on a topic where that fact is completely germane to the topic of conversation. It would be weird if you didn't.
A name dropper looks for opportunities to drop names into conversation regardless of the flow of the discussion. If Jake was present at the original Homebrew club meetings, I for one find that very interesting and I would love to know more.
If you are not interested in someone else's experience and knowledge, from a time and place that could not be more central to the home computer revolution, - if you have closed you mind because you have simply allowed petty prejudices about your preferred technology and your preferred view of the world, to get in the way of real first hand experience from someone that was there - then you are a petty individual with limited imagination.
There are plenty of Steve Jobs running around.
Guys who don't create anything, but just put on a good show.
What you really want is to find the next Woz. Who is the person that is going to make the technical innovations that you can wrap a sales and marketing campaign around?
Re: Misplaced admiration
Jobs did marketing and branding. He was one of those very rare marketing people who really did have a feel for what the public would consider cool, and who understood that punters don't want hardware or software, they want a wanky thing that could be called the Total Ownership Experience.
So he set about creating that at Apple, then Next, then Apple again, with everything from the initial product announcement to the physical stores to the packaging to the advertising to the design to the technology carefully crafted to sell, sell, sell, and keep selling.
He didn't need to code. He needed enough technical skill to hire good engineers and give them goals and targets.
But engineering was just a small part of market design to him. It wasn't the main event.
He sounds like a nightmare in person. But I think it's unfair to day he did nothing at Apple or Next.
Re: There are plenty of Steve Jobs running around.
"If you hire Woz(es) you also need someone to actually exploit them in order to have a product. "
Indeed. And when it came to ruthless exploitation Jobs was indeed the goto guy.
It's so difficult to find those charismatic borderline psychopaths that are still just this side of serial killer or ponzi fraudster.
The new Office Garage series:
