Most were Jobs’s personal heroes. They tended to be creative people who had taken risks, defied failure, and bet their career on doing things in a different way. A photography buff, he became involved in making sure they had the perfect iconic portraits. “This is not the right picture of Gandhi,” he erupted to Clow at one point. Clow explained that the famous Margaret Bourke-White photograph of Gandhi at the spinning wheel was owned by Time-Life Pictures and was not available for commercial use. So Jobs called Norman Pearlstine, the editor in chief of Time Inc., and badgered him into making an exception. He called Eunice Shriver to convince her family to release a picture that he loved, of her brother Bobby Kennedy touring Appalachia, and he talked to Jim Henson’s children personally to get the right shot of the late Muppeteer.
He likewise called Yoko Ono for a picture of her late husband, John Lennon. She sent him one, but it was not Jobs’s favorite. “Before it ran, I was in New York, and I went to this small Japanese restaurant that I love, and let her know I would be there,” he recalled. When he arrived, she came over to his table. “This is a better one,” she said, handing him an envelope. “I thought I would see you, so I had this with me.” It was the classic photo of her and John in bed together, holding flowers, and it was the one that Apple ended up using. “I can see why John fell in love with her,” Jobs recalled.
The narration by Richard Dreyfuss worked well, but Lee Clow had another idea. What if Jobs did the voice-over himself? “You really believe this,” Clow told him. “You should do it.” So Jobs sat in a studio, did a few takes, and soon produced a voice track that everyone liked. The idea was that, if they used it, they would not tell people who was speaking the words, just as they didn’t caption the iconic pictures. Eventually people would figure out it was Jobs. “This will be really powerful to have it in your voice,” Clow argued. “It will be a way to reclaim the brand.”
Jobs couldn’t decide whether to use the version with his voice or to stick with Dreyfuss. Finally, the night came when they had to ship the ad; it was due to air, appropriately enough, on the television premiere of Toy Story. As was often the case, Jobs did not like to be forced to make a decision. He told Clow to ship both versions; this would give him until the morning to decide. When morning came, Jobs called and told them to use the Dreyfuss version. “If we use my voice, when people find out they will say it’s about me,” he told Clow. “It’s not. It’s about Apple.”
Ever since he left the apple commune, Jobs had defined himself, and by extension Apple, as a child of the counterculture. In ads such as “Think Different” and “1984,” he positioned the Apple brand so that it reaffirmed his own rebel streak, even after he became a billionaire, and it allowed other baby boomers and their kids to do the same. “From when I first met him as a young guy, he’s had the greatest intuition of the impact he wants his brand to have on people,” said Clow.
Very few other companies or corporate leaders—perhaps none—could have gotten away with the brilliant audacity of associating their brand with Gandhi, Einstein, Picasso, and the Dalai Lama. Jobs was able to encourage people to define themselves as anticorporate, creative, innovative rebels simply by the computer they used. “Steve created the only lifestyle brand in the tech industry,” Larry Ellison said. “There are cars people are proud to have—Porsche, Ferrari, Prius—because what I drive says something about me. People feel the same way about an Apple product.”
Starting with the “Think Different” campaign, and continuing through the rest of his years at Apple, Jobs held a freewheeling three-hour meeting every Wednesday afternoon with his top agency, marketing, and communications people to kick around messaging strategy. “There’s not a CEO on the planet who deals with marketing the way Steve does,” said Clow. “Every Wednesday he approves each new commercial, print ad, and billboard.” At the end of the meeting, he would often take Clow and his two agency colleagues, Duncan Milner and James Vincent, to Apple’s closely guarded design studio to see what products were in the works. “He gets very passionate and emotional when he shows us what’s in development,” said Vincent. By sharing with his marketing gurus his passion for the products as they were being created, he was able to ensure that almost every ad they produced was infused with his emotion.
iCEO
As he was finishing work on the “Think Different” ad, Jobs did some different thinking of his own. He decided that he would officially take over running the company, at least on a temporary basis. He had been the de facto leader since Amelio’s ouster ten weeks earlier, but only as an advisor. Fred Anderson had the titular role of interim CEO. On September 16, 1997, Jobs announced that he would take over that title, which inevitably got abbreviated as iCEO. His commitment was tentative: He took no salary and signed no contract. But he was not tentative in his actions. He was in charge, and he did not rule by consensus.
That week he gathered his top managers and staff in the Apple auditorium for a rally, followed by a picnic featuring beer and vegan food, to celebrate his new role and the company’s new ads. He was wearing shorts, walking around the campus barefoot, and had a stubble of beard. “I’ve been back about ten weeks, working really hard,” he said, looking tired but deeply determined. “What we’re trying to do is not highfalutin. We’re trying to get back to the basics of great products, great marketing, and great distribution. Apple has drifted away from doing the basics really well.”
For a few more weeks Jobs and the board kept looking for a permanent CEO. Various names surfaced—George M. C. Fisher of Kodak, Sam Palmisano at IBM, Ed Zander at Sun Microsystems—but most of the candidates were understandably reluctant to consider becoming CEO if Jobs was going to remain an active board member. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Zander declined to be considered because he “didn’t want Steve looking over his shoulder, second-guessing him on every decision.” At one point Jobs and Ellison pulled a prank on a clueless computer consultant who was campaigning for the job; they sent him an email saying that he had been selected, which caused both amusement and embarrassment when stories appeared in the papers that they were just toying with him.
By December it had become clear that Jobs’s iCEO status had evolved from interim to indefinite. As Jobs continued to run the company, the board quietly deactivated its search. “I went back to Apple and tried to hire a CEO, with the help of a recruiting agency, for almost four months,” he recalled. “But they didn’t produce the right people. That’s why I finally stayed. Apple was in no shape to attract anybody good.”