Saturday, April 25, 2015

Opening paragraphs.................................

On a cold December afternoon in 1979, Steve Jobs pulled into the parking lot of the Garden of Allah, a retreat and conference center on the shoulder of Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, north of San Francisco.  He was tired, frustrated, angry, and late.  The traffic on 280 and 101 had been at a standstill much of the way up from Cupertino, way down south in Silicon Valley, where the company he founded, Apple Computer, had its headquarters, and where he had just suffered through a meeting of Apple's board of directors, which was chaired by the venerable Arthur Rock.  He and Rock didn't see eye-to-eye on much of anything.  Rock treated him like a child.  Rock loved order, he loved processes, he believed that tech companies grew in certain ways according to certain rules, and he subscribed to these beliefs because he'd seen them work before, most notably at Intel, the great Santa Clara chipmaker that he had backed early on.  Rock was perhaps the most notable tech investor of his time, but he in fact had been reluctant to back Apple at first, largely because he'd found Steve Jobs and his partner Steve Wozniak unpalatable.  He didn't see Apple the way Jobs saw it - as an extraordinary company that would humanize computing and o so with a defiantly unhierarchical organization.  Rock simply viewed it as another investment.  Steve found board meetings with Rock enervating, not invigorating;  he had looked forward to the long, fast drive to Marin with the top down to get rid of the stale stench of seemingly endless discussion.

-Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli,  Becoming Steve Jobs:  The Evolution Of A Reckless Upstart Into A Visionary Leader

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