Steve Jobs

Fadell resisted; he liked his freedom. Rubinstein was furious at what he considered Fadell’s whining. “This is one of those life decisions,” he told Fadell. “You’ll never regret it.”
    He decided to force Fadell’s hand. He gathered a roomful of the twenty or so people who had been assigned to the project. When Fadell walked in, Rubinstein told him, “Tony, we’re not doing this project unless you sign on full-time. Are you in or out? You have to decide right now.”
    Fadell looked Rubinstein in the eye, then turned to the audience and said, “Does this always happen at Apple, that people are put under duress to sign an offer?” He paused for a moment, said yes, and grudgingly shook Rubinstein’s hand. “It left some very unsettling feeling between Jon and me for many years,” Fadell recalled. Rubinstein agreed: “I don’t think he ever forgave me for that.”
    Fadell and Rubinstein were fated to clash because they both thought that they had fathered the iPod. As Rubinstein saw it, he had been given the mission by Jobs months earlier, found the Toshiba disk drive, and figured out the screen, battery, and other key elements. He had then brought in Fadell to put it together. He and others who resented Fadell’s visibility began to refer to him as “Tony Baloney.” But from Fadell’s perspective, before he came to Apple he had already come up with plans for a great MP3 player, and he had been shopping it around to other companies before he had agreed to come to Apple. The issue of who deserved the most credit for the iPod, or should get the title Podfather, would be fought over the years in interviews, articles, web pages, and even
Wikipedia
entries.
    But for the next few months they were too busy to bicker. Jobs wanted the iPod out by Christmas, and this meant having it ready to unveil in October. They looked around for other companies that weredesigning MP3 players that could serve as the foundation for Apple’s work and settled on a small company named PortalPlayer. Fadell told the team there, “This is the project that’s going to remold Apple, and ten years from now, it’s going to be a music business, not a computer business.” He convinced them to sign an exclusive deal, and his group began to modify PortalPlayer’s deficiencies, such as its complex interfaces, short battery life, and inability to make a playlist longer than ten songs.
    That’s It!
    There are certain meetings that are memorable both because they mark a historic moment and because they illuminate the way a leader operates. Such was the case with the gathering in Apple’s fourth-floor conference room in April 2001, where Jobs decided on the fundamentals of the iPod. There to hear Fadell present his proposals to Jobs were Rubinstein, Schiller, Ive, Jeff Robbin, and marketing director Stan Ng. Fadell didn’t know Jobs, and he was understandably intimidated. “When he walked into the conference room, I sat up and thought, ‘Whoa, there’s Steve!’ I was really on guard, because I’d heard how brutal he could be.”
    The meeting started with a presentation of the potential market and what other companies were doing. Jobs, as usual, had no patience. “He won’t pay attention to a slide deck for more than a minute,” Fadell said. When a slide showed other possible players in the market, he waved it away. “Don’t worry about Sony,” he said. “We know what we’re doing, and they don’t.” After that, they quit showing slides, and instead Jobs peppered the group with questions. Fadell took away a lesson: “Steve prefers to be in the moment, talking things through. He once told me, ‘If you need slides, it shows you don’t know what you’re talking about.’”
    Instead Jobs liked to be shown physical objects that he could feel, inspect, and fondle. So Fadell brought three different models to the conference room; Rubinstein had coached him on how to reveal them sequentially so that his preferred choice would be the pièce de résistance.They hid the mockup of that option under a wooden bowl at the center of the table.
    Fadell began his show-and-tell by taking the various parts they were using out of a box and spreading them on the table. There were the 1.8-inch drive, LCD screen, boards, and batteries, all labeled with their cost and weight. As he displayed them, they discussed how the prices or sizes might come down over the next year or so. Some of the pieces could be put together, like Lego blocks, to