Steve Jobs

and Mac—and whether it made sense to organize the company around product lines or markets or functions. But the discussion descended into a free-for-all of random ideas, complaints, and debates.
    At one point Jobs attacked the Lisa team for producing an unsuccessful product. “Well,” someone shot back, “you haven’t delivered the Macintosh! Why don’t you wait until you get a product out before you start being critical?” Sculley was astonished. At Pepsi no one wouldhave challenged the chairman like that. “Yet here, everyone began pig-piling on Steve.” It reminded him of an old joke he had heard from one of the Apple ad salesmen: “What’s the difference between Apple and the Boy Scouts? The Boy Scouts have adult supervision.”
    In the midst of the bickering, a small earthquake began to rumble the room. “Head for the beach,” someone shouted. Everyone ran through the door to the water. Then someone else shouted that the previous earthquake had produced a tidal wave, so they all turned and ran the other way. “The indecision, the contradictory advice, the specter of natural disaster, only foreshadowed what was to come,” Sculley later wrote.
    One Saturday morning Jobs invited Sculley and his wife, Leezy, over for breakfast. He was then living in a nice but unexceptional Tudor-style home in Los Gatos with his girlfriend, Barbara Jasinski, a smart and reserved beauty who worked for Regis McKenna. Leezy had brought a pan and made vegetarian omelets. (Jobs had edged away from his strict vegan diet for the time being.) “I’m sorry I don’t have much furniture,” Jobs apologized. “I just haven’t gotten around to it.” It was one of his enduring quirks: His exacting standards of craftsmanship combined with a Spartan streak made him reluctant to buy any furnishings that he wasn’t passionate about. He had a Tiffany lamp, an antique dining table, and a laser disc video attached to a Sony Trinitron, but foam cushions on the floor rather than sofas and chairs. Sculley smiled and mistakenly thought that it was similar to his own “frantic and Spartan life in a cluttered New York City apartment” early in his own career.
    Jobs confided in Sculley that he believed he would die young, and therefore he needed to accomplish things quickly so that he would make his mark on Silicon Valley history. “We all have a short period of time on this earth,” he told the Sculleys as they sat around the table that morning. “We probably only have the opportunity to do a few things really great and do them well. None of us has any idea how long we’re going to be here, nor do I, but my feeling is I’ve got to accomplish a lot of these things while I’m young.”
    Jobs and Sculley would talk dozens of times a day in the earlymonths of their relationship. “Steve and I became soul mates, near constant companions,” Sculley said. “We tended to speak in half sentences and phrases.” Jobs flattered Sculley. When he dropped by to hash something out, he would say something like “You’re the only one who will understand.” They would tell each other repeatedly, indeed so often that it should have been worrying, how happy they were to be with each other and working in tandem. And at every opportunity Sculley would find similarities with Jobs and point them out:
    We could complete each other’s sentences because we were on the same wavelength. Steve would rouse me from sleep at 2 a.m. with a phone call to chat about an idea that suddenly crossed his mind. “Hi! It’s me,” he’d harmlessly say to the dazed listener, totally unaware of the time. I curiously had done the same in my Pepsi days. Steve would rip apart a presentation he had to give the next morning, throwing out slides and text. So had I as I struggled to turn public speaking into an important management tool during my early days at Pepsi. As a young executive, I was always impatient to get things done and often felt I could do them better myself. So did Steve. Sometimes I felt as if I was watching Steve playing me in a movie. The similarities were uncanny, and they were behind the amazing symbiosis we developed.
     
     
    This was self-delusion, and it was a recipe for disaster. Jobs began to sense it early on. “We had different ways of looking at the world, different views on people, different values,” Jobs recalled. “I began to realize this a few months after he arrived. He didn’t learn things very quickly, and the people he wanted