Working With Steve Jobs

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Never before had she seen a CEO personally lead such a project, much less take an interest in every last detail.

Take the floor. After looking at many different materials, Jobs finally decided on a type of limestone called Pietra Serena that comes from a region of Italy near Florence. Although they could only find 5,000 square feet of the color Jobs liked, he insisted that 1,000 square feet of it be flown to Cupertino for his personal inspection.

“He cared about the veining,” Riley said. “He wanted to make sure that each piece had no marks in them and were perfect.”

Jobs wasn’t just obsessed with the minutiae, but with the overall effect. She marveled when Apple built a mock-up store in a warehouse a few miles from Apple’s campus, complete with fake cash registers. Unlike other clients, he wanted everyone who could even tangentially have an impact on the overall effect involved in the project. Structural engineers, whose job is mostly to make sure nothing falls down, usually don’t get close to the sexy stuff, Riley said. On this project, they were invited to pore over the plans at meetings, right along with the marketing folks, graphics folks, and others.

Working with Jobs was far from tension-free. When the limestone that arrived in Cupertino didn’t match the sample Jobs had approved, he called to yell at her for not checking the shipment personally while in Italy. Another time, she was whispering to someone in the corner of the conference room while Jobs was interrogating someone on the other side of the room.

“Suddenly, he turned around and said, ‘Could you please be quiet—I’m trying to yell at someone over here!’ ” Riley said.

Like many people, Riley found herself more motivated than discouraged by such treatment.

“Everyone rises to the occasion when you’ve got someone with that kind of leadership,” she said. He wasn’t micromanaging or being political, in her estimation. “He showed me a third way. There were no polite, unspoken messages with Steve. I liked the fact that he didn’t hold back.”

So what were the rules for avoiding Jobs’s ire?

“Don’t come unprepared,” Riley said. “And think beyond what he specifically asked for, to what he might ask.” She said Apple employees all knew to come prepared with backup plans, so if Jobs shot down their first proposal, they were ready with an alternative.

The other rules? Don’t take secrecy lightly because Jobs was dead serious about it, according to Riley. Jobs’s product designers were expected to bring prototypes of new devices to stores to see how they would look on the shelves. Before they revealed them, they had security guards clear all contractors and store personnel from the floor and lock the door behind them.

Also drawing Jobs’s ire was the Infinite Loop campus, which he hated and always apologized for, Riley said.

“It looked like any corporate campus anywhere in America,” she recalled him saying. “And it was built by John Sculley.”

Burrows is a senior writer for Bloomberg Businessweek, based in San Francisco.