When Jobs Returned to Apple

Paris, 1996. I think it was spring. Gil Amelio had become CEO of Apple a few months earlier and was making the rounds of its global headquarters. I had accompanied some Apple Center owners and a couple of Italian corporate clients. I remember it well: Amelio entered the meeting room in a suit and tie, probably to reassure European enterprise clients of his seriousness. No one had ever seen Apple executives in suits and ties. But it was the content of the two meetings (one with European dealers and one with enterprise clients) that really worried me. Amelio was trying to reposition Apple as a middleware technology company. A strategy that, frankly, was incomprehensible. Amelio managed in one fell swoop to disappoint enterprise customers by communicating an inconsistent strategy and disorienting the sales channel. Apple, the company that had invented the modern personal computer, created desktop publishing, brought color and sound to computers when others still ran DOS, was trying to sell itself as a middleware supplier?

Change of direction

This is the strategic confusion that Cain accurately describes in the book: a CEO perhaps technically competent in the world of microprocessors, capable of cutting costs, but totally incapable of understanding the core identity of Apple, both internally and for its customers.

I was so ashamed of that meeting that I didn't know how to justify it to the Apple resellers I had brought to Paris. For the first time in almost ten years, I decided to look around for another job. It was an irrational decision, almost entirely emotional. Frustration had taken precedence over judgment. A few weeks after that meeting, I accepted the offer to become General Manager of Olivetti Italy.

Apple’s counteroffer

Fate and my wife Monica saved me from what would have probably been the worst career move of my life. After I accepted the position at Olivetti, Apple made a counteroffer: George Scalise (then Executive Vice President and Chief Administrative Officer, Amelio's right-hand man) came from Cupertino specifically to convince me to change my mind, proposing me a promotion to a European role. The day after that meeting, Monica showed up for breakfast wearing a hat with a multicolored apple. She kept it on all day. She didn't say anything. It wasn't necessary. I didn't leave Apple. Confirmation that I had made the right choice came a few weeks later: the CEO of Olivetti, the man who would have been my direct boss, announced his resignation.

I recount these episodes to give you a sense of how desperate the situation was at the time. I was on the verge of becoming a manager at an Italian IT company that, that same year, would sell its entire PC division: the descendant of that Olivetti, which, in 1965, had invented the world's first personal computer, but thirty years later was no longer economically and technologically competitive with the US and Asia. Or I could have ended up absorbed into an acquisition by IBM.

Managing downsizing in Europe

In my new role as Head of Sales Europe, while still leading Apple Italy, I reported directly to Jan Gesmar-Larsen, the General Manager of Apple EMEA. It was 1996, and the company was in free fall. One of my main tasks, among the most difficult I had ever faced, was managing a significant downsizing of European sales operations. There's no elegant way to describe what it means to tell competent and passionate people that their job is no longer there. Especially when those people had believed in Apple at a time when trust in Apple was far from a given.

It was during that period that I began to witness firsthand the conversations that would shape the future of Apple—and, unbeknownst to anyone at the time, the tech industry as a whole.

The first deal we were informed about involved Jean-Louis Gassée and his company Be Inc. Gassée had left Apple in 1990 after a clash with Sculley. Through Be, he had built BeOS, a modern and technically elegant operating system. Amelio was desperately looking for a new operating system for Apple: MacOS had become obsolete, it wasn't multitasking, and was full of bugs; users had to reboot their Macs multiple times a day. MacOS, after years of technological supremacy and ease of use, was unable to compete with a new product, albeit riddled with flaws, like Windows 95. Gassée knew he had something valuable, and asked for a sum that Amelio wasn't willing to pay. The deal fell through on price.

Then Steve showed up one day.

The return of Steve Jobs

[…] I followed that deal from afar, through internal channels, in the rumors circulating in the European offices, and in phone calls with colleagues in Cupertino. I remember the clear feeling that something extraordinary was about to happen, not so much for the financial value of the operation, but for its symbolic significance. Steve Jobs was about to return to the home from which he had been kicked out eleven years earlier. And he was doing so by bringing NeXTSTEP with him: the operating system that, as Cain documents in the chapter "Foundations," had been born precisely from the frustration of not being able to realize within Apple that radically new machine he had in mind. There was something fascinating about all this. The man Apple had exiled was returning with the solution to the problem Apple had been unable to solve without him.

[…] Jobs's return was inevitably brutal. In a few weeks, he laid off around 4,000 people, 30% of the entire organization. The entire C-suite was wiped out. The only exception was Fred Anderson, the CFO: one of the very few survivors, who remained because Jobs recognized in him the financial nous needed to keep the company afloat while he was rebuilding it. The board was almost entirely replaced. Out went the old directors from the Amelio era, and in came people handpicked by Jobs: Larry Ellison of Oracle, Bill Campbell of Intuit, Jerry York, former CFO of IBM and Chrysler.

[…] In Europe, it fell to me to carry out the second part of that restructuring: the downsizing as General Manager of the whole of Apple EMEA, on an even larger scale than what I had already done as Head of Sales. But there was a more personal problem I needed to address.

How I met Steve

[…] I decided not to wait. Toward the end of September 1997, Steve had convened the first Top 100 Managers Meeting in Cupertino, bringing together the company's most important executives from around the world. I asked his assistant to meet with him, and to my surprise, Steve agreed to meet with me for fifteen minutes. I confronted him directly, without preamble: I wanted to know if he had already decided whether I was a problem to be done with or someone who could contribute to the solution. Jobs looked at me and replied with equal honesty: "I don't know yet. I only know you are a finance guy."

It wasn't a compliment. But it wasn't an excommunication, either.

I had the feeling, in that moment, that he liked my direct style, perhaps a little disrespectful according to anyone else's standards. Jobs had little patience for people who told him what they would like to hear. Perhaps I had passed his first test without knowing it.