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Steve Jobs' Demand for Excellence Extends to Elevator Pitches

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Apr 12, 2001
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In a wide-ranging interview with VentureBeat about his experiences with Steve Jobs, former Apple employee Michael Dhuey, now at Cisco, shared several instances where Jobs' unique expectations were especially memorable.
Dhuey recalls that people would dread getting into an elevator with Jobs. If you got on at the 4th floor, you'd better have captivated him by the time you got off on the 1st. Jobs remembered you when you had a great story to tell. He also remembered when you didn't.

"He would ask you what you were working on, and people started to dread that question," chuckles Dhuey. "Everyone started preparing questions to ask Steve in case they accidentally got in the elevator with him. A good question for Steve would keep the pressure off you."
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Dhuey also discloses that Jobs has some hearing loss, something that can be an issue when trying to listen to music.
"When we did the iPod we had to make sure it would be loud enough for Steve to hear the music," says Dhuey. "We had to balance his need for volume with a French law against things that were too loud. He tends to get early prototypes and these were built with Steve's needs in mind. He had an iPhone six months before they were announced. When he stood on stage demoing the phone, he was holding one of the only ones available in the world."

Dhuey learned that Jobs loved the Beatles and "standard pop music," bands like Coldplay. Dhuey also talks about how Jobs pushed against having noisy fans in any hardware. Perhaps this also had to do with his hearing issues.
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Dhuey worked at Apple for 25 years. He was the co-inventor of the Macintosh II and was one of the two main hardware engineers on the original iPod.

Article Link: Steve Jobs' Demand for Excellence Extends to Elevator Pitches
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2011/08/25/steve-jobs-demand-for-excellence-extends-to-elevator-pitches/
So, I'd assume that a casual, "So, how 'bout that Giants baseball game last night?" would not have gone over too well in those elevator rides!
 
wow I would hate to hear what am I working on...actually I am currently working on what I am working on. I am trying to figure out a new advertising plan. Maybe Steve can throw me some help, now that he has some newly found free time :D
 
Wirelessly posted (Iphone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_5 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8L1 Safari/6533.18.5)

That's pretty intense. The whole timed nature of the experience would make it seem like a game show challenge or something out of an action movie.
 
NeXT a failure?

Dhuey "reminds" us that Job's is mortal and uses NeXT as an example of a Jobs "failure". I'd have to disagree with him, in the end, NeXT was absolutely perfect. It was an incubator for software tech that was ahead of it's time. It allowed Steve and others an opportunity to think outside the pc (as in all personal computers including pre OSX Macs) norm to create a wonderful next generation system. After several years, it was time for the experiment to come back home and all that was learned could then be applied to creating OSX (as well as ushering Steve back).

So really, where would Apple be now had Steve not been fired and he not started NeXT and NeXT hadn't floundered? All three things needed to occur to turn Apple into what it is now. So in a way, it (NeXT) was a resounding success.
 
Couldn't Steve use a hearing aid or something? I was deaf since birth, and getting this far with speech, and being able to hear folks wouldn't be possible with out them.
 
MacRumors said:
Dhuey recalls that people would dread getting into an elevator with Jobs. If you got on at the 4th floor, you'd better have captivated him by the time you got off on the 1st. Jobs remembered you when you had a great story to tell. He also remembered when you didn't.
Click to expand...

My favorite Steve elevator story came from a visitor who was leaving the campus. While all his employees avoided getting on with him, the visitor didn't know any better and thought it would be cool just to stand next to Steve.

Halfway through the ride, Steve suddenly turns to him and asks, "So what have YOU done for me today?"

The guy was taken aback and could only stammer out, "Uhh, umm, well I listened to an iPod on the way to work!"

Steve went ballistic on him. "What's your name and who's your boss? I want you off the campus by the end of today. You're fired!"

The visitor was stunned but managed to explain that he didn't work there.

"Oh", said Steve. "Well okay then." And they finished the ride in silence, with Jobs first out the door when it opened.
 
I worked at Apple in 1996 right before and after the NeXT acquisition, in Infinite Loop 1. Steve Jobs was given an office on the 4th floor of the building, and the office I shared with a coworker was on the 2nd floor. Our group had weekly meetings in a conference room that was on the 4th floor right next to Jobs' office. There were jokes about how we didn't want to get caught in an elevator with Steve Jobs, so we all took the stairs, even though the elevator opened right in front of the conference room we were using.

(I never did see Steve Jobs actually in his office, though, when I would look around the corner before or after a weekly meeting. He was still splitting his time at NeXT's old offices, and presumably occasionally at Pixar.)
 
ouimetnick said:
Couldn't Steve use a hearing aid or something? I was deaf since birth, and getting this far with speech, and being able to hear folks wouldn't be possible with out them.
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Depends on the nature of the hearing loss. Sometimes just turning it up as most hearing aids do only intensifies a particular problem. My dad needs a hearing aid that filters out certain frequencies otherwise he just hears noise.
 
I don't think I'd be comfortable working for a company where the employees were afraid to talk to the boss.
 
While Jobs didn't apologize, at least he didn't continue to throw a hissy fit.
Still, he could've apologized.
kdarling said:
Steve went ballistic on him. "What's your name and who's your boss? I want you off the campus by the end of today. You're fired!"

The visitor was stunned but managed to explain that he didn't work there.

"Oh", said Steve. "Well okay then." And they finished the ride in silence, with Jobs first out the door when it opened.
Click to expand...
 
Dhuey recalls that people would dread getting into an elevator with Jobs. If you got on at the 4th floor, you'd better have captivated him by the time you got off on the 1st. Jobs remembered you when you had a great story to tell. He also remembered when you didn't.
Click to expand...

There's a simple, elegant solution to this.

Take the stairs.
 
Wow. And people here think this is acceptable behavior by SJ? :rolleyes: What a jerk he must have been (if this story is in fact true). It's one thing to demand perfection in your product, but to demand a good story in small talk on an elevator is unacceptable behavior.

Tony
 
Neat story until you realize that there are no 4 story buildings on Apple's campus...maybe back when they had City Center in Cupertino, but Jobs wasn't at the company then. Oops.
 
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