The fake Steve Jobs as Tony Soprano

I finally read oPtion$. Though I'm a couple of weeks late to the book club, thought I’d add a few thoughts that I didn’t see over at Prawfs. Spoilers alert.

At one point in this hilarious satire, Steve Jobs’ lawyer Bobby DiMarco says that Jobs, like all CEOs, is a sociopath. By this time in the book this is not news to the reader. The question we have to face is, so what?

It’s the Tony Soprano gambit: Soprano was a metaphor for American society. He was bad, but the so-called good guys (lawyers, politicians, FBI agents) weren’t much, if any, better. At least Soprano had a sort of integrity.

Jobs is a lot like Tony. They both run businesses, they both have shrinks, and they’re both being hounded by the cops, their business associates, and just about everybody else. Jobs may be no gem, but consider his world: supine directors, crazy investors, the US attorney who’s using Jobs’ scalp to run for governor, his assistant who later cashes in to do white collar defense, Jobs’ only friend, Larry Ellison, complete with kimono and bong, Bono [“the only person I know who’s more self-absorbed than I am”]; Steven Spielberg [the hilarious game of phone-tag between Spielberg and Jobs is worth the price of the book], etc.

Like Soprano, Jobs has a saving grace that sets him above this crowd: he’s a genius at selling stuff. And that’s no small thing, since a big part of modern capitalism is getting people to buy stuff they didn’t know they needed. The instruments of mass production would have been useless without advertising to create demand. So Jobs takes a shiny bit of plastic, puts some mundane electronics inside, and turns a commodity into something everybody has to have.

What makes Apple different, as the Jobs character says, is how far it’s taken the art of selling, with his help:

[W]e don’t start with the product itself. We start with the ads. We’ll spend months on advertisements alone. This is the reverse of how most companies do it. Everybody else starts with the product, and only when it’s done do they go, “Oh, wait, we need some ads, don’t we?” Which is why most advertising sucks, because it’s an afterthought. Not here. At Apple, advertising is a prethought. If we can’t come up with a good ad, we probably won’t do the product.”

Apple sells more than just its product. Listen to Jobs’ PR guy:

Basically our premise is this: Did illegal activities occur? Yes. Was Steve in charge at the time? Yes. Did Steve authorize the illegal activities? Yes. Did Steve benefit from them? Yes. Therefore Steve is not responsible. Now if you don’t mind we’d like to consider this matter closed, and we ask that you leave us alone so we can go back to making the beautiful objects that restore a sense of childlike wonder to your lives.

In the end, Jobs recognizes that he’s a sociopath, just as his lawyer said. But

The world needs sociopaths. Who ever gets anything done? Sociopaths are the ones who create, who lead, who inspire, who motivate. . . . Geniuses like me may not be entirely pleasant, but let’s face it, we’re necessary.

The idea that some CEOs are sociopaths is not far off the mark. As I said five years ago (Market vs. Regulatory Responses to Corporate Fraud: A Critique of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, 28 J. Corp. L. 1, 9 (2003) (footnotes omitted) (online version):

At least some of the new breed [of corporate executives] appear to be Machiavellian, narcissistic, prevaricating, pathologically optimistic, free from self-doubt and moral distractions, willing to take great risk as the company moves up and to lie when things turn bad, and nurtured by a corporate culture that instills loyalty to insiders, obsession with short-term stock price, and intense distrust of outsiders.

This does not fairly describe the typical CEO. For every Jobs there are many hard-working nuts-and-bolts types. Sort of like Ja’Red at the end of the book. But we need people like Jobs to build the companies these ordinary guys run.

At the beginning of the book Fake Steve says:

You’ve heard a distorted tale based on leaks and lies, fabrications and falsehoods created by prosecutors, government flunkies, and media hacks. Now it is my turn. And believe me, my lies and fabrications and falsehoods are way more convincing than theirs.

The Fake Steve Jobs, while just as fake as Tony Soprano, has a more convincing falsehood (i.e., fiction) to tell. Tony Soprano showed us a decayed world in which the head of a waste management firm who killed people was no worse than the head of any other company. Fake Steve is saying those executives are not really so bad (after all, fake Steve never actually killed anybody). We should get off their backs and stop hounding them or we’ll end up with nothing but boring Dells and companies run by fake fake Steve Jobs’s.

You bought the iPod, now buy the book.

Comments

[Jim]

I think it would be a grave error to confuse Fake Steve Jobs with the real Steve Jobs on the basis of one satirist's novel. For example, the idea that Apple starts with the ads before making products is completely antithetical to all serious accounts of product development processes Jobs has been involved with at Apple. It's ludicrous to say that all of Apple's success is due to some relentless focus on ads, or that because Jobs is a great salesman, he can sell any mediocre product "me too" product. Anyone who has been paying attention knows that Apple's success is based on an intense focus on the user experience for their products, and forward-looking, sophisticated industrial design. Apple has only gotten really good at marketing in the last 4 years or so, and it is the products that make their advertising look good, not the other way around.

It's fine if someone wants to make general points about the stereotypical CEO, but it would be necessary to do a lot deeper research on Jobs than reading Dan Lyons' novel to pin all of that on Jobs as well. (Hint: you wouldn't be able to.)

[Larry Ribstein]

oPtion$ was a satire and my blog post was on the satire. For those readers who didn't understand that, you need to get out more, do some reading. I would suggest starting with Swift.