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Steve Jobs in the wilderness
Jim Collins was 30 and had just rewritten the first line of his syllabus so the course was about how to turn a new venture or small business into an enduring great company. He knew little about it himself, so he phoned Jobs without knowing him and asked him to come teach.
Jobs was starting NeXT, which was not yet the next big thing, and he was not invited to a gathering of the top 500 Silicon Valley leaders meeting with the president. In the seminar he mentioned that he had been booted out of his last company. He talked about life, creativity, the future of computing, and how to put teams together.
Years later, in his last years, Jobs phoned Collins a couple of times to talk about the future of Apple. In between he had come back as a more seasoned leader after learning from people like Ed Catmull at Pixar. The Steve Jobs of 1988 was the early version, and the one who redid Apple was Steve Jobs 2.0.
Why did NeXT matter to Apple later?
Apple bought NeXT in December 1996 for about 400 million dollars, which brought Jobs back to the company he had left. NeXT's operating system, NeXTSTEP, became the foundation for Mac OS X. The same code lineage runs through the iPhone's software today.
What did Jobs gain from Pixar?
Jobs bought the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm in 1986 and it became Pixar, with Ed Catmull as a co-founder and leader. Pixar released Toy Story in 1995, the first feature film made entirely with computer animation. Jobs ran a company in the film business for nearly two decades, an experience that was different from running a hardware maker.
Why was Jobs pushed out of Apple in 1985?
A power struggle between Jobs and the chief executive John Sculley, whom Jobs had recruited from Pepsi, ended with the board siding with Sculley. Jobs was stripped of his operating role and left the company that September. He founded NeXT shortly afterward.
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