Steve's Two Jobs

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MARK RICHARDS FOR TIME

Backstage A rare private moment with his wife Laurene

But Jobs 2.0 is one decade older and two companies (NeXT and Pixar) wiser, and these days he is his own designated grownup. By the time Jobs returned to Apple, a succession of vision-free ceos had left the company coasting on the fumes of its past innovation, with a convoluted welter of products and no idea who its customers were. "The roots of Apple were to build computers for people, not for corporations," Jobs says. "The world doesn't need another Dell or Compaq." He swiftly slashed back to four product lines--a laptop and desktop for consumers, and a laptop and desktop for professional users--ordered his design team to make Macs look hot again, and set about unclogging the foundering company's executive arteries by replacing, according to Apple board member and former DuPont chairman Edgar Woolard Jr., "about 75% of the management team."

The new managerial flow chart is simple: Jonathan Ive runs the design group. Avi Tevanian runs software. Jon Rubinstein runs engineering. Tim Cook runs manufacturing. And senior vice president of worldwide sales Mitch Mandich--perhaps the company's true secret weapon--pulls it all together. Result? Apple, according to Charles Wolf, a senior analyst at Warburg, Dillon Read, has become a model of manufacturing efficiency, reducing inventory from $2 billion in early '96 to $17 million today.

Better management and delegation also let Jobs step back from his infamous "80 hours a week and loving it" work ethic. "I read something Bill Gates said about six months ago," he recalled last week over a long lunch in the new Apple cafeteria (when he came back, Jobs canned the company that ran that "dog-food" operation too). "He said, 'I worked really, really hard in my 20s.' And I know what he means, because I worked really, really hard in my 20s too--seven days a week, lots of hours every day. But you can't do it forever. You don't want to do it forever."

At any rate, even 90 hours a week wouldn't cover dual-activist CEO gigs at two highly dynamic companies on opposite sides of the San Francisco Bay. Over and over, Jobs notes that he "doesn't direct the movies" at Pixar, and--the odd marketing meeting aside--he has clearly relinquished day-to-day leadership of the animation house to director John Lasseter on the creative side and co-founder Ed Catmull on the tech side. But when the company does need Jobs--mostly as a public face and all-purpose corporate strategist--he delivers. The money. The marketing. The deals. He is revered for going toe-to-toe with Disney capo Michael Eisner, renegotiating the fledgling studio's five-picture deal with the Mouse Kingdom at a time when Toy Story had made Pixar the first serious threat to Disney's 60-year monopoly on big-ticket animated films.

The result is a company that's swiftly emerging as a powerhouse--both in Hollywood and on Wall Street--and an executive whose life remains a perpetual juggling act. "I'm a good morning person," Jobs says, asked to describe a typical weekday. "I'll wake up sixish and work a little before the kids get up. Then we'll have a little food, finish up some homework and see them off to school. If I'm lucky I'll work at home for another hour, but oftentimes I'll have to come in. I usually get [to Apple] about nine." Pause. "Eight or nine." Pause. "Having worked about an hour and a half or two hours at home."

Of course, it doesn't really matter where he works. Whether he's at Pixar, at Apple or at home in Palo Alto, Jobs just parks in front of a computer linked via high-speed line to a server that offers the current state of affairs at both companies: documents, presentations and e-mail, e-mail, e-mail. "There's not a day that goes by that I don't do stuff for Pixar," Jobs says, "even if I'm not physically there. And there's not a day that I'm at Pixar that I don't do stuff for Apple." Today, he says over lunch, he has already answered 25 e-mails and 10 phone calls relating to Pixar, and by nightfall he will cover at least 100 Apple e-mails--many from fevered Mac-heads around the world. "If somebody doesn't flush a toilet around here," he says in mock complaint, "I get e-mail from Kansas about it."

But you know he loves it. And for many employees, the boss's volatile demeanor is a small price to pay for that passion. "Steve might be capable of reducing someone to tears," says John Patrick Crecine, an academic turned entrepreneur and Jobs friend of long standing, "but it's not because he's meanspirited; it's because he's absolutely single minded, almost manic, in his pursuit of quality and excellence." Indeed, Jobs' most potent weapon is still his messianic zeal to fulfill his original vision of Apple as the bridge between the average citizen and the mysterious world of the computer. "His DNA was built into this company," says Heidi Roizen, a partner at the Softbank venture-capital firm who has known Jobs since the beginning. "And when he came back, everything fell into place--a return to excellence in design, to listening to the consumer, to developing cool products."