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In midlife, though, Jobs has mellowed enough to chuckle at that elevator story, and seems to have vanquished at least some of his personal demons. Adopted as an infant, Jobs spent his early adulthood on a classic '60s-era quest for personal identity, seeking transcendence and self-realization through drugs and meditation, founding Apple and establishing a New Age "family" of fervent Macintosh partisans while keeping his own out-of-wedlock daughter Lisa and her mother at a sad remove.
Twenty years later, though, the former counterculturalist has, like much of his generation, embraced traditional domestic pleasures. He's happily married and the devoted father of four, including the now college-age Lisa. He has befriended his biological sister, writer Mona Simpson (who wrote him into her novel A Regular Guy) and made contact with his birth mother. It's hard not to be charmed by the sheer joy Jobs derives from talking, mostly off the record, about his family: how his youngest daughter just started waving him off to work; how he won't let his kids watch TV, lest it stifle their creativity; how, over and over, his wife Laurene makes him shave off his salt-and-pepper beard.
Familial bliss may have even helped him learn to conduct his professional life a bit more professionally. "He entered the business world a real novice," says Regis McKenna, the renowned Valley marketing guru, who's known Jobs since he was a teenager. "He had no management training, no business skills." It showed. Young Jobs was a my-way-or-the-highway iconoclast who cared only that his employees embrace his apocalyptic vision for Apple as passionately as he did. "If you had religion," recalls McKenna, "you had the job." Such absolutism helped give birth to the Mac, but it wasn't exactly conducive to building a stable corporation, and by the mid-'80s Jobs, with strong encouragement from Apple's CEO and designated grownup John Sculley, had hit the highway himself.
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.