Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs by Daniel Lyons Read Free Book Online Page B

afternoon blocked off for Ross Ziehm, our PR guy. Ross is the ultimate flack, a cross between a pit bull and a weasel, but with the face of a schoolboy. He began his career at IBM, then moved on to the National Rifle Association. After that he worked for Pacific Gas & Electric during the years when they were being sued by Erin Brockovich for putting chemicals into groundwater that caused cancer. His spin on that? “First, the science was flawed. Second, nobody forced these people to live in this town and drink the water.” Talk about balls. Nothing fazes this guy. He’s perfect.
    The great thing about Ross is that although he has a heart of pure evil, on the outside he looks like the nicest guy you’d ever meet. Soft-spoken, never swears, uses words like “gosh.” He grew up in Long Beach, and is a total Southern California surfer kid. He’s in his forties now but he still surfs, down at Maverick’s in Santa Cruz, and he’s still got the look—tousled blonde hair, whitened teeth, tall and lean, good-looking in that tanned movie-star kind of way. Drives an old beat-up Subaru Outback wagon with his board on the roof and his wetsuit in the back and loads of leftie bumper stickers.
    Ross’s take on how to handle the Sonya Bourne resignation is to pretend it didn’t happen. No announcement, no press release.
    “Who pays attention to the general counsel? Just bury it in some SEC filing at the end of the year,” he says.
    He shows me the draft of the press release we’re going to put out announcing that we’ve brought in a team of lawyers to conduct our internal investigation. I do what I always do. Without even looking at the paper I say, “This is shit. Too wordy. Fourth sentence makes no sense. Transitions need work. Do it again and bring it back.”
    I make him do his rewrites at a desk outside the Jobs Pod, so I can watch him through the glass wall and bombard him with suggestions via iChat and email. Makes him nuts, but that’s how people get creative. You’ve got to get them a little bit crazy. After five drafts over three hours I sit back in my chair and read the whole thing, very slowly. Then roll it up into a ball and tell him I liked the first one best, so go with that.
    He laughs his ass off and says, “Oh, Steve, you know what? I love you, man! What a process! I can’t believe it!”
    We call the management team together and hand out copies for everyone to review. Ross gives everyone the usual speech about how all press inquiries should be routed to him. He also explains our timing. We’re going to put the news out on Thursday, right before the Fourth of July holiday weekend.
    “We’ll wait until the end of the day West Coast time, after the markets have closed,” he says. “The papers back East will have a couple of hours to close their stories before their deadline hits, and their editions will mostly be locked up by then, but I’m sure they’ll be able to get some kind of brief item into the paper.”
    I thank Ross for his excellent presentation and then explain to the team that the really insanely great thing about doing it this way is that people will have all day Friday, the first day of the long Fourth of July holiday weekend, to digest the news, and since the holiday isn’t until Tuesday, they’ll have at least four more days to mull over this important information. A lot of people will be taking all of next week off, so when they’re on the beach with their kids they’ll definitely be able to give this story their full attention, and by the time people come back from their break, nearly two weeks from now, they’ll know that we here at Apple are really serious about this, um, thing with options or whatever that happened a while ago and we said we are looking into it.
    “Steve,” says Pete Fisher, our senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, “once again I bow to your genius. What can I say? You’re brilliant. Brilliant.”
    Jim Bell, our COO, says he couldn’t