Guest post written by Connie Guglielmo
Editor's note: Connie Guglielmo this week joins Forbes as a reporter in our San Francisco bureau. She previously spent a long stretch covering the Valley and the tech business for Bloomberg, where she broke many scoops about Apple and other topics. She'll be doing more of the same for us. Connie will have her own blog up and running shortly; meanwhile, here's her take on today's release of the FBI file on Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs was strong willed and stubborn, hardworking, driven, extremely health-conscious, deceptive, complex, ambitious, creative, willing to distort the truth at times to get his way, an excellent business negotiator and recruiter of talent, good at mediating, demanding, straightforward, forthright, narcissistic — "a visionary and charismatic individual who at the same time was shallow and callous to people in his personal relationships."
He was also a "genius in the area of computers" even though he was "not an engineer in the real sense."
Not exactly new news.
Still, the 191-page background investigation put together by the FBI in 1991 when Jobs, then CEO of NeXT Inc., was being considered for a position on President George H. Bush's Export Council is interesting reading if only for the odd tidbits, like his Social Security number, his high school grade point average (2.65 out of 4.0), his height (6 feet tall), and his only membership being to the New York Athletic Club, which he said he had never been in.
There's also his self-described employment record, which starts with a 15-month stint at Atari Inc. in 1974. When asked if he left a job for any reason, he checks Option 5 on the "Questionnaire for Sensitive Positions" to describe his inglorious exit from Apple in 1985: "Left a job for other reasons, under unfavorable circumstances."
Released earlier Thursday, the report, which also includes details of a 1985 investigation into a bomb threat against Apple, offers up praise — and criticism — of Jobs from more than 30 friends, former employers, co-workers, business peers and neighbors, in the dry, mundane prose you would expect from the FBI. One former Apple colleague's interview is summed up in part with this: "The Appointee always appeared to live within his means and associated with an eclectic group of people, most of whom are famous."
You'll also find the summary of their interview with Jobs, which apparently took three weeks to set up. Jobs' secretary is reported as telling the FBI he could not even see them "for one hour" before then.
There are tributes aplenty to his intelligence and creativity from colleagues and other business leaders at Apple, Adobe, Sun, General Magic and NeXT, among others. There's concern about his high school and college drug use and a lot of references to the out-of-wedlock daughter that he initially refused to support. There's a search for his birth certificate, which was a little tricky to get since Jobs was adopted.
There's also the former Apple employee who was bitter about not getting stock options from Jobs. The unhappy ex-Apple staffer describe Jobs, who died in October, as someone "who will twist the truth and distort reality in order to achieve his goals" and who "possesses integrity as long as he gets his way."
I found the most interesting comments to be from admirers who praised his intelligence, creativity, passion and genius — but only after noting that he wasn't an engineer and didn't finish college.
- "Although the appointee is not an engineer in the real sense, he understands base technology and technical jargon to the extent that he is an innovative force within the technical community."
- "Although the appointee is not a deeply technical individual, he understands the technical field sufficiently well to engender new ideas in technology, which are exciting to the computer field. "
"Back then, this was 20 year ago, it was one of those things about the Valley that you had to have to that engineering cred. It is part of the whole meritocracy here that there is a bias toward people who can go deep in the engineering," venture capitalist Heidi Roizen, a veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur who ran an early Apple Macintosh software company, said in an interview Thursday. "I get why that has a lot of validity, but there's room for some fuzzy studies. User interfaces sometimes suffer because engineers design them and they presume everyone who uses them thinks like an engineer. Steve Jobs approached things from the user perspective."
