Steve Jobs understood a basic truth: Apple could never be more than the sum of its people and their ideas. Regardless of the extent of his personal drive and his not inconsiderable skills, the greatness he hungered for could only be achieved by a team – and an extraordinarily talented team at that. Jobs believed that his key management duty was to assemble a winning team and then create an environment in which each individual would feel he or she was undertaking important work, with equally talented people, and as part of an overall vision.

He was convinced that the best people can achieve exponentially more than the merely competent or capable, and so invested much energy in seeking them out. He considered recruitment to be among the most challenging demands of his role and rarely permitted himself to delegate it to others. For a man with an undoubted touch of the ‘control freak’ about him, Jobs did not trust anyone as much as himself to sniff out the true crème de la crème of candidates. And a person’s talent had to be combined with a willingness to be stretched: not for Jobs a shrinking violet happy to sit quietly for five or ten years awaiting their opportunity. Instead, in his own words, he wanted an individual who would thrive in a situation where he was in ‘a little over his head’.

Jobs’ resolution to have the best team around him was acutely evident after he had wrestled control of the Macintosh project from its previous leader, Jef Raskin – the man who had given the project its name, inspired by ‘[his] favorite kind of eatin’ apple, the succulent McIntosh’. Jobs was determined to triumph with what was something of a secondary project within Apple at the time – behind the Lisa project – and the first step to securing this was to handpick a creative team, even if it came at the expense of what were now rival Apple operations. For instance, he decided he wanted Andy Hertzfeld, who was working on the Apple II. Having interviewed him in the morning, Jobs offered Hertzfeld a job in the afternoon. Hertzfeld eagerly accepted, explaining that he could join the project after tying up a few loose ends in his current post. Jobs responded by pulling the power cord from Hertzfeld’s Apple II, losing all of his unsaved work, and directed him to his new desk. The message was clear: Hertzfeld was now on Jobs’ squad and was not to be distracted by anything else.

But Jobs’ recruitment record was by no means perfect. After Mike ‘Scotty’ Scott, Apple president since 1977, quit the company in 1981, Jobs undertook a long search for the right person to replace him. His head was turned by the great strides that Pepsi-Cola was then making against its great rival, Coca-Cola. So he approached Pepsi’s main man, John Sculley, wooing him over a period of several months. With Sculley wavering as to his next move, Jobs laid down a poser for him: would he rather spend a life selling fizzy pop or would he like to make a dent in the universe?

Sculley signed a highly lucrative contract and joined Apple in 1983. By 1985, however, the firm needed a hit following the relatively unsuccessful commercial performances of the Apple III and Lisa models; amid that pressure, Jobs and Sculley were not getting along. Indeed, Sculley would report to the board that Jobs was behaving like ‘a petulant brat’. Jobs, deciding against seizing the moral high ground, retaliated by calling him a ‘bozo’. It was a rare instance when Jobs apparently met his match. He was removed from the Mac project and essentially cut adrift from the company he loved. All the while, Apple’s stock was falling and Sculley was looking less and less like the man to save the day. Jobs, no doubt, wished he’d left him selling fizzy pop.

Of course, Apple’s relative wilderness years in the 1990s ensured that Jobs’ finest bit of recruitment was still to come – recruiting himself back into the company in 1997. Once back in situ, he set about a comprehensive overhaul of the board and the installation of ‘his people’. Personnel would be as critical to Jobs’ Apple 2.0 project as they had been in the company’s first incarnation.