Iger had big news to share: The following day, March 13, Disney would announce that he would become the next CEO of Disney, replacing Michael Eisner. Eisner had been CEO since 1984, and had followed a great first decade with a second one that can only be described as mediocre and turbulent. By the end, he had disappointed shareholders and alienated just about every stakeholder who had a vested interest in the company. One of those was Pixar’s CEO, who disliked Eisner so much that he had publicly announced that the company would find a new distributor once its existing contract with Disney ended in 2006.
“Steve,” said Iger, “before you read it in the paper tomorrow, I’m calling to let you know I’m going to be named the next CEO of the company. I don’t fully know what that’s going to mean in terms of Disney and Pixar, but I’m calling to tell you I’d like to figure out a way to keep this relationship alive.”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. Iger had pondered this call for several days. He knew that fixing the mess at Disney Animation was the most crucial task facing him as CEO, and he had already decided that keeping Pixar was the key to any solution. From what he’d heard, Steve thought of him as a mere extension of Eisner—and frankly, Iger, who had always been a good company man, had given him little reason to think otherwise. He’d been quoted in the press defending Disney’s position in the tortuous Pixar negotiations, and he’d never spent any real time with Steve. But now there was this long pause, and Iger was beginning to hope that, just maybe, Steve was conflicted. “Well,” he finally heard from the other end, “I think I owe you the right to prove that you’re different. If you want to come up and talk about that, then that’s what we should do.”
The bricks were manufactured by a single beehive kiln in Washington State, one that Steve’s supplier had reopened solely for the purpose of manufacturing bricks with the specific shades that Steve demanded. A couple of times, when Steve visited the construction site and saw the wall going up with a randomness that he deemed unpleasing, he had asked workers to tear down the wall. Eventually, the construction team figured out an algorithm of sorts to ensure that the bricks were distributed in a “perfectly” random pattern.
不满意就拆除重做，永远要追求最好
看上去随机，但并不是真正随机My editors chose not to, in part because the building is not so much a jaw-dropping architectural statement. Its greatest beauty is that it is perfectly suited for its function. “It wasn’t that he was lovingly crafting a beautiful building,” says Ed Catmull. “It’s a higher thing. He was lovingly crafting a place to work in. That’s an important distinction.”
创造一个能让创意涌现的工作场所，是乔布斯的热情所在Steve’s initial design for the building was minimalist, based mostly on his particular aesthetic taste and his own ideas about how a great building can shape a great office culture. “His theory was very simple,” says John Lasseter. “He believed in the unplanned meeting, in people running into people. He knew how everybody works at Pixar, where you’re one-on-one with your computer. He had the theory of this big atrium that would be able to house the whole company for a company meeting, and that would have everything that gets you out of your office and into that center spine. It would draw you to the center, or have you crossing it, many times a day.” Steve was so set on this idea that he originally proposed that there be no bathrooms in the building’s two wings—there would be just one men’s restroom and one women’s restroom, in the central atrium. Catmull, the most masterful of the many people who had to figure out ways to manage Steve’s idiosyncratic excesses, patiently steered Steve clear of this particularly absurd example of his occasional advocacy of unrealistic means designed to achieve laudable ends. (Steve compromised and allowed bathrooms upstairs as well as in the atrium.)
Lasseter and Catmull also resisted the idea of a minimalist, glass-and-steel headquarters. It didn’t fit with either their industrial neighborhood or the rich, colorful, fantastical work being done by Pixar employees. “Pixar is warmer than Apple or NeXT,” says Lasseter. “We’re not about the technology, we’re about the stories and the characters and the human warmth.” They voiced their concern to Tom Carlisle and Craig Paine, the architects Steve had hired for the job. Carlisle and Paine hired a photographer to shoot the brickwork of the lofts in the surrounding neighborhood, and in San Francisco. Then, at the end of one of the days when Steve was working from Pixar’s Point Richmond headquarters, they laid dozens of those photos out on the table of a conference room. “He walked in and I remember him looking at all these beautiful photographs, all the details, and he walked around and around,” remembers Lasseter. “Then he looked at me and he goes, ‘I get it, I get it, you guys are right. John, you’re right.’ He got it, and he became a giant advocate for that look.”
乔布斯最终还是在苹果实现了他的钢和玻璃的梦想Steve signed the wallpaper: “This is why we built this building, Steve Jobs.”
“We called it Steve’s movie,” says Catmull. “This was a labor of love.” Adds Lasseter: “It took the same budget, and the same amount of time as one of our movies, and he was the director. We love it.”
“One of the things we lost when Steve died was an external hammer,” says Catmull. “At some point in every film, the director gets lost in the forest. So once or twice a film, I might call Steve up and say, ‘Steve, I think we’ve got a problem.’ That’s all I would say. You never try to tell Steve what to think. I wouldn’t prep him.”
“Steve never said anything that hadn’t already been said by one of the other brain trust members, because they’re all really good at the storytelling,” Catmull continues. “But there is something about his presence, and he was so articulate, that he could take the same thing said by somebody else and just cut right through it. He was very careful about how he went about this. Steve would preface it by saying, ‘I’m not a filmmaker, you can ignore everything I say.’ He literally said that every time. He would then just say what he thought the problem was. Right? Only the fact that it was articulate was the gut punch. He didn’t tell them to do anything, he just told them what he thought.
“Sometimes,” Catmull says, “if it were a big enough of a gut punch he’d go for a walk with the director. Steve was this incredibly intelligent, strong-willed person who made things happen, but at the same time he enabled people. He was always big on going for walks with people. So he would take the director out on a walk, where you talked more slowly, you think through things … just talking, just a friendly back-and-forth talking. His goal was just to help them make a better movie. It always made it easier for the director to move forward. It wasn’t ever like ‘Oh, you screwed up.’ It was ‘What are we gonna do to move forward?’ The past can be a lesson, but the past is gone. He believed that.”
难怪乔布斯临死送的最后一本书是禅者的初心This kind of one-on-one mentoring was something Steve learned over time. “Early on, if somebody didn’t measure up Steve wouldn’t hide it,” says Catmull. “That kind of behavior wasn’t something I ever saw during his last ten years. Instead, he would take you off in private, and turn what could have been an embarrassing thing into something that actually became very productive and bonding. He learned; he had taken the mistakes that he made, internalized and processed them, and made some changes.”
Steve was more relaxed at Pixar than he was at Apple. “He never tried to make us like Apple,” says Catmull, “or to run us the same way.” Andy Dreyfus, a designer at Pixar who had previously worked at Apple and CKS Group, says that whenever he and his boss Tom Suiter wanted to present something to Steve, they tried to meet him at Pixar. “We were always happy when we had a Friday meeting with Steve,” Dreyfus recalls, “because Friday was the day he was at Pixar, and he was always in a good mood there.”
老板的周五心灵休息日，哈哈哈Week after week, year after year, Pixar provided Steve with a series of uncomplicated highs. He attended the Oscars regularly, as Pixar accumulated more and more honors. He loved showing friends preview reels from unfinished movies. “Steve was our biggest fan. Every time we did an internal reel, he would want a copy,” remembers Lasseter. “And I’d find out from people I knew, he’s showing it to every neighbor at his house. Hey, everybody—come see this! He loved it. He was like a kid.”
After delivering Monsters Inc. in 2002, Pixar was free to start negotiations with any studio for a new distribution pact. Catmull and Lasseter wanted to continue with Disney, since the company owned the rights to all the Pixar characters they’d created, and since Pixar’s films had done so well with Disney as distributor. Steve hoped Eisner would call to open negotiations, but Eisner chose to wait him out. He believed he would be able to negotiate a better deal after the release of Finding Nemo. He’d seen two previews at Pixar, and, as he wrote Disney’s board of directors, in a memo that was leaked to the Los Angeles Times, “It’s okay, but nowhere near as good as their previous films.” Eisner, of course, was dead wrong. Finding Nemo became one of Pixar’s most beloved films and grossed $868 million around the world.
难怪乔布斯称他EvilNow Steve laid out a set of aggressive terms: in return for distributing Pixar movies, Disney would get 7.5 percent of the box-office gross—and nothing else. It would have no ownership of the new characters. No ownership of the films. No DVD rights. At the same time, Steve went public with his dissatisfaction with Disney, harping on the creative excellence of Pixar versus the forgettable disasters that were being released by Disney Animation: Treasure Planet, Brother Bear, and Home on the Range.
这个条款好侮辱迪斯尼！The negotiations caused Catmull and Lasseter no end of distress. “He had stayed at the negotiating table with Disney largely for me,” says Lasseter, “because of how much I cared about the characters we had created.” As the months dragged on, things just seemed to get worse and worse. Steve believed that Eisner leaked his demands to the press in an effort to make him seem greedy. In early January 2004, things seemed to reach an endpoint: Jobs told Lasseter and Catmull that Pixar would no longer negotiate with Disney. He would not work with Eisner. Not now. Not ever. “It was the worst day of my life,” says Lasseter, who, besides facing the loss of all his old characters, was now facing the prospect that Cars, which he was just finishing up, would also belong to Disney, and to a CEO who had visited Pixar just twice since the original deal was signed. Lasseter cried as he, Catmull, and Jobs announced the impasse to the Pixar staff, and he swore that the company would never again make a movie without owning the characters.
可恶，中途泄漏条款Steve watched all this unfold with glee, especially since his threat to take Pixar elsewhere had helped undermine Eisner. He had never had anything against Disney, after all; it was just Eisner he couldn’t stand.
When Steve returned from his postoperative convalescence in the fall of 2004, he told Catmull and Lasseter that he wanted to find a way to ensure that Pixar would be in good shape even if he wasn’t around. It wasn’t that he feared an imminent death. But as he pondered a future in which he might have to further pare down his responsibilities, he knew that Pixar would survive without him more easily than Apple. It wouldn’t be easy. Steve always believed that he, Catmull, and Lasseter worked like a three-man version of the Beatles, complementing one another’s strengths while making up for individual weaknesses. The prospect of operating without Steve made Catmull nervous. “He wasn’t a [film] director, or anything like that. It wasn’t so much the creative side that would be hurt,” says Catmull. “But I’m not really a public CEO kind of person. It’s just not who I am. So if he goes, then we are actually missing a key component.”
乔布斯判断还是很准确的，皮克斯没他还是能很好地生存，但苹果没有他会失去灵魂Pixar seemed to have three options: find a new distributor and enter into an unproven relationship; build its own distribution arm, which would have entailed a massive investment of money and people to create a service that neither Catmull nor Lasseter really wanted to manage; or stay with Disney—which in fact was not an option so long as Eisner was CEO. The choices seemed even more dire given that the first two scenarios would mean that Disney, not Pixar, would own the characters from all the movies that Lasseter and his team had created under the old contract.
皮克斯本质上是制作公司，和音乐唱片公司是一样的，他们擅长制作故事、发现优秀的创意，但分发或者广告不是他们的擅长
而迪斯尼，不仅仅是制作，还非常善于分发、运营、商业化
这其实和当今的游戏行业非常像，你需要制作出很好的游戏，还需要成功发行、运营、商业化，持续给它生命力Disney had the theme parks, where Pixar characters lived on in new ways. It had the proven distribution network that had successfully launched every Pixar movie. And its name was still magical for Catmull and Lasseter, who grew up dreaming of joining the great animators from Disney’s fabled past. “I knew right from the very beginning that Steve’s long-term game plan was to sell to Disney,” says Catmull, even though Steve never overtly acknowledged this to him. “I never had any question about it. He was doing all this stuff, and playing these games, but I knew that was the long-term game plan.”
For three years, Steve displayed remarkable patience as he waited out Eisner. His public attitude put pressure on the Disney CEO, since his directors couldn’t see any way to secure Pixar with him still at the helm. But behind the scenes, Steve made sure that his public ire did nothing to harm the working relationship between the companies. “We were working hard to maintain a good relationship with Disney,” Catmull remembers. “When Eisner was going through his war with Roy Disney, a book was being written, [Disney War, by James B. Stewart, which was eventually published in January 2006]. Steve said, ‘Whatever we do, we don’t talk. We don’t know what’s going to happen, so they get nothing from us for the book.’ So there is nothing that came from us, because Steve didn’t want any ill will towards us at Disney.
商业好残酷“With things like this,” Catmull adds, “you connect a few dots and you figure, okay, I know what this means. And then the war finally comes to an end, and they bring in Bob Iger.”
高级商业教程
向乔布斯学习One month after their first phone call, he called Steve with an idea: What if there were a way for consumers to have access to view all kinds of TV episodes, both current and past, on Macs or PCs or other kinds of devices? Couldn’t Apple do for the television industry what it had done for the music industry, and become, in essence, the retail outlet for TV? Iger said he knew the idea was fraught with complexity, but that he would love the opportunity to discuss it with Steve.
原来串媒体播放这个点子，Iger也有贡献At one point they considered having Disney sell back to Pixar the right to make sequels, in return for a 10 percent equity stake in Pixar. But Iger called it off. “It was a one-sided deal,” he remembers. “I’d get an announcement that the relationship is continuing, but the actual relationship wouldn’t have been good for Disney’s bottom line. We wouldn’t own the intellectual property, we’d have basically a silent ownership in Pixar, and we’d have done nothing to fix Disney Animation.”
A few weeks later, Steve visited Iger at Disney’s headquarters in Burbank. “I’ve got something to show you,” he told Iger, and pulled one of the first video iPods out of his pocket. “Would you really consider putting your TV shows on this?” he asked. “I’m up for that,” Iger replied without missing a beat. He secured the deal even faster than Steve had won Bill Gates’s investment in Apple back in 1997. Iger became CEO on October 1, and by October 5 Apple had a deal to sell downloads of Desperate Housewives, Lost, and Grey’s Anatomy episodes from the iTunes store for viewing on iPods. The two made the announcement on the stage of an Apple event a week later. “He was blown away that, one, I would even do this,” says Iger. “Two, that we could make a deal in five days without Disney lawyering it to death. Three, that I would have, I don’t know, the presence to go on his stage with Steve Jobs, even though Disney had been the mortal enemy in some ways.”
That October, Iger also asked his board of directors to allow him to explore the outright purchase of Pixar. As he recalls it, “This was my first meeting as CEO, and I hadn’t been the absolute choice of everyone in the room. I looked around and they were all a little taken aback. A third didn’t know what to say, a third were really intrigued, and a third thought this was ridiculous, but since it’s never going to happen anyway, let him go ahead.” A couple of days after the MacWorld event, Iger called Steve. “I said, ‘I’ve got a crazy idea. Maybe Disney should just buy Pixar outright.’ Steve paused, and then he said, ‘That might not be the craziest idea in the world. And anyway, I like crazy ideas. Let me think about it!’ He called me back a couple of days later.”
Iger and Steve were now speaking just about every day, and their relationship was building into one of mutual respect. Iger was pleasantly surprised by Steve’s honesty—his primary source on the Apple CEO had been Michael Eisner, who had painted a somewhat less than flattering picture. Steve, meanwhile, began to realize that Iger was smart, as well as straightforward, a combination that Steve appreciated, according to Catmull. Iger was a welcome change from Eisner, who Steve had found plenty smart but deeply political and evasive. At the very beginning of the negotiation, Iger simply laid his cards on the table. “My wife told me that the average tenure of a CEO is three and a half years,” he told Steve. “Mine will be less unless I fix Animation, and getting there goes through you. I’ve got a problem; you’ve got a solution. Let’s get this done.”
好直接的对话Steve asked Lasseter and Catmull to come visit him at his home in Palo Alto. When they showed up, he wasted no time dropping his bomb. “I’m thinking about selling Pixar to Disney,” he explained, before laying out the reasons he was now considering such a move. He revealed that, as part of the deal, the two of them would have to run Disney Animation as well as Pixar. “If you guys say no, we’re not going to do it. But the only thing I ask of you is that you get to know Bob Iger.”
乔布斯作风还是挺挺兄弟的，卖NeXT是否让Avie能当老大，卖Pixar又能让Catmull当老大“We sat and talked until the wee hours,” Lasseter remembers. “We talked about the importance of Disney Animation, the importance of bringing it back. I told him all I could see was the risk of dividing my time, and he said, ‘Well, I look at it the other way. I see it as giving you a bigger canvas because I think you can handle it.’
Just as Steve had, Lasseter and Catmull grew comfortable with Iger, and as they talked over the deal with Steve they came to see other benefits. Being part of Disney would mean that Pixar would be protected in ways it couldn’t as a stand-alone public company. “Our board,” says Lasseter, “did amazing due diligence. They told us that having one hit per year for a decade going forward was already built in to our valuation. And since the shareholders, whom the board represented, would always want growth, eventually that one-movie-per-year model was not going to cut it. We would have to start making television shows, or many more movies a year.” It did seem, he decided, that the best way for Pixar to cement into place the way of life it loved was to sell itself to the company it had battled for so long.
Iger did his own personal due diligence, of course. One day he flew up to Pixar, for a series of one-on-one meetings with the directors of Pixar’s next few movies. “We had only had one movie, Cars, left to distribute,” he recalls, “and people within Disney had spent months pooh-poohing the idea for the next movie, about a rat in a restaurant in Paris. So I go up to Emeryville, and for six or seven hours the directors pitch me every single upcoming movie. I see a couple of movies that they didn’t wind up making [one called Newt, and the other an unnamed Lee Unkrich project about dogs in a New York City apartment building]. I also see work in progress from Ratatouille, Up, Wall-E. Disney hadn’t seen any of this, and I went back to my guys—including Alan Braverman, the general counsel—and told them that it wasn’t even close. The richness of the creativity, the quality of the people, was so obvious. We had to do this deal.”
With Lasseter and Catmull feeling more comfortable, Steve homed in on the final details of a deal. He didn’t overreach by demanding an exorbitant premium over Pixar’s market value. Believing that Pixar might someday be purchased, investors had already overvalued Pixar with a very high market capitalization of around $5.9 billion. Steve and Iger settled on a price of $7.4 billion. They agreed that Pixar and Disney would get equal billing on every film. They even agreed to a side deal that Catmull and Lasseter had proposed: To ensure that Disney wouldn’t change the culture of Pixar, Iger agreed that his company would never change or cancel any of seventy-five items on a list of Pixar cultural touchstones that Lasseter drew up. The list protected the cereal bar in the dining room, the annual paper airplane contest, the employee car show, the right of animators to do whatever they like to their office spaces, and so on.
公司估值，成绩Iger knew that the price he had paid could not be justified by any conventional reasoning. “There wasn’t an analysis in the world that would make the deal pencil out,” he says. But he argued to the Disney board of directors that the deal had more potential than could be captured by the numbers: if Catmull and Lasseter could revive Disney Animation, and if both studios, rather than Pixar alone, were creating memorable characters, the ancillary revenue from theme parks, merchandise, and other divisions could soar. “All the way back to Walt’s time,” says Iger, “Disney has been most successful in terms of its bottom line and its reputation when animation has been strong.”
Iger also knew that many so-called experts thought he was nuts for inviting Steve Jobs to join the board of directors as Disney’s biggest shareholder. “Many people who were deeply involved in the process told me that bringing Steve in as the biggest shareholder was the dumbest thing I could do,” Iger remembers. “I won’t name names, but one of the investment bankers we used told me that. He said, ‘You’re a brand-new CEO who’s going to try to run Disney. Jobs is going to be in your life at a level that will drive you crazy. You don’t have the clout to fight that. If you want to run this company in an unfettered way, don’t do this.’ ” Iger trusted his gut. “Steve and I had talked about the fact that he was going to take all stock, and hold it. I knew there was some risk in letting him into the tent. On the other hand, I had a good relationship with him, and I felt I could benefit from having Steve Jobs around. And if for some reason it didn’t work out for me, Disney would still have Steve Jobs and that would be a great thing.”
Like many others, Bill Gates was astounded by what Steve had been able to negotiate. “When he has the upper hand, he’s good at using time,” says Gates. “You know, he would wait people out. Just look at how much of the resulting company ends up being owned by this fairly small—and yes, very high tech, very brilliant—animation studio. They end up owning a very substantial percentage of the entire Disney-ABC-ESPN entity. It’s owned by a little animation studio! That took three rounds of negotiations, and by the time the acquisition is being done, Disney is just flat on its back saying, ‘Take me.’ Because of the political dynamics of Disney at the time, they needed that win, and Steve knew they needed it.”
把握时机Selling Pixar to Disney was a singular triumph. Steve had gotten Lasseter and Catmull the corporate parent they needed for their unique institution to thrive for decades. He’d even put the two of them in a position to revive the greatest animation studio of all time, Disney. And he’d done all this by developing, in the space of less than a year, a trusting relationship, in fact a friendship, with the man who’d been the go-to executive for one of the two people he most detested. Compare this with the wary antipathy Steve displayed during the NeXT/IBM negotiations, and you realize just how much Steve had changed over the intervening years.
如果乔布斯自己不生病，他应该不会愿意卖掉迪斯尼He says, “I’m telling you because I’m giving you a chance to back out of the deal.”
So I look at my watch, and we’ve got thirty minutes. In thirty minutes we’re going to make this announcement. We’ve got television crews, we’ve got the board votes, we’ve got investment bankers. The wheels are turning. And I’m thinking, We’re in this post Sarbanes-Oxley world, and Enron, and fiduciary responsibility, and he is going to be our largest shareholder, and I’m now being asked to bury a secret. He told me only two people know this. Laurene and his doctor. He told me, “My kids don’t know. Not even the Apple board knows. Nobody knows, and you can’t tell anybody.”I have to make a decision sitting on this bench with him whether I can even go through with this deal. I don’t even know. So I took a chance, and I said, “You’re our largest shareholder, but I don’t think that makes this matter. You’re not material to this deal. We’re buying Pixar, we’re not buying you. We’re going to hype the fact that you become the largest shareholder, but that’s not how you value the deal. You value the deal on the assets of Pixar.”
The two men walked back into the building, the one that Catmull and Lasseter would name the Steve Jobs Building after his death. Iger had just sworn himself to secrecy, but he felt he had to tell Braverman. He felt he needed a second opinion. Braverman quickly agreed that Disney could go ahead with the deal. Steve went off to find Lasseter and Catmull and brought them into his office. He put his arms around the two of them. As Catmull explains, “He looked at us and said, ‘Are you guys good with this? If you say no, I’ll send them away right now.’ And we both said we were okay, and Steve just started weeping. We just held each other for the longest time. He loved this company.”
乔布斯可能是因为自己没法更长久陪伴这家公司，而哭泣吧“The problem was that Ed and I had gone through this three-month journey of getting to know Bob Iger, doing our due diligence, and eventually realizing this was the right decision to do,” Lasseter recalls. “But everybody else in the company was in the same place we had been when Steve first mentioned the idea to us, of ‘How can you do this?’ Standing up in front of them in that moment was very hard. This gasp went through the crowd, like, ‘Oh my God.’ I’ll never forget [A Bug’s Life producer] Katherine Sarafian sitting down right in the front, just weeping when Steve said it.”
Before the deal had been announced, Steve had talked to Laurene about revealing his secret to Iger. They both felt that it was the right thing to do, given the magnitude of the sale. Their discussions had revolved around a single question: Could Steve really trust Iger to keep the secret? Steve told her they could. “I love that guy,” he told Laurene.
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