1980s Insubordination at Apple - the Curious Team Dynamics Between Jobs and His Engineers

Excuse the language but this is simply too good not to share.

In 1980, Apple had gone public. This meant that Steve Jobs had more money but less power. The engineering team developing the Lisa computer essentially exiled him from their team. At this time, a woman Jobs had been dating claimed he was her child's father. He denied this. The woman named her daughter Lisa; the engineering team decided to name the computer they were developing Lisa, in the hopes that Jobs would also walk away from them.

So Jobs, lurching about for a project to engage in, found Jef Raskin, who was obsessed with making a friendly computer. Raskin didn't want Jobs encroaching on his Macintosh project but, of course, Jobs did, eventually making it his own.

Here is their relationship as recounted by various Apple people, including Jobs.
Andy Hertzfeld: The Mac was initially a skunkworks. At this time it was not an important project at Apple. It was a very minor thing.
Randy Wigginton: And Steve went over to Macintosh where Jef Raskin was, and he and Jef did not mix well.
Steve Jobs: Jef's a shithead who sucks.
Jef Raskin: Steve would have made an excellent king of France.

Apple may have done well to bring in junior high teachers to help with team dynamics. Or maybe that would have defused all the creative energy. Who knows? You live on a weird planet. Apple is the most valuable publicly traded company in the world, now worth $2.1 trillion. It's hard to know how much of this is because of and how much of this is in spite of men who took projects so personally.

These comments are from Adam Fisher's Valley of Genius.