Andrea ‘Andy’ Cunningham is an expert in marketing and all things market related who was part of the Macintosh launch in 1984. Additionally, she founded Cunningham Communications, a firm dedicated to helping major Silicon Valley companies with their public relations. For years, she gave interviews and reflected on Apple’s identity as a company, what made it so special, and how Tim Cook completely transformed what she loved.
To this day, she still devotes herself to it full time, but At the time, he worked directly with Steve Jobs. hand in hand. This gave rise to a very peculiar situation in which Jobs fired her, but thanks to her efforts, she managed to be reinstated. So up to five times, as he admits in a interview from a few years ago.
Jobs managed to bring out the best in everyone. and the worst.
As his interview reflects:
“I think Steve Jobs fired me about 5 times.. My name is Andy Cunningham and I run a marketing consultancy called Cunningham Collective and I just wrote a book about positioning, which is a great practice in marketing. It’s called Go to Aha!“
The businesswoman explains that at one point she was called to Steve Jobs’ office while he was working on Macintosh. She was afraid they would fire her, and unfortunately they did. He ended up in a conference room with Apple’s CFO. He told her that her work was horrible and that they were going to terminate her employment contract.. Cunningham reminded her that they still owed her 30,000 dollars, but she replied that she had no intention of paying, that her work was very bad and that she did not deserve it.
Andy called a colleague for advice. He told him, “If you want Steve Jobs to pay you, you’re going to have to have something that interests him.” “I don’t have anything that would interest Steve Jobs,” Andrea immediately said. However, his friend Regis McKenna reminded him that it was:your relationship with the press“.
“So I went back and met Steve because I was friends with his CFO, she set me up on a date. I went down there for the meeting, which he accepted, which was amazing, and I said, ‘Steve, you owe me $35,000. I need that money. I have a new business. I have to pay payroll and I want you to give me a check for what I owe.’ And he said, ‘I’m not going to do that.’ And I said, ‘You have to,’ and he said, ‘Why?
And I said, “Well, just so you know, Steve, I get about 30 or 40 calls a week from the business press that we’ve been building relationships with over the last couple of years, asking what kind of guy you are to work with. And Right now I’m telling you very nice things.“He immediately wrote me a check and rehired me.”
Andrea Cunningham got to know Jobs like no one else
Andrea Cunningham and Steve Jobs in the film about the founder of Apple
From then on, Jobs was tempted to fire her on some occasionsbut ultimately he didn’t. We connect the dots to a very telling anecdote that sums up that era pretty well. And it would be reasonable to think that Cunningham would hold it against him, but no. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, she’s extremely grateful to him.
He would throw things at people, nothing heavy, but he would throw wads of paper at people, insult them, criticize their clothes. He did all those things. What it did to some people is it made us try harder and try to be even better. but he destroyed some. Luckily for me, I was one of the first and I am eternally grateful to him for that experience, because I am now much better at what I do than I would have been without him.
It’s clear that Jobs was demanding. You don’t create the greatest company of all time without being able to bring out the best in everyone around you. It’s true that he surpassed some, but This has enabled many to achieve goals that were previously only distant dreams through effort and work.. Sure, it took some sweat, but if you put yourself in their hands, you would end up being a version of yourself you never could have imagined. That’s a leader.
An older version of this article was originally published on 08/29/2023.
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