Steve Jobs Said: Unless the Caller ID Says 'GOD,' You Should Never Pick Up During Services

What was the story?

After Steve Jobs resigned as Apple's CEO on August 24, 2011, tributes poured in from across the industry. One of the most memorable came from Vic Gundotra, then Google's senior vice president of social, who shared a story on Google+ about a Sunday morning in January 2008. Gundotra was in religious services when his phone vibrated with an unknown caller. He ignored it — and discovered afterward that the caller had been Steve Jobs, asking him to call back urgently.

When Gundotra returned the call and apologized for not answering during services, Jobs laughed and said: "Vic, unless the Caller ID said 'GOD', you should never pick up during services."

What was the urgent issue?

It was the Google logo on the iPhone. Jobs had been looking at it and wasn't happy: the second O in Google, he said, didn't have the right yellow gradient. He'd already assigned someone from his team — designer Greg Christie — to help, and hoped Gundotra could fix it the next day. Minutes later, Gundotra received an email from Jobs with the subject line "Icon Ambulance," directing him to work with Christie on the fix.

Why did the story travel?

Gundotra closed his post by saying that when he thinks about leadership, passion, and attention to detail, he thinks back to that Sunday-morning call: a CEO who cared about shades of yellow — on a Sunday. The anecdote captured what made Jobs both revered and difficult: the pixel-level obsession, the willingness to call a partner's executive on a weekend over a gradient, and the instinct that details compound into products people love.

What does it say about him?

The story has two readings, and both are probably true. One is the leadership lesson Gundotra drew: care about details, even shades of yellow, even on a Sunday. The other is the cost of that obsession — the Sunday calls, the "urgent" crises over gradients, the atmosphere of permanent emergency that some former Apple employees describe. Jobs's resignation a week before Gundotra's post gave the story its poignancy: a tribute to one of the greatest leaders he had ever met, from a man who had spent fifteen years working for Bill Gates and still admired what Apple had produced.