Apple Computer Apostles Keep the Faith and Preach the Gospel.(Originated from San Jose Mercury News, Calif.)

Apple Computer Apostles Keep the Faith and Preach the Gospel.(Originated from San Jose Mercury News, Calif.)

Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News

March 28, 1997 | Leibovich, Mark

CUPERTINO, Calif.--Mar. 28--They might have the toughest job in Silicon Valley today: Apple Computer Inc.'s evangelists, full-time apostles charged with preaching the gospel amid a plague of bad press and bad numbers.

Each week seems to pack fresh distractions for the company's professional true believers -- the latest being Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's statement Wednesday that he might bid more that $1 billion for control of Apple.

Faith is an abiding challenge for evangelists who survived last week's layoffs of 2,700 fulltime employees and 1,400 contract workers. The evangelical ranks, which were hit less hard than some other departments, shrank by 25 percent.

Roughly put, the jobs of evangelists is to champion the company and its technology to users and software developers. In plain terms, they're elite marketeers.

It would seem especially difficult to remain evangelical_ a quality that by definition requires being upbeat -- in the face of unrelenting negativism from the outside. But Apple's surviving corps calls the barrage a rallying point. They speak in defiant tones, praise the company's newly streamlined focus and couch their optimism in religious imagery.

"In the darkest hours of Christianity is where you found the best evangelists," said Guy Kawasaki, one of Apple's original evangelists, who preached to the faithful in five U.S. cities over four days this week.

Kawasaki compares the bad publicity Apple is now getting with that endured by Audi in the 1980s after "60 Minutes" revealed that some automobiles were sporadically lurching forward, a phenomenon known as "unintended acceleration."

"This is like Apple's version of unintended acceleration," Kawasaki says, adding one exception: Audi's sales slowed to a virtual halt. "But no matter how bad Apple's press is, we're still selling a million units a quarter."

In keeping with their job description, Apple evangelists are quick to see the good in Apple's recent travails. "It's like a comet hitting the earth, wiping out the dinosaurs and paving the way for a higher life form," said Jim Black, a 31-year-old evangelist. "This has been a traumatic period for all of us at Apple. But the result is a healthier company." (Black says he doesn't mean to compare any of his laid-off colleagues to dinosaurs.)

Still, the memory of of recent layoffs stays fresh. Last Tuesday, a few hours before it was announced who would keep their jobs, Black stayed in his office until 3 a.m. commisserating with other evangelists.

At noon, Black was called into his supervisor's office and was told he would still be employed at Apple -- albeit in a new capacity, reporting to a new manager, and evangelizing a new technology (the upcoming operating system Rhapsody, not the OpenDoc component of the current OS).

In the face of such upheaval, it takes a deft managerial hand to quell demoralization before it festers. Since the layoffs, Royce BuNag, Apple's director of evangelism, has held individual meetings with about half of his nearly 50-person staff and plans to meet with the rest in the coming week.

"I'm practicing seat-of-the-pants crisis management," said BuNag, who in his 12 years at Apple has been through 10 reorganizations, four of which included layoffs. This is the deepest number of cuts he has experienced, he says. In a belt-tightening measure that breaks with widespead Silicon Valley tradition, Apple no longer subsidizes the cans of soda that fill his office refrigerator. He buys them himself.

BuNag says he is a known advocate of team-building exercises, especially during difficult times. Last Friday, he held a department-wide beer and pool excursion to Sunnyvale's Bank Shot SportsBar and Billiards -- descibed by one evangelist as a "we survived party." At 3 p.m., the room looked decidedly downcast, which might be attributed to the rotten pool being played. BuNag plans a team retreat for next month.

Survivors say their renewed fervor is genuine -- of course, they are evangelists. They attribute it less to team-building and more to relief.

"This company was like a deer frozen in the headlights for the past few weeks," says Richard Schlein, an evangelism manager in charge of hardware and the Mac OS. Schlein, who now manages 12 evangelists, up from four, said the prospects of those who were laid off finding new jobs are excellent. "I heard from some management consultant that there are four job offers for every employee who was let go."

It's nice to know there's a safety net, but rampant Apple-picking can be a distraction to even the truest of believers. Most evangelists report several head-hunter calls each week. But they're not jumping.

The day layoffs were announced, evangelist Jeff Lloyd received an e-mail from a friend at Javasoft, a unit of Sun Microsystems Inc., telling him 40 jobs were available.

But Lloyd says he has more work to do before he considers moving on: "I've given 10 years of my life to this company," says Lloyd, 31. "I'm bound and determined to prove people wrong."

He will evangelize for as long as he believes. But on Thursday, Lloyd left for two weeks to undergo a tonsillectomy. It begs the question of how an evangelist can evangelize without a voice. He answers with a preacher's reassurance: "Thank god for e-mail."