Steve Jobs

First and foremost, this is just a good read.

I found that Isaacson's bio of Einstein was both interesting and did a profoundly better job of explaining relativity than my physics professors ever did. This book didn't disappoint. It was both captivating, and offered meaningful insight into Steve Jobs and the history of Apple.

On way of my own biases, I was an Apple bigot before being an Apple bigot was cool. I learned to program on an Apple II that my father brought home in 1980. I've been a shareholder since I was given a single share of Apple stock for my bar mitzvah in 1981. I later grew up using Macs in college for everything from writing papers to digital circuit simulation to writing shareware apps that paid off debt I had accumulated as a starving grad student and provided the down payment on my first home. I even continued to use a Mac (eventually a PowerPC clone) as my exclusive home computer during most of my tenure with IBM!

But around 1998-99, I finally gave up on Macs and bought my first PC. By then I had concluded that Windows hadn't simply caught up, but in many regards had surpassed the Mac. Mac had become a lesser computer that cost a premium, for which applications were fewer in number, and cost more. Even after Apple finally made substantial improvements and moved to a Unix kernel, I've never been tempted to look back.

What's more, as Apple entered the consumer electronics domain and began producing closed devices and systems characterized by excessive proprietary control, I developed a decidedly anti-Apple viewpoint. Not a reflexive anti-Apple bias -- I did eventually start using a hand-me-down iPod when my daughter just had to upgrade to a iTouch. And we eventually all got iPhones after I concluded that, whatever it's limitations, it was still a better option than the available Android alternatives. But you get the point -- I'm now closer to being an anti-Apple bigot than one of the hordes of Apple fans.

This book provides real insight into why Apple systems are as closed as they are, and why Apple acts as controlling as it does. It provides a good understanding of just how Steve Jobs drove Apple to where it is today.

Ultimately, the book does not paint a flattering picture of Jobs. I've read other reviewers who complained that Isaacson clearly disliked Jobs, and that the book was a hatchet job. I've seen Isaacson doing interviews since Jobs' death, however, and if anything, I'd say the opposite is true. I think he actually holds Jobs in awe.

(Those who find the description of Jobs as such an unrelenting jerk incompatible with the extremely strong positive feelings expressed by many who worked with him have clearly never worked with somebody of his ilk, and fail to recognize something basic in human psychology. When people go through what is effectively prolonged hazing, one of two things happen: either they part ways prior to completion, in which cases they are left only with enormous resentment over the hazing/bad behavior, or they survive the hazing and feel empowered and strongly bound to the others involved, as a result. What you would expect from those who worked closely with/for Jobs is precisely a polarized love or hate reaction. But even those who come out with strong positive feelings will still very much recognize, and likely even resent, the bad behavior.)

I've also seen complaints that the book gives short shrift to specific events or aspects of Jobs' life. That strikes me as inevitable. The book is ~600 pages as it is. I think the purpose of the book is to provide meaningful insight into Jobs, including what formed him and what he formed, not to comprehensively document each and every aspect and occurrence of his life.

Are there places where the book is lacking? Yes, I think so. The book suggests that there was a substantial change in Jobs -- a maturation -- between his initial stint with Apple and his second run there. But if he became more reasonable and effective at his interpersonal interactions with Apple employees in his second stint, that certainly wasn't apparent to me from the book.

In any case, whatever its limitations, and whatever your feelings toward Apple or Steve Jobs, this book is enlightening and entertaining, and well worth the read.

P.S. For the record, this is the first book I've read in it's entirety on an eReader. (A Kindle Fire -- perhaps there's some irony there.)

Many people might mistake this book for a mere biography of the man that made Apple a household name and its products coveted by millions around the world. It's not.

This book is actually three books in one. It's a business book on how to (and not to) run a company using Apple, NeXT and Pixar as case studies. It's also a history book on the ascent and the drama behind the consumer electronics evolution. And as its title suggests, it's the fascinating story of one of the most gifted people of our time.

As a business book, Isaacson writes about three distinct business practices. The first is how to really create a company from scratch. The passion exuded by Jobs and Wozniak is detailed with infectious enthusiasm in the first half of the book.

The second practice (and one often not talked about in business books) is how to drive a company to the ground. The book is rife with examples of internal politics, lack of leadership and the absence of focus that truly illustrate how companies fail.

The last practice is how to build and operate a creative company that endures. For me, this is the most fascinating narrative of all. But to fully appreciate it, one must truly understand the first two, which almost always precede this one.

The book offers a great case study of three companies: Apple, NeXT and Pixar. One fascinating vignette in the book draws a contrast between Apple and Sony and why Apple was successful in conquering the consumer-end of the music business while Sony, who was in a favorable position to do exactly that, failed to do so. This story draws attention to the importance of inter-departmental cohesion that Apple possessed and Sony didn't, to the success of innovation in a company.

Business leaders reading this book will learn a lot about the power of "focus" in business. Steve Jobs's most doled out advice was "focus." Throughout the book, we learn how Jobs followed his own advice to a deadly fault.

As a business book, it is amongst the best.

It's also an even better history book. It details the ascent of personal computing from the perspective of the very people that were (and still are) at its helm. The book doesn't only cover Apple's evolution, but that of the entire industry. Naturally, that involves drama, which Isaacson does a great job of covering. The philosophical divide between open and closed systems that dominated the personal computing evolution is discussed thoroughly in the book via anecdotal accounts on what really happened behind the scenes. It explains what it really took to bring us the products on which I read this book and now writing its review.

Most importantly, this is a very personal book. It is the story of man adored by millions of geeks, and when departed, mourned by hundreds of millions of Apple consumers around the world. Unfortunately, a devastating portrait that is guaranteed to put out any respect or admiration you've ever had for the man emerges early on in the book. If you have spent the last fifteen years romanticizing about Steve Jobs and his products, this book will leave you punch-drunk. You will learn through stomach-churning details how Steve Jobs was a disloyal, lying, backstabbing, vindictive, manipulative, vengeful, and all-around vile and damaged human being. He was, and surprisingly so, a coward, as clearly illustrated by how he treated people in his twenties and thirties.

And oh, he cried a lot. I mean, A LOT.

The book is rife with examples of his cruelty towards those who he seemed to have loved the most. His treatment of Steve Wozniak was unconscionable and disgusting. But the most disturbing example and the one that really shows his character was how he treated his "soul mate" from Reed College, Daniel Kottke. I could sum it up by quoting John Scully's wife when she told Jobs:

When I look into most people's eyes, I see a soul. When I look into your eye, I see a bottomless pit, an empty hole, a dead zone.

Even the amiable, most trusting co-founder of Apple, Steve Wozniak, who's been backstabbed by Jobs several times, have said about Jobs, "I look forward to a great product and I wish him success, but his integrity I cannot trust."

The irony in Steve Jobs story was that he loathed people that treated him the way he treated others. He had to deal with a few people that gave him a run for his money like Eisner of Disney and Katzenburg of DreamWorks. He claims throughout the book that he's "honest" and a "straightshooter" yet all the stories relayed by people that had to deal with him tell a completely different story.

For a control freak, it boggles me how he allowed such a book to be written about him. Now we all know that he might have been a visionary, but he was also a very disturbed man void of compassion, empathy and integrity.

As I got deeper into the book I started to wonder, "did Apple offer on-campus Al-Anon meetings to its employees?" Evidently, working for or with Steve Jobs was like being in a relationship with a recovering Cocaine addict who sees the world in black and white and throws frequent tantrums that are aimed at destroying those around them. It's what Mike Murray, Apple's Marketing Chief, called, "management by character assassination."

Jobs quotes Bob Dylan, whom we learn early in the book was one of his heroes, "if you're not busy being born, you're busy dying." It's ironic to quote those powerful words and not heed them. The book clearly shows that Steve Jobs was never really reborn or reinvented as a person. He never evolved and his base qualities were never tamed. Naturally, he spent his entire life dying from the inside out.

The book left me enriched, provoked and sad in equal measure. It is long but flows well and is a fast read. All business executives should read it for the insight it offers on what real successful companies are made of and what pitfalls to avoid along the way. Also, everyone in technology should read it to get a perspective on the evolution in the space of personal and consumer computing and to understand where we're headed and how to get there. Even if you're not an executive or a geek, you should read this book for its fascinating (and well told) story of a man from Northern California who dramatically changed how we live. A man as rich with creativity and intuition for what consumers want as he was bankrupt of decency and compassion for most of those he touched.

It's a story worth reading. If for nothing else, read it to understand what it took to create the device on which you're reading this very review.

Below are key excerpts from the book that I found particularly insightful:

1- "I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics," he said. "Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that's what I wanted to do." It was as if he were suggesting themes for his biography (and in this instance, at least, the theme turned out to be valid). The creativity that can occur where both the humanities and the sciences combine in one strong personality was the topic that most interested me in my biographies of Franklin and Einstein, and I believe that it will be a key to creating innovative economies in the twenty-first century."

2- "His wife also did not request restrictions or control, nor did she ask to see in advance what I would publish. In fact she strongly encouraged me to be honest about his failings as well as his strengths. She is one of the smartest and most grounded people I have ever met. "There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy. and that's the truth," she told me early on. "You shouldn't whitewash it. He's good at spin, but he also has a remarkable story, and I'd like to see that it's all told truthfully" I leave it to the reader to assess whether I have succeeded in this mission. I'm sure there are players in this drama who will remember some of the events differently or think that I sometimes got trapped in Jobs's distortion field."

3- "Jobs said that his appreciation for Eichler homes instilled in him a passion for making nicely designed products for the mass market. I Jove it when you can bring really great design and simple capability to something that doesn't cost much," he said as he pointed out the clean elegance of the houses. "It was the original vision for Apple. That's what we tried to do with the first Mac. That's what we did with the iPod.""

4- "The Blue Box adventure established a template for a partnership that would soon be born. Wozniak would be the gentle wizard coming up with a neat invention that he would have been happy just to give away. and Jobs would figure out how to make it user-friendly, put it together in a package, market it, and make a few bucks."

5- "Coming back to America was, for me, much more of a cultural shock than going to India. The people in the Indian countryside don't use their intellect like we do, they use their intuition instead, and their intuition is far more developed than in the rest of the world. Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That's had a big impact on my work."

6- "Jobs is a complex person, he said, and being manipulative is just the darker facet of the traits that make him successful. Wozniak would never have been that way, but as he points out, he also could never have built Apple. "I would rather let it pass," he said when I pressed the point. "It's not something I want to judge Steve by.""

7- "Apple. It was a smart choice. The word instantly signaled friendliness and simplicity. It managed to be both slightly off-beat and as normal as a slice of pie. There was a whiff of counterculture, back-to-nature earthiness to it, yet nothing could be more American. And the two words together—Apple Computer—provided an amusing disjuncture. "

8- "Jobs's father had once taught him that a drive for perfection meant caring about the craftsmanship even of the parts unseen. Jobs applied that to the layout of the circuit board inside the Apple II. He rejected the initial design because the lines were not straight enough. This passion for perfection led him to indulge his instinct to control. Most hackers and hobbyists liked to customize, modify, and jack various things into their computers. To Jobs, this was a threat to a seamless end-to-end user experience."

9- "Markkula would become a father figure to Jobs. Like Jobs's adoptive father, he would indulge Jobs's strong will, and like his biological father, he would end up abandoning him. "Markkula was as much a father-son relationship as Steve ever had," said the venture capitalist Arthur Rock. He began to teach Jobs about marketing and sales. "Mike really took me under his wing," Jobs recalled. "His values were much aligned with mine. He emphasized that you should never start a company with the goal of getting rich. Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last.""

10- "Was Jobs's unfiltered behavior caused by a lack of emotional sensitivity? No. Almost the opposite. He was very emotionally attuned. able to read people and know their psychological strengths and vulnerabilities. He could stun an unsuspecting: victim with an emotional towel-snap, perfectly aimed. He intuitively knew when someone was faking it or truly knew something. This made him masterful at cajoling, stroking, persuading, flattering, and intimidating people."

11- "But even though Jobs's style could be demoralizing, it could also be oddly inspiring. It infused Apple employees with an abiding passion to create groundbreaking products and a belief that they could accomplish what seemed impossible."

12- "The best products, he believed, were "whole widgets" that were designed end-to-end, with the software closely tailored to the hardware and vice versa. This is what would distinguish the Macintosh, which had an operating system that worked only on its own hardware, from the environment that Microsoft was creating, in which its operating system could be used on hardware made by many different companies."

13- "Their differences in personality and character would lead them to opposite sides of what would become the fundamental divide in the digital age. Jobs was a perfectionist who craved control and indulged in the uncompromising temperament of an artist; he and Apple became the exemplars of a digital strategy that tightly integrated hardware. software, and content into a seamless package. Gates was a smart, calculating, and pragmatic analyst of business and technology; he was )pen to licensing Microsoft's operating system and software to a variety of manufacturers."

14- "I'll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life I'll sort of have the thread of my life and the thread of Apple weave in and out of each other, like a tapestry. There may be a few years when I'm not there, but I'U always come back. If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you've done and whoever you were and throw them away. The more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times. artists have to say. "Bye. I have to go now. I'm going crazy and I'm getting out of here." And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they re-emerge a little differently."

15- "Jobs sometimes avoided the truth. Helmut Sonnenfeldt once said of Henry Kissinger, "He lies not because it's in his interest. he lies because it's in his nature." It was in Jobs's nature to mislead or be secretive when he felt it was warranted. But he also indulged in being brutally honest at times, telling the truths that most of us sugarcoat or suppress. Both the dissembling and the truth-telling were simply different aspects of his Nietzschean attitude that ordinary rules didn't apply to him."

16- "For all of his willfulness and insatiable desire to control things. Jobs was indecisive and reticent when he felt unsure about something. He craved perfection, and he was not always good at figuring out how to settle for something less. He did not like to wrestle with complexity or make accommodations. This was true in products, design, and furnishings for the house. It was also true when it came to personal for the house. It was also true when it came to personal commitments. If he knew for sure a course of action was right. he was unstoppable. But if he had doubts, he sometimes withdrew, preferring not to think about things that did not perfectly suit him."

17- "Ever since he left the apple commune, Jobs had defined himself and by extension Apple, as a child of the counterculture. In ads such as "Think Different" and "1984," he positioned the Apple brand so that it reaffirmed his own rebel streak, even after he became a billionaire, and it allowed other baby boomers and their kids to do the same. "From when I first met him as a young guy, he's had the greatest of the impact he wants his brand to have on people," said Clow. Very few other companies or corporate leaders—perhaps none— could have gotten away with the brilliant audacity of associating their brand with Gandhi, Einstein, Picasso, and the Dalai Lama. Jobs was able to encourage people to define themselves as anti-corporate, creative. innovative rebels simply by the computer they used. "Steve created the only lifestyle brand in the tech industry," Larry Ellison said. "There are cars people are proud to have—Porsche, Ferrari, Prius—because what I drive says something about me. People feel the same way about an Apple product."

18- "One of his motivating passions was to build a lasting company. At age twelve, when he got a summer job at Hewlett-Packard, he learned that a properly run company could spawn innovation far more than any single creative individual. "I discovered that the best innovation is sometimes the company, the way you organize a company," he recalled. "The whole notion of how you build a company is fascinating. When I got the chance to come back to Apple, I realized that I would be useless without the company, and that's why I decided to stay and rebuild it."

19- "Why do we assume that simple is good? Because with physical products. we have to feel we can dominate them. As you bring order to complexity, you find a way to make the product defer to you. Simplicity isn't just a -visual style. It's not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. X involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. For example, to have no screws on something, you can end up having a product that is so convoluted and so complex. The better way is to go deeper with the simplicity, to understand everything about it and how it's manufactured. You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential."

20- "Despite his autocratic nature—he never worshiped at the altar of consensus—Jobs worked hard to foster a culture of collaboration at Apple. Many companies pride themselves on having few meetings. Jobs had many."

21- ""From the earliest days at Apple, I realized that we thrived when we created intellectual property. If people copied or stole our software, we'd be out of business. If it weren't protected, there'd be no incentive for us to make new software or product designs. If protection of intellectual property begins to disappear, creative companies will disappear or never get Started. But there's a simpler reason: It's wrong to steal. It hurts other people. And it hurts your own character." He knew, however, that the best way to stop piracy—in fact the only way—was to offer an alternative that was more attractive than the brain-dead services that music companies were concocting."

22- "But Sony couldn't. It had pioneered portable music with the Walkman, it had a great record company, and it had a long history of making beautiful consumer devices. It had all of the assets to compete with Jobs's Strategy of integration of hardware, software, devices, and content sales. Why did it fail? Partly because it was a company, like AOL Time Warner that was organized into divisions (that word itself was ominous) with their own bottom lines; the goal of achieving synergy in such companies by prodding the divisions to work together was usually elusive. Jobs did not organize Apple into semi-autonomous divisions; he closely controlled all of his teams and pushed them to work as one cohesive and flexible company, with one profit-and-loss bottom fine. "We don't have 'divisions' with their own P&L," said Tim Cook. "We run one P&L for the company.""

23- "Despite being- a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too well its isolating potential, Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings. "There's a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat," he said. "That's crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they're doing, you say 'Wow,' and soon you're cooking up all sorts of ideas." So he had the Pixar building- designed to promote encounters and unplanned collaborations. "If a building doesn't encourage that, you'll lose a lot of innovation and the magic that's sparked by serendipity," he said. "So we designed the building to make people get out of their offices and mingle in the central atrium with people they might not otherwise see.""

24- "Jobs insisted that Apple focus on just two or three priorities at a time. "There is no one better at turning off the noise that is going on around him," Cook said. "That allows him to focus on a few things and say no to many things. Few people are really good at that." In order to institutionalize the lessons that he and his team were learning. Jobs started an in-house center called Apple University. He hired Joel Podolny, who was dean of the Yale School of Management, to compile a series of case studies analyzing important decisions the company had made, including the switch to the Intel microprocessor and the decision to open the Apple Stores. Top executives spent time teaching the cases to new employees, so that the Apple style of decision making would be embedded in the culture."

25- ""Steve has a particular way that he wants to run Apple, and it's the same as it was twenty years ago, which is that Apple is a brilliant innovator of closed systems." Schmidt later told me. "They don't want people to be on their platform without permission. The benefits of a closed platform is control. But Google has a specific belief that open is the better approach, because it leads to more options and competition and consumer choice.""

26- "The nasty edge to his personality was not necessary. It hindered him more than it helped him. But it did, at times, serve a purpose. Polite and velvety leaders, who take care to avoid bruising others, are generally not as effective at forcing change. Dozens of the colleagues whom Jobs most abused ended their litany of horror stories by saying that he got them to do things they never dreamed possible. And he created a corporation crammed with A players."

27- "The saga of Steve Jobs is the Silicon Valley creation myth writ large: launching a start-up in his parents' garage and building it into the world's most valuable company. He didn't invent many things outright. but he was a master at putting together ideas, art, and technology in ways that invented the feature. He designed the Mac after appreciating the power of graphical interfaces in a way that Xerox was unable to do. and he created the iPod after grasping the joy of having a thousand in your pocket in a way that Sony, which had all the assets and heritage, never could accomplish. Some leaders push innovations by being good at the big picture. Others do so by mastering details. Jobs did both, relentlessly. As a result he launched a series of products over three decades that transformed whole industries..."

28- "Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius. His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical. He was, indeed, an example of what the mathematician Mark Kac called a magician genius, someone whose insights come out of the blue and require intuition more than mere mental processing power. Like a pathfinder, he could absorb information, sniff the winds, and sense what lay ahead. Steve Jobs thus became the greatest business executive of our era, the one most certain to be remembered a century from now. History will place him in the pantheon right next to Edison and Ford. More than anyone else of his time, he made products that were completely innovative, combining the power of poetry and processors. With a ferocity that could make working with him as unsettling as it was inspiring, he also built the world's most creative company. And he was able to infuse into its DNA the design sensibilities, perfectionism, and imagination that make it likely to be, even decades from now. the company that thrives best at the intersection of artistry and technology."

Below are key excerpts from the book that I found particularly insightful:

1- "I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics," he said. "Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that's what I wanted to do." It was as if he were suggesting themes for his biography (and in this instance, at least, the theme turned out to be valid). The creativity that can occur where both the humanities and the sciences combine in one strong personality was the topic that most interested me in my biographies of Franklin and Einstein, and I believe that it will be a key to creating innovative economies in the twenty-first century."

2- "His wife also did not request restrictions or control, nor did she ask to see in advance what I would publish. In fact she strongly encouraged me to be honest about his failings as well as his strengths. She is one of the smartest and most grounded people I have ever met. "There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy. and that's the truth," she told me early on. "You shouldn't whitewash it. He's good at spin, but he also has a remarkable story, and I'd like to see that it's all told truthfully" I leave it to the reader to assess whether I have succeeded in this mission. I'm sure there are players in this drama who will remember some of the events differently or think that I sometimes got trapped in Jobs's distortion field."

3- "Jobs said that his appreciation for Eichler homes instilled in him a passion for making nicely designed products for the mass market. I Jove it when you can bring really great design and simple capability to something that doesn't cost much," he said as he pointed out the clean elegance of the houses. "It was the original vision for Apple. That's what we tried to do with the first Mac. That's what we did with the iPod.""

4- "The Blue Box adventure established a template for a partnership that would soon be born. Wozniak would be the gentle wizard coming up with a neat invention that he would have been happy just to give away. and Jobs would figure out how to make it user-friendly, put it together in a package, market it, and make a few bucks."

5- "Coming back to America was, for me, much more of a cultural shock than going to India. The people in the Indian countryside don't use their intellect like we do, they use their intuition instead, and their intuition is far more developed than in the rest of the world. Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That's had a big impact on my work."

6- "Jobs is a complex person, he said, and being manipulative is just the darker facet of the traits that make him successful. Wozniak would never have been that way, but as he points out, he also could never have built Apple. "I would rather let it pass," he said when I pressed the point. "It's not something I want to judge Steve by.""

7- "Apple. It was a smart choice. The word instantly signaled friendliness and simplicity. It managed to be both slightly off-beat and as normal as a slice of pie. There was a whiff of counterculture, back-to-nature earthiness to it, yet nothing could be more American. And the two words together—Apple Computer—provided an amusing disjuncture. "

8- "Jobs's father had once taught him that a drive for perfection meant caring about the craftsmanship even of the parts unseen. Jobs applied that to the layout of the circuit board inside the Apple II. He rejected the initial design because the lines were not straight enough. This passion for perfection led him to indulge his instinct to control. Most hackers and hobbyists liked to customize, modify, and jack various things into their computers. To Jobs, this was a threat to a seamless end-to-end user experience."

9- "Markkula would become a father figure to Jobs. Like Jobs's adoptive father, he would indulge Jobs's strong will, and like his biological father, he would end up abandoning him. "Markkula was as much a father-son relationship as Steve ever had," said the venture capitalist Arthur Rock. He began to teach Jobs about marketing and sales. "Mike really took me under his wing," Jobs recalled. "His values were much aligned with mine. He emphasized that you should never start a company with the goal of getting rich. Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last.""

10- "Was Jobs's unfiltered behavior caused by a lack of emotional sensitivity? No. Almost the opposite. He was very emotionally attuned. able to read people and know their psychological strengths and vulnerabilities. He could stun an unsuspecting: victim with an emotional towel-snap, perfectly aimed. He intuitively knew when someone was faking it or truly knew something. This made him masterful at cajoling, stroking, persuading, flattering, and intimidating people."

11- "But even though Jobs's style could be demoralizing, it could also be oddly inspiring. It infused Apple employees with an abiding passion to create groundbreaking products and a belief that they could accomplish what seemed impossible."

12- "The best products, he believed, were "whole widgets" that were designed end-to-end, with the software closely tailored to the hardware and vice versa. This is what would distinguish the Macintosh, which had an operating system that worked only on its own hardware, from the environment that Microsoft was creating, in which its operating system could be used on hardware made by many different companies."

13- "Their differences in personality and character would lead them to opposite sides of what would become the fundamental divide in the digital age. Jobs was a perfectionist who craved control and indulged in the uncompromising temperament of an artist; he and Apple became the exemplars of a digital strategy that tightly integrated hardware. software, and content into a seamless package. Gates was a smart, calculating, and pragmatic analyst of business and technology; he was )pen to licensing Microsoft's operating system and software to a variety of manufacturers."

14- "I'll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life I'll sort of have the thread of my life and the thread of Apple weave in and out of each other, like a tapestry. There may be a few years when I'm not there, but I'U always come back. If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you've done and whoever you were and throw them away. The more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times. artists have to say. "Bye. I have to go now. I'm going crazy and I'm getting out of here." And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they re-emerge a little differently."

15- "Jobs sometimes avoided the truth. Helmut Sonnenfeldt once said of Henry Kissinger, "He lies not because it's in his interest. he lies because it's in his nature." It was in Jobs's nature to mislead or be secretive when he felt it was warranted. But he also indulged in being brutally honest at times, telling the truths that most of us sugarcoat or suppress. Both the dissembling and the truth-telling were simply different aspects of his Nietzschean attitude that ordinary rules didn't apply to him."

16- "For all of his willfulness and insatiable desire to control things. Jobs was indecisive and reticent when he felt unsure about something. He craved perfection, and he was not always good at figuring out how to settle for something less. He did not like to wrestle with complexity or make accommodations. This was true in products, design, and furnishings for the house. It was also true when it came to personal for the house. It was also true when it came to personal commitments. If he knew for sure a course of action was right. he was unstoppable. But if he had doubts, he sometimes withdrew, preferring not to think about things that did not perfectly suit him."

17- "Ever since he left the apple commune, Jobs had defined himself and by extension Apple, as a child of the counterculture. In ads such as "Think Different" and "1984," he positioned the Apple brand so that it reaffirmed his own rebel streak, even after he became a billionaire, and it allowed other baby boomers and their kids to do the same. "From when I first met him as a young guy, he's had the greatest of the impact he wants his brand to have on people," said Clow. Very few other companies or corporate leaders—perhaps none— could have gotten away with the brilliant audacity of associating their brand with Gandhi, Einstein, Picasso, and the Dalai Lama. Jobs was able to encourage people to define themselves as anti-corporate, creative. innovative rebels simply by the computer they used. "Steve created the only lifestyle brand in the tech industry," Larry Ellison said. "There are cars people are proud to have—Porsche, Ferrari, Prius—because what I drive says something about me. People feel the same way about an Apple product."

18- "One of his motivating passions was to build a lasting company. At age twelve, when he got a summer job at Hewlett-Packard, he learned that a properly run company could spawn innovation far more than any single creative individual. "I discovered that the best innovation is sometimes the company, the way you organize a company," he recalled. "The whole notion of how you build a company is fascinating. When I got the chance to come back to Apple, I realized that I would be useless without the company, and that's why I decided to stay and rebuild it."

19- "Why do we assume that simple is good? Because with physical products. we have to feel we can dominate them. As you bring order to complexity, you find a way to make the product defer to you. Simplicity isn't just a -visual style. It's not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. X involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. For example, to have no screws on something, you can end up having a product that is so convoluted and so complex. The better way is to go deeper with the simplicity, to understand everything about it and how it's manufactured. You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential."

20- "Despite his autocratic nature—he never worshiped at the altar of consensus—Jobs worked hard to foster a culture of collaboration at Apple. Many companies pride themselves on having few meetings. Jobs had many."

21- ""From the earliest days at Apple, I realized that we thrived when we created intellectual property. If people copied or stole our software, we'd be out of business. If it weren't protected, there'd be no incentive for us to make new software or product designs. If protection of intellectual property begins to disappear, creative companies will disappear or never get Started. But there's a simpler reason: It's wrong to steal. It hurts other people. And it hurts your own character." He knew, however, that the best way to stop piracy—in fact the only way—was to offer an alternative that was more attractive than the brain-dead services that music companies were concocting."

22- "But Sony couldn't. It had pioneered portable music with the Walkman, it had a great record company, and it had a long history of making beautiful consumer devices. It had all of the assets to compete with Jobs's Strategy of integration of hardware, software, devices, and content sales. Why did it fail? Partly because it was a company, like AOL Time Warner that was organized into divisions (that word itself was ominous) with their own bottom lines; the goal of achieving synergy in such companies by prodding the divisions to work together was usually elusive. Jobs did not organize Apple into semi-autonomous divisions; he closely controlled all of his teams and pushed them to work as one cohesive and flexible company, with one profit-and-loss bottom fine. "We don't have 'divisions' with their own P&L," said Tim Cook. "We run one P&L for the company.""

23- "Despite being- a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too well its isolating potential, Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings. "There's a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat," he said. "That's crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they're doing, you say 'Wow,' and soon you're cooking up all sorts of ideas." So he had the Pixar building- designed to promote encounters and unplanned collaborations. "If a building doesn't encourage that, you'll lose a lot of innovation and the magic that's sparked by serendipity," he said. "So we designed the building to make people get out of their offices and mingle in the central atrium with people they might not otherwise see.""

24- "Jobs insisted that Apple focus on just two or three priorities at a time. "There is no one better at turning off the noise that is going on around him," Cook said. "That allows him to focus on a few things and say no to many things. Few people are really good at that." In order to institutionalize the lessons that he and his team were learning. Jobs started an in-house center called Apple University. He hired Joel Podolny, who was dean of the Yale School of Management, to compile a series of case studies analyzing important decisions the company had made, including the switch to the Intel microprocessor and the decision to open the Apple Stores. Top executives spent time teaching the cases to new employees, so that the Apple style of decision making would be embedded in the culture."

25- ""Steve has a particular way that he wants to run Apple, and it's the same as it was twenty years ago, which is that Apple is a brilliant innovator of closed systems." Schmidt later told me. "They don't want people to be on their platform without permission. The benefits of a closed platform is control. But Google has a specific belief that open is the better approach, because it leads to more options and competition and consumer choice.""

26- "The nasty edge to his personality was not necessary. It hindered him more than it helped him. But it did, at times, serve a purpose. Polite and velvety leaders, who take care to avoid bruising others, are generally not as effective at forcing change. Dozens of the colleagues whom Jobs most abused ended their litany of horror stories by saying that he got them to do things they never dreamed possible. And he created a corporation crammed with A players."

27- "The saga of Steve Jobs is the Silicon Valley creation myth writ large: launching a start-up in his parents' garage and building it into the world's most valuable company. He didn't invent many things outright. but he was a master at putting together ideas, art, and technology in ways that invented the feature. He designed the Mac after appreciating the power of graphical interfaces in a way that Xerox was unable to do. and he created the iPod after grasping the joy of having a thousand in your pocket in a way that Sony, which had all the assets and heritage, never could accomplish. Some leaders push innovations by being good at the big picture. Others do so by mastering details. Jobs did both, relentlessly. As a result he launched a series of products over three decades that transformed whole industries..."

28- "Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius. His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical. He was, indeed, an example of what the mathematician Mark Kac called a magician genius, someone whose insights come out of the blue and require intuition more than mere mental processing power. Like a pathfinder, he could absorb information, sniff the winds, and sense what lay ahead. Steve Jobs thus became the greatest business executive of our era, the one most certain to be remembered a century from now. History will place him in the pantheon right next to Edison and Ford. More than anyone else of his time, he made products that were completely innovative, combining the power of poetry and processors. With a ferocity that could make working with him as unsettling as it was inspiring, he also built the world's most creative company. And he was able to infuse into its DNA the design sensibilities, perfectionism, and imagination that make it likely to be, even decades from now. the company that thrives best at the intersection of artistry and technology."

Book review by Richard L. Weaver II, Ph.D.

This is a fascinating, if not riveting, story that is not only well-written and well-constructed (organized in a chronological manner), but it is incredibly well-researched, too. It not only revealed how open Jobs was with Isaacson, but how open all of those who were part of, influenced, or were on the fringes of Job's life, were when Isaacson interviewed them.

From reading this book, you get this intricate portrait of a mercurial, sometimes vicious, self-absorbed, genius who had serious difficulties dealing with the realities of day-to-day living. But, it is Jobs' peculiarities--his uniquenesses--that make this book so engaging. You simply have a hard time believing such a person like Jobs even existed! (Remember, Jobs did not read this book before he died.)

One aspect of Jobs' personality--reinforced throughout the book--was that "ordinary rules didn't apply to him" (p. 313). I found it astonishing, for example, that he couldn't be relied on to tell the truth. It was said about him by Helmut Sonnerfeldt, "He lies not because it's in his interest, he lies because it's in his nature" (p. 313). He was adept at misleading, being secretive, as well as being brutally honest. He could be incredibly brutal!

Whatever you thought about Steve Jobs--based on his public persona--this book will shake (destroy?) that image. Isaacson pulls no punches, nor do the individuals interviewed. Jobs was a temperrmental, insensitive, authoritative, control freak, with an emphasis on freak! Sure, he was incredibly bright, imaginative, creative, intelligent, educated, and knowledgeable, but the way he treated others, the way he thought about others who were not his intellectual equals (or intellectual superiors!), was near pathological and perverse. He was an egomaniac's egomaniac (terribly selfish and demanding). To give you a mere glimpse of how selfish he was, he seldom remembered anniversaries or birthdays (p. 530).

Jobs was not one to emulate when it comes to effective human relations, however, even though many of his personal eccentricities were not exemplary, this is a motivational book.

There are a number of great motivational messages throughout the book. Some of the messages include: never give up, create a vision or dream, pursue your dream, whatever it takes, surround yourself with great minds and supportive personnel (not just "yes people"), don't worry about going against the grain, be creative, take risks, defy failure, bet your career on doing things in a different way, be hands-on, know your product, be thorough, check-and-re-check, perfectionism is good and it works, have passion, infuse everything you do with emotion, focus, prepare thoroughly, do nothing half-assed, and always keep your customers in mind (be user friendly). Jobs knew that "deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do" (p. 336).

On the basic values Jobs supported--and a value seen in every Apple product which he oversaw (and a value that made Apple successful!)--is the effective marriage between technology and the humanities (p. 527). The marriage was consummated in the silicon architecture, in the Aple organization, as well as in Jobs' own soul (p. 527)!

If you really want an overview of who Steve Jobs was and how he operated, Isaacson does a beautiful job of summarizing in Chapter 42, "Legacy" (pp. 560-571). It is an honest, complete, and intimate conclusion that accurately and completely draws together many of the comments, reactions, and insights scattered throughout the book. It is a wonderful closing chapter.

In this final chapter, too, Isaacson allowed Jobs, who had shared with him what he hoped his legacy would be throughout the course of their conversations, to be the one to conclude the book (pp. 567-570). No, there are no completely new insights in Jobs' essay, because you absorb his personal values, approaches, feelings, and reactions throughout the book, but Isaacson was correct, just hearing Jobs express himself at the end was a beautiful, warm, and touching way to conclude the book. Just as Jobs was a true genius (very few measure up!), Isaacson is a genius in the manner with which he introduces him to the general public. This is truly an incredible book.