Product Description
Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two
years—as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members,
friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has
written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly
intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for
perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal
computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital
publishing.
At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain
its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to
build digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of
inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to
create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with
technology. He built a company where leaps of the imagination were
combined with remarkable feats of engineering.
Although Jobs
cooperated with this book, he asked for no control over what was written
nor even the right to read it before it was published. He put nothing
off-limits. He encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. And Jobs
speaks candidly, sometimes brutally so, about the people he worked with
and competed against. His friends, foes, and colleagues provide an
unvarnished view of the passions, perfectionism, obsessions, artistry,
devilry, and compulsion for control that shaped his approach to business
and the innovative products that resulted.
Driven by demons,
Jobs could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his
personality and products were interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and
software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is
instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation,
character, leadership, and values.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #2 in Books
- Published on: 2011-10-24
- Released on: 2011-10-24
- Original language:
English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 656 pages
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best Books of the Month, November 2011: It is difficult to read the opening pages of Walter Isaacson’s
Steve Jobs
without feeling melancholic. Jobs retired at the end of August and died
about six weeks later. Now, just weeks after his death, you can open
the book that bears his name and read about his youth, his promise, and
his relentless press to succeed. But the initial sadness in starting the
book is soon replaced by something else, which is the intensity of the
read--mirroring the intensity of Jobs’s focus and vision for his
products. Few in history have transformed their time like Steve Jobs,
and one could argue that he stands with the Fords, Edisons, and
Gutenbergs of the world. This is a timely and complete portrait that
pulls no punches and gives insight into a man whose contradictions were
in many ways his greatest strength.
--Chris Schluep
Amazon Exclusive: A Q&A with Walter Isaacson
Q:
It's becoming well known that Jobs was able to create his Reality
Distortion Field when it served him. Was it difficult for you to cut
through the RDF and get beneath the narrative that he created? How did
you do it?
Isaacson: Andy Hertzfeld, who
worked with Steve on the original Macintosh team, said that even if you
were aware of his Reality Distortion Field, you still got caught up in
it. But that is why Steve was so successful: He willfully bent reality
so that you became convinced you could do the impossible, so you did. I
never felt he was intentionally misleading me, but I did try to check
every story. I did more than a hundred interviews. And he urged me not
just to hear his version, but to interview as many people as possible.
It was one of his many odd contradictions: He could distort reality, yet
he was also brutally honest most of the time. He impressed upon me the
value of honesty, rather than trying to whitewash things.
Q: How were the interviews with Jobs conducted? Did you ask lots of questions, or did he just talk?
Isaacson:
I asked very few questions. We would take long walks or drives, or sit
in his garden, and I would raise a topic and let him expound on it. Even
during the more formal sessions in his living room, I would just sit
quietly and listen. He loved to tell stories, and he would get very
emotional, especially when talking about people in his life whom he
admired or disdained.
Q: He was a powerful
man who could hold a grudge. Was it easy to get others to talk about
Jobs willingly? Were they afraid to talk?
Isaacson:
Everyone was eager to talk about Steve. They all had stories to tell,
and they loved to tell them. Even those who told me about his rough
manner put it in the context of how inspiring he could be.
Q:
Jobs embraced the counterculture and Buddhism. Yet he was a billionaire
businessman with his own jet. In what way did Jobs' contradictions
contribute to his success?
Isaacson: Steve
was filled with contradictions. He was a counterculture rebel who became
a billionaire. He eschewed material objects yet made objects of desire.
He talked, at times, about how he wrestled with these contradictions.
His counterculture background combined with his love of electronics and
business was key to the products he created. They combined artistry and
technology.
Q: Jobs could be notoriously difficult. Did you wind up liking him in the end?
Isaacson:
Yes, I liked him and was inspired by him. But I knew he could be unkind
and rough. These things can go together. When my book first came out,
some people skimmed it quickly and cherry-picked the examples of his
being rude to people. But that was only half the story. Fortunately, as
people read the whole book, they saw the theme of the narrative: He
could be petulant and rough, but this was driven by his passion and
pursuit of perfection. He liked people to stand up to him, and he said
that brutal honesty was required to be part of his team. And the teams
he built became extremely loyal and inspired.
Q: Do you believe he was a genius?
Isaacson:
He was a genius at connecting art to technology, of making leaps based
on intuition and imagination. He knew how to make emotional connections
with those around him and with his customers.
Q: Did he have regrets?
Isaacson:
He had some regrets, which he expressed in his interviews. For example,
he said that he did not handle well the pregnancy of his first
girlfriend. But he was deeply satisfied by the creativity he ingrained
at Apple and the loyalty of both his close colleagues and his family.
Q: What do you think is his legacy?
Isaacson:
His legacy is transforming seven industries: personal computers,
animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, digital publishing,
and retail stores. His legacy is creating what became the most valuable
company on earth, one that stood at the intersection of the humanities
and technology, and is the company most likely still to be doing that a
generation from now. His legacy, as he said in his "Think Different" ad,
was reminding us that the people who are crazy enough to think they can
change the world are the ones who do.
About the Author
Walter Isaacson, the CEO of the Aspen Institute, has been chairman of CNN and the managing editor of
Time magazine. He is the author of
Einstein: His Life and Universe;
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life; and
Kissinger: A Biography, and the coauthor of
The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and daughter.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Excerpt 1
His
personality was reflected in the products he created. Just as the core
of Apple’s philosophy, from the original Macintosh in 1984 to the iPad a
generation later, was the end-to-end integration of hardware and
software, so too was it the case with Steve Jobs: His passions,
perfectionism, demons, desires, artistry, devilry, and obsession for
control were integrally connected to his approach to business and the
products that resulted.
The
unified field theory that ties together Jobs’s personality and products
begins with his most salient trait: his intensity. His silences could be
as searing as his rants; he had taught himself to stare without
blinking. Sometimes this intensity was charming, in a geeky way, such as
when he was explaining the profundity of Bob Dylan’s music or why
whatever product he was unveiling at that moment was the most amazing
thing that Apple had ever made. At other times it could be terrifying,
such as when he was fulminating about Google or Microsoft ripping off
Apple.
This intensity
encouraged a binary view of the world. Colleagues referred to the
hero/shithead dichotomy. You were either one or the other, sometimes on
the same day. The same was true of products, ideas, even food: Something
was either “the best thing ever,” or it was shitty, brain-dead,
inedible. As a result, any perceived flaw could set off a rant. The
finish on a piece of metal, the curve of the head of a screw, the shade
of blue on a box, the intuitiveness of a navigation screen—he would
declare them to “completely suck” until that moment when he suddenly
pronounced them “absolutely perfect.” He thought of himself as an
artist, which he was, and he indulged in the temperament of one.
His
quest for perfection led to his compulsion for Apple to have end-to-end
control of every product that it made. He got hives, or worse, when
contemplating great Apple software running on another company’s crappy
hardware, and he likewise was allergic to the thought of unapproved apps
or content polluting the perfection of an Apple device. This ability to
integrate hardware and software and content into one unified system
enabled him to impose simplicity. The astronomer Johannes Kepler
declared that “nature loves simplicity and unity.” So did Steve Jobs.
Excerpt 2
For
Jobs, belief in an integrated approach was a matter of righteousness.
“We do these things not because we are control freaks,” he explained.
“We do them because we want to make great products, because we care
about the user, and because we like to take responsibility for the
entire experience rather than turn out the crap that other people make.”
He also believed he was doing people a service: “They’re busy doing
whatever they do best, and they want us to do what we do best. Their
lives are crowded; they have other things to do than think about how to
integrate their computers and devices.”
This
approach sometimes went against Apple’s short-term business interests.
But in a world filled with junky devices, inscrutable error messages,
and annoying interfaces, it led to astonishing products marked by
beguiling user experiences. Using an Apple product could be as sublime
as walking in one of the Zen gardens of Kyoto that Jobs loved, and
neither experience was created by worshipping at the altar of openness
or by letting a thousand flowers bloom. Sometimes it’s nice to be in the
hands of a control freak.
Jobs’s
intensity was also evident in his ability to focus. He would set
priorities, aim his laser attention on them, and filter out
distractions. If something engaged him—the user interface for the
original Macintosh, the design of the iPod and iPhone, getting music
companies into the iTunes Store—he was relentless. But if he did not
want to deal with something—a legal annoyance, a business issue, his
cancer diagnosis, a family tug—he would resolutely ignore it. That focus
allowed him to say no. He got Apple back on track by cutting all except
a few core products. He made devices simpler by eliminating buttons,
software simpler by eliminating features, and interfaces simpler by
eliminating options.
He
attributed his ability to focus and his love of simplicity to his Zen
training. It honed his appreciation for intuition, showed him how to
filter out anything that was distracting or unnecessary, and nurtured in
him an aesthetic based on minimalism.
Unfortunately
his Zen training never quite produced in him a Zen-like calm or inner
serenity, and that too is part of his legacy. He was often tightly
coiled and impatient, traits he made no effort to hide. Most people have
a regulator between their mind and mouth that modulates their brutish
sentiments and spikiest impulses. Not Jobs. He made a point of being
brutally honest. “My job is to say when something sucks rather than
sugarcoat it,” he said. This made him charismatic and inspiring, yet
also, to use the technical term, an asshole at times.
Andy
Hertzfeld once told me, “The one question I’d truly love Steve to
answer is, ‘Why are you sometimes so mean?’” Even his family members
wondered whether he simply lacked the filter that restrains people from
venting their wounding thoughts or willfully bypassed it. Jobs claimed
it was the former. “This is who I am, and you can’t expect me to be
someone I’m not,” he replied when I asked him the question. But I think
he actually could have controlled himself, if he had wanted. When he
hurt people, it was not because he was lacking in emotional awareness.
Quite the contrary: He could size people up, understand their inner
thoughts, and know how to relate to them, cajole them, or hurt them at
will.
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.
Excerpt 3
The
saga of Steve Jobs is the Silicon Valley creation myth writ large:
launching a startup 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 future. 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
songs 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.
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.
Excerpt 4
The
difference that Jony has made, not only at Apple but in the world, is
huge. He is a wickedly intelligent person in all ways. He understands
business concepts, marketing concepts. He picks stuff up just like that,
click. He understands what we do at our core better than anyone. If I
had a spiritual partner at Apple, it’s Jony. Jony and I think up most of
the products together and then pull others in and say, “Hey, what do
you think about this?” He gets the big picture as well as the most
infinitesimal details about each product. And he understands that Apple
is a product company. He’s not just a designer. That’s why he works
directly for me. He has more operational power than anyone else at Apple
except me. There’s no one who can tell him what to do, or to butt out.
That’s the way I set it up.
Excerpt 5
When
Jobs gathered his top management for a pep talk just after he became
iCEO in September 1997, sitting in the audience was a sensitive and
passionate thirty-year-old Brit who was head of the company’s design
team. Jonathan Ive, known to all as Jony, was planning to quit. He was
sick of the company’s focus on profit maximization rather than product
design. Jobs’s talk led him to reconsider. “I remember very clearly
Steve announcing that our goal is not just to make money but to make
great products,” Ive recalled. “The decisions you make based on that
philosophy are fundamentally different from the ones we had been making
at Apple.” Ive and Jobs would soon forge a bond that would lead to the
greatest industrial design collaboration of their era.
Ive
grew up in Chingford, a town on the northeast edge of London. His
father was a silversmith who taught at the local college. “He’s ...
Customer Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
476 of 516 people found the following review helpful.
Gripping but amazingly incomplete
By David Dennis
This is a gripping journey into the life of an amazing individual.
Despite its girth of nearly 600 pages, the book zips along at a torrid
pace.
The interviews with Jobs are fascinating and revealing. We
get a real sense for what it must have been like to be Steve, or to
work with him. That earns the book five stars despite its flaws, in
that it's definitely a must-read if you have any interest at all in the
subject.
But there are places in the book where I have to say, "Huh?"
The
book is written essentially as a series of stories about Steve. The
book continuously held my interest, but some of the dramas of his life
seem muted. For instance, he came close to going bust when both Next
and Pixar were flailing. There was only the slightest hint that
anything dramatic happened in those years. In one paragraph, Pixar is
shown as nearly running him out of money. A few brief paragraphs later,
Toy Story gets released and Jobs' finances are saved for good.
We
hear a lot about Tony Fadell's role in the development of iPhone. Tony
led the iPod group and was clearly a major source for the book. You
may know from a recent Businessweek article that Tony was basically
driven out of the company shortly after the final introduction of
iPhone, due to personality conflicts between him and Scott Forestall,
the person now in charge of iOS development. But the book doesn't say a
word about it. Tony simply disappears from the rest of the book with
no explanation, and Forestall is barely mentioned.
Another
strange incident was the Jackling house, the house he spent a large part
of his life in. A case could be made that the house is historic simply
because Steve spent many of his formative years living in it.
Preservationists were battling with him to save the house. Only a
couple of months before his death, when he must have known he was not
going to actually build a house to replace it, he had the house torn
down. I would have loved to learn this story. Why did he buy it? Why
did he destroy it through neglect? Why did he acquire such a blind
loathing for it that he worked hard to get it torn down?
And why
did Jobs keep almost all the Pixar options to himself? He doesn't seem
to have needed the money, or even really wanted it that much. He could
have cut his friends John Lasseter et al into their own huge fortunes.
Lasseter only got about $25 million from Pixar, which seems like a
shockingly low amount in view of his contributions. Now, it's not like
they will starve or anything, and I think John can buy pretty much
anything he wants, but it still seems surprising Jobs is so ungenerous.
There
were a lot of things like this, incidents casually tossed away in a
brief paragraph that should have merited an entire chapter.
I
think this will always be the best account of the emotional aspects of
Steve's life, which are fully covered. The chapters about his illness
moved me to tears. But as an account of what really happened at Apple
and how Steve fixed the company, it's insufficient. I guess that will
have to await more distance from the subject.
Of course what's
truly remarkable about Jobs is that he lived a life so full of incident
that perhaps no biography has the space to cover the broad sweep of his
life. He accomplished as much as 10 ordinarily famous men. Maybe the
upshot is that you just can't fit a man like this in a book, even if
that book's nearly 600 pages.
362 of 416 people found the following review helpful.
Story of the man who put a dent in the universe. Well worth reading.
By Dr. Chuck Chakrapani
Steve Jobs wanted to change the world, "put a dent in the universe."
And he did. If you are interested in life and want to know how Jobs
changed it right before our eyes, you should read this book.
No
other book on Jobs has been based on first hand information from the
Master himself, his colleagues and his detractors. There is no other way
to know the man who changed the way we live and work. The fact that the
book is engaging is a big bonus.
First Jobs' personal life,
personality and beliefs. Like all fascinating people in history, Jobs
was a bundle of contradictions. Born out of wedlock, he was an American
icon and yet born of a Syrian Muslim whom he never knew, but had
accidentally met. Adopted at birth by working class parents, he became
skeptical of the Church as the all-knowing god did not help the starving
children in Biafra and alternated between being a believer and a
non-believer. He was, at different times, a vegan and a fruitarian
(hence the name Apple). Jobs was influenced by the counter cultural
ideas of the 60's and the 70's and yet become one of the most revered
corporate figures of all time. He was a multi-billionaire who lived on a
regular street with no high fenced compound, security or live-in
servants; a Zen Buddhist who was obsessed with Zen-like simplicity but
did not possess Zen-like tranquility; a son who tried to abandon his
child like the way he had thought he was abandoned; a leader who was
highly demanding of his colleagues and coworkers; a vastly influential
figure in computing who neither built computers not wrote codes himself;
a genius who was mean to many people. All these factoids had to have
some influence on who he was and who he became and may keep interested
psychologists busy for years. Yet, it is not for these tabloid fodder
that he is looked upon with awe. To get caught up in the contradictions
of a man is to miss the man.
So who is the man then? Isaacson presents Jobs life and work as a play in three acts.
During
the first act, two unlikely partners named Steves (Jobs and Woz) create
the world's first commercially viable personal computer, Apple II. Jobs
then creates the revolutionary but unsuccessful Lisa. Apple goes
public, Jobs creates the Mac, which carves itself a distinct niche. He
then brings in Pepsi's Scully to manage the company only to find himself
ousted from the company he founded. During his exile Jobs creates
another revolutionary but not-so-successful computer NeXT. But Jobs
other venture, Pixar, an outstanding animation company, is a huge
commercial success.
The second act is Jobs' return to Apple.
Apple was in decline and it buys the money losing NeXT. Job returns to
the company he founded as the interim CEO. Introduces a series of
products: peppermint colored iMacs followed b y 21st Century Macs.
The
third act is the post-pc revolution, the most dramatic of all: the
creation of ipod (almost 10 years ago to the day), paradigm-changing
iphone and the category-creating ipad, along with many other things and
cloud computing. We can't imagine a world today without ipads, ipods and
iphones. The rewards are high. Apple first surpasses Microsoft and
becomes the most valuable tech company. Then Apple becomes, for brief
periods of time, the most valuable company in the world.
But this
is not the story of Apple, but of Job. What was happening in the
background while the three act play is being staged - to his family,
his health, his odd beliefs that might have cost him his life, and his
relationships with other giants of technology - is the focus of this
book. The story is told with many interesting anecdotes such as Bill
Gates incredulously exclaiming "Do ALL of you live here?" when visiting
for the first time Steve Jobs' modest house.
This is an
"authorized biography" and I'm wary of "authorized" biographies. Always
thought they were full-length PR pieces. This one is different. Jobs
gave Isaacson complete freedom to write the book and Jobs didn't demand
editorial control. He didn't even want to see the book before it was
published. And it shows. You see Jobs as he was. Warts and all. This is
Jobs' last gift to those of us who admired his vision of the world, but
wondered about the essence of the man behind it all. Now we know.
As
you finish reading Job's biography of nearly 600 pages, something
strikes you as odd. Steve Jobs' death is not mentioned in the book. Not
the date, not the time and not even the fact that he is no more.
Strangely fascinating. Like the man himself.
558 of 693 people found the following review helpful.
Adequate, but not excellent
By R. Bourne
This new, highly-anticipated bio is reasonably comprehensive in
scope, but written in a plodding, subjectively fawning fashion that
undercuts its impact. Mr. Isaacson doesn't hail from the technology
world, and it shows; his feel for the real importance of Jobs'
accomplishments is largely constrained to social impact (of the fuzzy,
gee-whiz sort) rather than crucial areas of interface, functionality and
convergence. Why do Apple's products really work? What impact will they
have on how we interact with the digital world, tomorrow and after?
Isaacson has no idea. All he seems to know is that 'simplicity' is good,
and that 'design' is more than skin deep. And that the little things
matter. Millions upon millions of people already know that; the
opportunity missed here is to go deep on the subject, and unpack it.
That doesn't happen here, because the writer is out of his element.
Apart
from that, we learn that Jobs was basically an ass, and that he cried a
lot when he didn't get his way. It's implied that he carried a
narcissistic disorder, but that's never really explored -- to the book's
detriment, as psychiatric context is pretty important to understand how
a comprehensive tyrant could achieve so much, and improve the
productivity and satisfaction of so many.
The book is also
overlong -- a remarkable thing given the richness of the subject. It's
written almost as a sequential fact-finding report, rather than as a
truly insightful look at a man and his work. We come away with the
impression that strong-willed CEOs can do what they want, as long as
they make money for shareholders and impart a sense of accomplishment
(however painfully won) to their underlings. Not exactly a revelation,
but it takes more than 600 pages for Isaacson to drive the point home.
I'm
glad we have this bio, but I suspect someone will come along and write a
much better treatment of Jobs' life. For now, don't expect to learn any
larger truths about Jobs and his world; just enjoy the anecdotes, and
prepare to make your own conclusions about the book's fascinating
subject.
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