Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs

The first major biography of Jobs following his death was written by Walter Isaacson. The author has performed a service by creating a narrative of the life of a man with whom business historians will be coming to terms for a long time. Isaacson’s book, Steve Jobs, was published on October 24, 2011, and immediately became a best seller. Three-hundred-seventy-nine-thousand copies were sold in the first week in the United States alone. According to Wikipedia, it “[broke] all records for sales of a biography.”Footnote ⁴ The book was “authorized,” meaning that Jobs had asked Isaacson to write it and gave the project his blessing. The two men had “more than 40 interviews and conversations” concerning the book. Equally important, Jobs opened doors for Isaacson, who spoke to “more than 100 friends, relatives, competitors, adversaries, and colleagues.”Footnote ⁵ But Jobs had no editorial rights, and the book was published after his death.

Not just Jobs but other interviewed parties have died in the decade since Isaacson published his book. Thus, he captured stories that, had they not been told to him, would have been lost forever. Conducting these interviews with a man facing death and with members of his family, friends, and colleagues, many of whom his achievements made very wealthy, is no small feat. Isaacson’s journalistic training served him well. He appears not to have been star-struck by the celebrities, like Joan Baez, or by the billionaires to whom he spoke. And he must have a deft touch to have been able to discuss Jobs with Laurene Powell Jobs as her husband’s life was drawing to a close.

Isaacson first met Jobs in 1984 while an editor at Time (this was an era when Time magazine was a big deal). The two kept in touch in a desultory fashion for years. Silicon Valley big shots are well known for cultivating journalists. In the summer of 2004, Jobs contacted Isaacson—who had become a professional author and also served as president of the Aspen Institute, which sponsors seminars and conferences featuring big-name participants—about writing his biography. Isaacson’s response was that it was too soon. Jobs was still in medias res. Isaacson did not know about Jobs’s health situation at the time. Innumerable books had already been written about Jobs by 2004. Scores of authors would have jumped at the chance to write the “inside story” of a man who defined charisma, a man who was at once illusive yet also arguably the world’s most famous businessperson.

Jobs approached Isaacson about a biography again in 2009, and this time Isaacson agreed. Jobs would make himself as available as necessary and encourage those who knew him to say whatever they had on their minds. Jobs's only condition was that he “have input in designing a new version” of the book’s cover because he did not like what the publisher was proposing. Isaacson “was both amused and willing, so I readily assented.” Not afraid to look this gift horse in the mouth, Isaacson asked Jobs why he had been chosen to write the book. Jobs responded, “I think you’re good at getting people to talk.” Isaacson said this answer was “unexpected.”Footnote ⁶ His previous two books had been on Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein, neither of whom, it is fair to guess, had spoken to him. Isaacson was not an industry expert. He was not a denizen of Silicon Valley. Getting people to tell the truth is far more important than getting them to talk, but that is not what Jobs specified. These were the terms under which the project was created. Isaacson did a great deal of work in a brief time. The book he turned out is perspicacious in places but bears the hallmarks of a project completed in a hurry.

The book sold extraordinarily well and was reviewed widely. For the most part the reviews were favorable. However, not all were, and the critics deserve a hearing. One, Maurice Timothy Reidy, felt that “the book reads like a series of well-reported magazine articles, but it has little sense of narrative sweep. Steve Jobs will be the subject of a great biography someday, but this is not it.”Footnote ⁷ Perhaps, given the pressure of producing this volume, this is all that could be expected—journalism as the first draft of history. Evgeny Morozov, in a lengthy and valuable review essay, describes the book as “immensely detailed and pedestrian.” He forgives Isaacson the lack of “earth-shattering revelations” on the grounds that “Apple-watching is an industry: there exists an apparently insatiable demand for books and articles about the company.” Nevertheless, Morozov also observes of Isaacson’s dozens of interviews with Jobs that “as one nears the end of this large book it’s hard not to wonder what it was that Isaacson and Jobs actually talked about on those walks around Palo Alto. Small anecdotes abound, but weren’t there big themes to discuss?”Footnote ⁸

Reidy and Morozov have a point. This book is straight narrative history. If the reader is looking for a coherent explanation of the bundle of contradictions that was Steve Jobs, it will not be found in this volume. Morozov’s essay provides a discussion of Apple product design that is more informative than any in the Isaacson book. Isaacson has written an even-tempered book about a profoundly tempestuous man who achieved great things as a business executive by creating products the whole world uses. But this remarkable achievement came at the price of cruelty that is hard to overstate.

One of the big questions about Steve Jobs is: Did he have to be who he was to achieve what he did? If the answer is yes, many business school courses on leadership, creativity, and innovation are going to have to be rethought.

Is it fair to call the book “pedestrian,” as Morozov did? Consider the following two sentences: “In the annals of innovation, new ideas are only part of the equation. Execution is just as important.”Footnote ⁹ Passages like this illuminate nothing. The book needed a more careful editor.

Is this book weighted with too much detail? No question about it—there are details aplenty. Some of these are superfluous and could have been dispensed with. We are provided, for example, with half a page of text about how Jobs and his family purchased a washing machine. Once again, a stronger edit would have saved the reader from a story that teaches little. On the other hand, some details are valuable because they are revealing. In a delightful book on the iPod called The Perfect Thing, author Steven Levy writes, “Simply handing over your iPod to a friend, your blind date, or a total stranger sitting next to you on the plane opens you up like a book. … It’s not just what you like—it’s who you are.”Footnote ¹⁰ In March 2011, Isaacson asked Jobs to show him what music he had on his iPad2 (which originally had been on his iPod). Jobs told Isaacson that Bach “was his favorite classical composer. He was particularly fond of listening to the contrast between the two versions of the ‘Goldberg Variations’ that Glenn Gould recorded, the first in 1955 as a twenty-two-year-old little-known pianist and the second in 1981, a year before he died. ‘They’re like night and day. The first is an exuberant, young, brilliant piece, played so fast it’s a revelation. The later one is so much more spare and stark. You sense a very deep soul who’s been through a lot in life. It’s deeper and wiser.’”Footnote ¹¹ This is a remarkably incisive observation about the evolution of a great pianist as illustrated by his performance of a piece of music that will live forever.

In his keynote introducing the iPad2 on March 2, 2011, Jobs reiterated a theme that he had enunciated in one form or another his whole life: “It is in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. We believe that it’s technology married with the humanities that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.”Footnote ¹² These are beautiful words, but they were spoken by a man who had, to put it kindly, a casual relationship with the truth. However, Jobs's appreciation of Glenn Gould’s odyssey with the “Goldberg Variations” illustrates that these are more than just words. This is reality—dyed in the wool. Because of this anecdote, we get an unvarnished look at the real Steve Jobs. This is not a minor story. It is a vital piece of evidence to which we never would have been privy had Isaacson been less detail oriented. Thus, some of the detail in this lengthy book contributes mightily to our understanding of who Jobs was. One of the problems is that Isaacson had trouble telling the difference between the value of one story versus another. The washing machine is not important. Glenn Gould is. Including both diminishes our understanding of the latter, which deserved a richer discussion than it received.

The most virulent criticism of Isaacson’s book came from an unexpected source. So much is written about Apple that the company has made a point of not commenting on publications about it. This case was different. Apple’s top executives did not like Isaacson’s book, and they departed standard practice by making their displeasure publicly known. Jony (Sir Jonathan since 2012) Ive, the English-born product designer rescued from obscurity when Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, had in the last years of Jobs’s life become something of a soulmate. The two regularly had lunch together on campus and spoke endlessly about—literally—the shape of things to come. In a 2015 interview in the New Yorker, Ive said he had not read Isaacson's whole book “but had seen enough to dislike it for what he called inaccuracies. ‘My regard couldn't be any lower,’ he said with unusual heat.’”Footnote ¹³

Equally, if not more, critical are the comments of Tim Cook, who succeeded Jobs as CEO of Apple. This has proven to be probably the most successful CEO transition in the history of technology. Cook took over when Jobs stepped down as CEO on August 24, 2011. On that date, Apple had a market capitalization of $348.8 billion. At this writing, after nine years with Cook at the helm, its market capitalization is $2.03 trillion. Cook’s words have weight. Here is what he said: “I thought the Isaacson book did him [Jobs] a tremendous disservice. It was just a rehash of a bunch of stuff that had already been written, and focused on small parts of his personality. You get the feeling that [Steve is] a greedy, selfish egomaniac. It didn’t capture the person. The person I read about there is somebody I would never have wanted to work with over all this time. Life is too short.”Footnote ¹⁴ It is reported that many other people interviewed for the Isaacson book felt the same way.

Cook is a man of courage and integrity. What is one to make of his indictment of Isaacson’s book? Cook makes two points. The first is that Isaacson offers a “rehash.” There is nothing new in his book. Second, in focusing on only a small part of Steve’s personality, Isaacson portrays him as a “greedy, selfish egomaniac.” The first observation has a good deal of force. In a 656-page book, there is not as much new material, such as the Gould story, as one would have liked. Cook’s second assertion is more troubling: Isaacson gave us a caricature rather than capturing the whole person. Is this true?

In the book's index, there are 23 entries for Jobs under “offensive behavior of.” There could have been more. Jobs was a shrewd, astute, demanding man. He cared deeply about the products for which he was responsible. He was genuinely in search of excellence for the perfect thing. He did insist upon the impossible and as a result sometimes achieved it. He was an intense man who drove himself as hard as he drove others. But he could also be dreadfully—needlessly—cruel. He terrorized people; and if Isaacson had skated over that aspect of his personality, the book would have earned no credibility. In the acknowledgments to the electronic version of the book, Isaacson writes, “When the original version of this book came out, it caused some wounded feelings, which was probably inevitable given what a complicated and extraordinary man Jobs was. For that I am sorry. It was not my intention. I am grateful to those who have been forgiving of my lapses and misperceptions and who have helped me make corrections or clear a few things up.”Footnote ¹⁵

Yet in his criticisms of Jobs, Isaacson has nothing to apologize for. Some of Jobs’s conduct was unbearable. It is unclear whether he deployed his cruelty for effect, whether it just leapt out of him because he could not control himself, or whether it was some combination of the two. But it was no secret that this man had a special talent for being vicious and for humiliating others. He was famous in Silicon Valley for his anger attacks. At Apple, even after he returned in 1997, there were engineers who refused to “demo” for him because they did not want to put up with a pointless tantrum. Jobs could be an inspirational leader beyond compare. It is also undeniable, however, that he motivated through fear. Some people at Apple were afraid to ride in an elevator with him because they feared they might be fired on a whim.Footnote ¹⁶ In order to work with Jobs, one had to be able to manage him. Some people learned to manage around him when he was being pointlessly stubborn and rudely dismissive. At times he was his own worst enemy. Cook could deal with him, but Cook has “the skin of a rhinoceros.”Footnote ¹⁷ Cook, moreover, reports that “Steve only yelled at me four or five times during the thirteen years I knew him.”Footnote ¹⁸ Many at Apple who did not have “rhinoceros skin” and whom Jobs yelled at more often were caused needless pain.

It is to his credit that Isaacson did not whitewash a man who, at his death, was venerated by millions of people around the world because his life story illustrated that a person could suffer defeats without being defeated and because in demanding perfection he got a lot closer to it than others did. Jobs showed people who worked for or with him what they could accomplish. More than one person has said that they did the best work of their lives under his tutelage. The end result was not merely selling to consumers but, in a sense, honoring them by delivering products that they themselves had not known they wanted. Apple’s goal was never merely to satisfy. It was to surprise and delight those who purchased their products. Jobs instilled this goal in the company.

The real problem with Isaacson’s biography is not what the Apple faithful complained of. It is indeed critical at times but not excessively so, given that the criticism was warranted. It is also complimentary to such a degree that at its conclusion it skirts the edge of hagiography. Isaacson provides us with a lengthy block quotation from Jobs in which Jobs celebrates being “brutally honest” without explaining, and without Isaacson asking him, why brutality had to go hand in hand with honesty. This is just one loose end among many. When one has finished this lengthy tome, one does not know what to think of its subject. That is the fundamental problem. The book has no thesis.

Jobs’s goal was to build products that were not merely great. They had to be “insanely great,” a phrase he made famous. To make him understandable requires an insanely great biography. What Isaacson delivered was a quality biography written in a hurry that had insanely great sales.

Schlender and Tetzeli's Becoming Steve Jobs

The second big book about Jobs is Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader, by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, which was published in 2015. Apple was solidly behind this book. Its executives cooperated with the authors, and the book was featured in a high-profile event at the SoHo Apple Store in Manhattan.

The principal difference between this book and Isaacson's is that Schlender and Tetzeli ask a clear question to which they provide a clear answer. The question is, How did the callow youth who managed to get himself fired from the company he cofounded in 1985 transform himself into arguably the most effective CEO in the world between his return to Apple in 1997 and his death in 2011? The answer is twofold. First, he learned an enormous amount about leadership, management, and creativity through his experience with Pixar (which he bought from filmmaker George Lucas in February of 1986), which was as great a success as the computer company he founded after leaving Apple, unimaginatively called NeXT, was a failure. Second, he found the perfect woman to be his wife. He and Laurene Powell were married on March 18, 1991. She understood him. She helped him grow.

Writing of Pixar, Schlender and Tetzeli observe,

This is not all. In Pixar’s leader, Ed Catmull, Jobs found a true mentor. A physicist as committed to computer animation as Jobs was to anything to which he turned his attention, Catmull had a profound ability to understand Jobs, to manage him, and to get the best out of him. “I liked him from the moment I met him,” Jobs said of Catmull. “Ed is a quiet guy, and you could mistake that quietness for weakness—but it’s not, it’s strength.” According to Schlender and Tetzeli, “Steve listened to Catmull. … Steve was constantly trying to learn.”Footnote ²⁰ The two men had a professional relationship that lasted for twenty-six years, probably the longest such relationship of Steve's life.Footnote ²¹ Jobs regularly abandoned (and sometimes betrayed) people whose genius he borrowed in order to build his own success. Catmull was the great exception, and Catmull's description of his relationship with Steve in his book, Creativity, Inc., is inspiring.

Jobs was lucky to meet Catmull. And he was lucky to meet Laurene Powell, who became his wife. Here are Schlender and Tetzeli’s comments: “Steve had had serious relationships with several girlfriends by then … , [b]ut Laurene … had a depth of character that touched him in a whole new way. Some of the women he had dated came to seem needy over time; Laurene wasn’t that way. She brought as much self-sufficiency to the relationship as he did. … They both accepted the value of hard work, which made it easier for Laurene to handle Steve’s long hours.” When they had children, a son and two daughters, they tried to raise them “with as normal values as they could.” The authors describe Laurene as “willowy with a California girl’s blonde hair and piercing eyes.”Footnote ²² She is indeed a striking-looking woman (perhaps that is what “willowy” means), but the “California girl” observation is misplaced given that she was born and raised in the East. Schlender and Tetzeli also refer to the couple’s “middle-class connection,” which is another wrong note.Footnote ²³ Steve and Laurene were anything but middle class.

What is not in doubt is that she was and is an altogether remarkable woman. Strong and self-possessed, she knew how to deal with a very difficult man. Joanna Hoffman, an original member of the Mac team, said, “He is the luckiest guy to have landed with Laurene, who is smart and can engage him intellectually and can sustain his ups and downs and tempestuous personality. Because she's not neurotic, Steve may feel that she is not as mystical as Tina [his previous girlfriend]. … But that's silly.” According to Andy Hertzfeld, another original member of the Mac team, “Laurene looks a lot like Tina, but she is totally different because she is tougher and armor-plated. That's why the marriage works.”Footnote ²⁴ Laurene knew how to discipline him. Here is an example from a book by Steve's high school girlfriend, Chrisann Brennan, who was the out-of-wedlock mother of his first child, Lisa Brennan-Jobs. Chrisann recounts visiting Steve and Laurene when their daughter, Lisa, was thirteen or fourteen and Steve and Laurene's son, Reed, was an infant (perhaps the year was 1992). Chrisann, Lisa, Steve, Laurene, and Reed (in a stroller) were at Steve's home in Palo Alto “and about to go for a walk when, without warning, Steve blurted out the meanest, most ridiculous, terrible comments at me, like a machine gun spraying bullets across me. It was so unexpected and awful, something about why I was such a total failure of a human being that I gasped. You can't prepare for this sort of behavior, no matter how many times it happens. I fell silent, but … Laurene yelled at him to stop. Even she was indignant on my behalf.”Footnote ²⁵ It would appear that Steve could not push Laurene around.

These two people were in love. Laurene's comments at Steve's funeral, published in their entirety in Schlender and Tetzeli’s book, are, as they point out, “especially poignant.” “Like my children,” she concluded, “I lost my father when I was young. It was not what I wanted for myself; it was not what I wanted for them. But the sun will set and the sun will rise, and it will shine upon us tomorrow in our grief and our gratitude, and we will continue to live with purpose, memory, passion, and love.”Footnote ²⁶

This book’s thesis is that Steve’s experiences at Pixar and as a husband and father enabled him to mature. He came to accept that he was not always right. He learned to listen and, when necessary, he learned how to wait. He shed many of the self-defeating aspects of his personality and was able to marshal his impressive talent upon his return to Apple in 1997. Apple at that time seemed to all the world to be moribund. It was a beaten company. Michael Dell made what became a famous remark. If he were the CEO of Apple, he said, “I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”Footnote ²⁷ Considering Apple’s situation, by standard business metrics Dell’s comment made sense. However, not only did Steve save the company but he enabled it to achieve heights that even he had trouble believing were possible. Nothing is more difficult than turning around a technology company. The graveyard is full of attempts that failed. Jobs’s success at not only saving the company but making it great was an achievement of historic importance, and Schlender and Tetzeli give him the credit he deserves.

From a young adulthood marked by fabulous success but crippled by hubris into the wilderness, where he encounters a wise mentor and captures the willowy woman of his dreams, to greatness. That is this book’s thesis. John Lasseter, Pixar’s executive producer and greatest storyteller, called this the classic hero’s journey. The question that needs to be asked about Becoming Steve Jobs is whether we believe that the thesis is true. What Schlender and Tetzeli write makes a lot of sense, but we must nevertheless render the Scottish verdict of “not proven.” The reason is that the Jobs we encounter from 1997 to 2011 has many of the same shortcomings that he always had. Here are two examples.

In their penultimate chapter, entitled “Blind Spots, Grudges, and Sharp Elbows,” which deals with these three important issues in a mere twenty pages, the authors question the propriety of letting top executives “take the fall” for the scandalous manner in which stock options were distributed. When Jobs testified before the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission concerning this matter, he explained, “It wasn’t so much about the money.” (Billionaires often say this sort of thing, and the assertion always seems rather doubtful.) “Everybody likes to be recognized by his peers. It would have made me feel better.”Footnote ²⁸ This is not a compelling rationale for fudging the securities laws. Yet more disturbing was the agreement (“Steve was the informal leader. …”) among Apple, Google, and a number of other technology companies not to hire engineers from one another. Steve took “mordant pleasure” at the firing of a Google recruiter for hiring an Apple engineer after he complained to Google’s CEO about poaching talent. “When Jobs heard the news, his email reply was a smiley face icon.”Footnote ²⁹

Someone was fired for hiring an engineer away from Apple. This agreement among companies was probably illegal. But one should think beyond legality to the morality on display here. Engineers are the men and women who make the wheels go round in the giant machine that is this nation’s technology industry. The picture of a bunch of billionaires keeping the salaries of these people below what they would be in a free market is not appealing. The new and improved Steve may have learned to deploy his talents more strategically. However, even Schlender and Tetzeli offer no good explanation for this kind of behavior, which can be characterized as unseemly at best and dirty at worst.

If you are going to read one big book about Steve Jobs, which of these two should it be? It is a close call, but I would recommend Schlender and Tetzeli. Their knowledge of the industry in which Jobs made his name is first rate. With the important exception of making Schlender part of the story—he appears often in the book and is a distraction—the writing is very good. They had a couple of more years to reflect on their subject than did Isaacson, and they made the most of that time.

Other Books on Steve Jobs

If neither of these books is quite satisfactory, where can one go to learn about Steve Jobs, the whole person? There are some good books that capture parts of the puzzle.

Randall E. Stross is a historian whose PhD from Stanford is in East Asian Studies but most of whose books deal with technology. In 1993, he published Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing. A pleasure to read, this book deals with the low point of Jobs's career. NeXT, the computer company he founded after being fired from Apple in 1985, was a train wreck with Jobs the conductor. An important contribution of this book results from Stross's understanding of what charisma is and what made Jobs charismatic. Specifically, Jobs's charisma derived “from a perceived connection to the overarching questions of human existence. … Others could pursue the mundane [such as profits]. He was after the much larger quarry of changing the world, rescuing computer users from the existing prison of mediocrity, making a dent in the universe, carrying out revolution, claiming an enduring place in history; it was the extraordinary scope of his ambition that was the ultimate source of his appeal.”Footnote ³⁰ Stross also observes that “Steve Jobs is persuasive only because we have our own needs that mesh with his. As a society, we are desperate for the heroic figure, and if Steve Jobs wields powers of persuasion with few equals, the credit or blame … should also fall upon the audience.”Footnote ³¹ Stross is right. Jobs was only in part a self-made man. The other part was created by those, a not insignificant number, who needed what he represented. Stross published his book in 1993, when there seemed to be no chance that Jobs's grand vision would be realized. He was looking like a one-hit wonder, another Orson Welles, who peaked at the age of twenty-five and spent the rest of his life trying to recapture the magic.Footnote ³² From boy wonder to has-been.

Another worthwhile book is Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration, Ed Catmull's recounting of the creation of Pixar's remarkable culture. While Jobs was engaged in the quixotic venture that was NeXT, his involvement with Pixar began in 1986. Steve, as noted, bought what became Pixar for $5 million and put another $5 million into the company. This was his own money. The deal closed in February of 1986. Against the odds, Pixar became a spectacular success. Its success was not easily achieved. CEO Catmull and his team “had to figure out … the yin and the yang of working with Steve.” At first, it wasn't easy. “Steve was often impatient and curt. … He was young and driven and not yet attuned to his impact on others. … [He] didn't ‘get’ normal people—meaning people who did not run companies or who lacked personal confidence.” Declarations such as “These charts are bullshit” and “This deal is crap” were not uncommon in the early years.Footnote ³³

There were glimmers of brilliance in Pixar's people and in its early computerized animation. There was, however, one problem. “[W]e were,” writes Catmull, “just hemorrhaging money.” It was Steve's money. By the late 1980s, he had put $54 million into Pixar--“a significant chunk of his net worth”Footnote ³⁴ “Pixar could not have survived without Steve,” writes Catmull. But in the late 1980s and early 1990s, “I wasn't sure if we'd survive with him. Steve could be brilliant and inspirational, capable of diving deeply and intelligently into any problem we faced. But he could also be impossible: dismissive, condescending, threatening, even bullying.”Footnote ³⁵ Most worrisome, he lacked empathy. Watching him change—indeed, playing a key role in his maturation—was Catmull's responsibility. He was masterful. Catmull was (and is) not only brilliant but exceptionally decent. The story of Catmull, Jobs, and Pixar is as beautiful and touching as any Pixar picture. In his concluding observations, Catmull writes that Steve's “wife and children, of course, were paramount, and Apple was his first and most heralded achievement. Pixar was a place he could relax a little and play. While he never lost his intensity, we watched him develop the ability to listen. More and more he could express empathy and caring and patience. He became truly wise. The change in him was real, and it was deep.”Footnote ³⁶

The product was always paramount for Jobs, and upon his return Apple became the quintessential product-first company. The product that transformed it from merely a computer maker, in which it could never have been more than a niche player, to a consumer-electronics powerhouse was the iPod. The best appreciation of this perfect product is Steven Levy's delightful treatment of the iPod, The Perfect Thing. Levy published this book in 2006. The next year, Apple premiered the iPhone, the most successful new product introduction of this century. The iPhone would not have been possible had it not been preceded by the iPod. Along with its introduction of the iPhone in 2007, Apple changed its name. It dropped “Computer” to become Apple, Inc., and was on the road to realizing the ambitions that Stross wrote about, which had seemed so unlikely when his book appeared.

Portable music players had been around for a while; but the iPod, introduced in October of 2001, revolutionized the whole music industry. “By the end of 2005,” writes Levy,

Why was the iPod such a screaming success? Some of Levy's chapter titles tell us: “Perfect,” “Personal,” “Cool,” “Identity.” The most enjoyable chapter is “Cool.” The advertising was cool. It was cool that Oprah Winfrey, the Queen of All Media, twice declared the iPod one of her “Favorite Things,” giving each person in her lucky studio audience of 350 a free iPod on one occasion (and the audience erupted with joy). It was more than this, however. As Levy writes, “the iPod declared itself cool from the get-go.”Footnote ³⁸ “On the first day I got my iPod,” a twelve-year-old girl reported, “I kissed it good night.”Footnote ³⁹ This is far more than customer satisfaction. This is surprise and delight!

Much has been made of Jobs's product philosophy, especially the importance of simplicity and of the user interface. He built his career and his charisma on the idea that your technology is your servant. It must work for you. The technology in a product must be so simple that it disappears, leaving only the product to marvel at. The best book on how this sausage was made is software engineer Ken Kocienda's Creative Selection, published in 2018. Kocienda's description of his demonstration of keyboards for the upcoming iPad to Jobs at the ridiculously misnamed conference room called “Diplomacy” on the old Apple campus is the best discussion of its kind. When Kocienda was ushered into the conference room, Jobs was on his iPhone. He finished his call and then turned to Kocienda. “His eyes met mine,” Kocienda writes.

It is in the description of this demo that one sees concretely the workings of the drive for simplicity and taste. “Steve figured that the best way to answer difficult questions … was to avoid the need to ask them.” That belief guided the decision Steve made about the choice Kocienda placed before him. Kocienda marvels at “how much Steve taught me in one meeting where he spoke just four sentences.”Footnote ⁴¹ Creative Selection is the best “show don't tell” book of its kind. Kocienda shows us how Jobs extracted simplicity from complexity.

If one's goal is to learn of the whole person, then the brilliant book Small Fry: A Memoir by Jobs's out-of-wedlock daughter Lisa Brennan-Jobs is indispensable.Footnote ⁴² How this woman grew up to be sane is one of life's mysteries. The book review in the New Yorker puts it well: “Brennan-Jobs admires her father's brilliance and charisma, but her memoir elicits little sympathy for him and Small Fry, a book of no small literary skill, is confused and conflicted, angry and desperate to forgive. Its central, compelling puzzle is Brennan-Jobs's continuing need to justify not just her father's behavior but her longing for his love. It is mesmerizing … discomfiting reading.”Footnote ⁴³

Discomfiting indeed. The book is filled with sentences such as “I felt that I was with him [Steve] and also alone.” “Inspiring love, I thought, had to do with being defenseless.” “I began to see how inside my father there were two competing qualities: one sensitive and specific as a nerve in a tooth, the other unaware, blunt, and bland.” “There was a thin line between civility and cruelty in him, between what did and did not set him off.” At Lisa's tenth birthday, “I walked between my parents, holding their hands. It was ecstasy.” She felt she was “joining the two sides.”Footnote ⁴⁴ On his deathbed, Steve said to Lisa, “I'm so sorry. I owe you one.”Footnote ⁴⁵ He did.

Who Was Steve Jobs?

A superb businessman with a unique combination of common and uncommon sense. A man who was capable of growth but only under ideal circumstances. A decisive man. An imaginative man. A mercurial and untrustworthy man who gave himself permission to display hard-hearted cruelty. A chiseler. A man who did not know himself. “I am who I am,” he said to Catmull.Footnote ⁴⁶ Quite different from Don Quixote’s declaration that “I know who I am.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Not a technologist of the caliber of his heroes—among whom was Robert Noyce, Intel employee number one who co-invented, along with Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments, the integrated circuit. But a man who did a great deal to make high technology an everyday companion to literally billions of people.

Is Jobs similar to any other American CEO? This is a question often asked. In one particular, the answer is no. Never has the death of an American CEO been met with such a global outpouring of emotion. Many learned of his death through his company's products—the Mac, the iPhone, or the iPad. By 2011 Apple was firmly in the communication business. Communication is next door to communion. Apple had entered the intimate lives of a lot of people. According to Isaacson, “history will place Jobs in the pantheon right next to Edison and Ford” (p. 566). Schlender and Tetzeli write that Jobs “became our generation's Edison and Ford and Disney and Elvis all rolled into one.” (p. 14). One assumes (one certainly hopes) Schlender and Tetzeli are joking about Elvis. Walt Disney is an interesting choice because of his creativity, his determination to go his own way, and his ability to create and, in a sense, inhabit his characters. Neal Gabler has written the best biography of Disney, its subtitle being “the triumph of the American imagination.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The phrase is appropriate in relation to Jobs. Thomas Edison, needless to say, will always be remembered for his inventions rather than for his business dealings.

This leaves Henry Ford. Steve referred to him often when explaining why Apple did not conduct focus groups. The reason was that customers did not know what they wanted. Jobs insisted that “our job is to figure out what [people are] going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, ‘If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, “A faster horse!” People don't know what they want until you show it to them.’”Footnote ⁴⁹ Ford probably never made that statement, but Jobs's point is clear.Footnote ⁵⁰

Ford put America on wheels. Jobs made communication and the consumption of a wide variety of media more available than ever. Both men can be credited with remarkable achievements, and both will find a place in the history books for decades to come. Another similarity is that the death of Ford (on April 7, 1947, at the age of eighty-three), like the death of Jobs, was regarded as an important event to the world outside his family and company (albeit not marked by the intensity of the reaction to Jobs's death). In Michigan, the state legislature interrupted its business “in commemoration of the passing of a great man.”Footnote ⁵¹ The governor ordered flags on state buildings lowered to half staff. In Detroit, the “common council directed that a large portrait of Ford, draped in mourning colors, be displayed on the front of the city hall for thirty days, and that mourning posters be displayed on buses. All motorists in Detroit were requested by the council to come to a complete halt as Ford's body was lowered into the grave.”Footnote ⁵² All automobile assembly lines in the United States stopped for one minute at that time. It has been estimated that seven million workers paused. The New York Times obituary observed that, “to a peculiar degree, Ford was the embodiment of America in the industrial revolution.”Footnote ⁵³ Nevertheless, Jobs and Ford had such different approaches to business and to life that these differences overwhelm any traits they might have shared. For Ford, the Model T was an appliance. It hardly changed from its introduction in 1908 to its discontinuance in 1927. His favorite slogan about it was “It takes you there and brings you back.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Ford had no sense of style. The idea of leavening technology with the humanities would have been utterly foreign to him.

The American businessperson most similar to Jobs was Edwin Land, founder of Polaroid. Indeed, Isaacson describes Land as “Jobs's hero” (p. 207). Both Jobs and Land were college dropouts. Both were autodidacts in technology-intensive industries. Both were charismatic. Both were handsome. Both were superb showmen when introducing new products. Most important, both cultivated an aesthetic sense that they refused to let the business world strip them of. “I am first of all an artistic person,” said Land in 1975.Footnote ⁵⁵ One thinks of Jobs's whole life, from hanging around Reed College after dropping out in order to learn calligraphy to his numerous discussions about design with Jony Ive. One can imagine Land appreciating Bach. It is unimaginable that Ford could have appreciated two performances of the “Goldberg Variations” by the same pianist.

Land explained Polaroid's success with a line that one can imagine coming from Jobs: “Virtue and a good product are invincible.”Footnote ⁵⁶ His most famous invention was instant photography, the purpose of which, he said, was “essentially aesthetic.”Footnote ⁵⁷ In 1985, Jobs said, “Not only was [Land] one of the great inventors of our time, but, more importantly, he saw the intersection of art and science and business and built an organization to reflect that. … The man is a national treasure.”Footnote ⁵⁸ When Jobs visited Land at the Rowland Institute (a research organization that Land created), Tom Hughes, who knew both men, described an emotional side of Jobs that he had not previously seen: “It was sort of a father son reunion. Steve was so clearly in admiration of … Land and taken with every word he had to share. It was a very touching moment in time.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Steve Jobs was a man who believed that the rules did not apply to him. This belief served him well in many instances. He really did embody the Apple slogan of which he was so fond: “Think Different.” But his inability to differentiate rules that are sensible from those that are not will forever cast a shadow on his reputation. In the case of his health, his inability to follow the appropriate rules when it came to dealing with cancer may well have cost him his life. One writer described Jobs as “the last charismatic individual.”Footnote ⁶⁰ This is doubtless not true. However, there is no better illustration of the power of charisma than Jobs's career. He is today the touchstone of charisma among business leaders.