Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

A Book Summation* by Wayne Maruna

Steve Jobs is a 500+ page biography by Walter Isaacson, former chairman of CNN and former managing editor of Time Magazine. In 2004, Isaacson was approached by Jobs to author his biography.  He resisted until 2009 when Jobs’ faithful wife of twenty years, Laurene Powell, bluntly made Isaacson aware of the severity of Jobs’ closely guarded dire battle with pancreatic cancer. Isaacson went into full investigative mode early in 2010, and in the time remaining prior to Jobs’ death on Oct. 5, 2011, was able to engage in over 40 interviews with Jobs plus numerous interviews with those who knew and worked with him.  The book was published just three weeks after Jobs’ death.

Isaacson had just finished a biography of Benjamin Franklin, was about to release a book on Henry Kissinger, and was starting on a biography of Albert Einstein when Jobs first approached him.  Isaacson wondered at the time if Jobs saw himself as the natural successor to the other three subjects.

The business successes and occasional failures of Jobs have been well documented and are fully detailed here.  While numerous books have been written about Jobs and Apple Computer, which he co-founded with engineering wizard Steve Wozniak in 1976, this book focuses more on the person.

He was born in 1955 to an unwed Midwestern grad student of German heritage who was pregnant by a teaching assistant from Syria, and who was compelled to give up her child for adoption.  As a result, Steve was raised in Los Altos, CA by blue-collar mechanic Paul Jobs and his wife Clara. The community was part of what came to be called Silicon Valley when tech firms started flowering and growing about the time Steve was in his formative years. His parents did not hide his adoptive status from him, and the fact that his birth parents (who later married) would give him up is thought to have troubled him the rest of his life and perhaps may have contributed to his drive and demeanor.

Art and Technology

One of Job’s heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, spoke about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences. That was what Jobs aimed to be, a person who could combine both humanities and science into one strong personality, much as Franklin and Einstein had.  This juncture of art and technology lies at the heart of much of what Jobs accomplished. He thought himself an artist and indulged in the temperament of one.  Many words have been used to describe Jobs, often in the extreme:  passionate, petulant, perfectionist, obsessively controlling, relentlessly focused, and perhaps above all intense.  He is said to have had a binary view of the world, meaning things were either excellent or, um, let’s call it junk, though that was not the word he used. There was no acceptable middle ground with Jobs, no ‘good enough’.

Not a Model Human Being

The author makes it clear that Jobs was not a model boss or human being. Prior to meeting his wife, one of the greatest loves of Jobs’ personal life was long-time girlfriend Tina Redse.  The two had a strong chemistry, but Tina knew they could never sustain a life together.  She later read an article on Narcissistic Personality Disorder and decided that Jobs perfectly met the criteria. “The capacity for empathy is lacking", she said.

Jobs could masterly cajole and enchant people, but at the same time any perceived flaw could set off a rant.  Author Isaacson writes: “Most people have a regulator between their mind and mouth that modulates their brutish sentiments and spikiest impulses.  Not Jobs.”  He adds: “Even his family members wondered whether he lacked the filter that restrains people from venting their wounding thoughts, or willfully bypassed it”. 

The book sites many instances where Jobs engaged in what his associates came to call his ‘reality distortion field’ where Jobs would simply ignore or refuse to internalize things he could not accept or deal with.  Rules did not apply to him.  The author cites as examples the fact that he never bothered to put a license plate on his car, and frequently utilized handicapped parking spots.

Legacy of Creativity

Yet despite his abrasive ways, there is no denying that Jobs transformed whole industries, changing the world as we know it. The author cites as examples: the Apple II, the first personal computer that was not just for hobbyists; the Macintosh, which begat the home computer revolution and popularized graphical user interfaces; Pixar, which Jobs ran prior to his return to Apple, and which changed digital animation; the iPod, which put a thousand songs in our pocket and changed the way we consume music; the iTunes store, which the author claims saved the music industry at a time of rampant music piracy; the iPhone, which turned mobile phones into music, photography, video, email, and web devices; and the iPad, which launched tablet computing, a platform for digital newspapers, magazines, books, and videos.

Jobs’ controlling nature was evident in his product designs. He was passionate about end-to-end integration of hardware and software. And with iTunes and the Apple retail stores, he extended that controlling integration to sales and marketing. He was a rigid proponent of closed systems, as opposed to the path that Microsoft took with Windows which was available to any and all hardware systems.  Jobs refused to license the Mac operating system to other system builders or to allow the porting of independently produced software to the iPhone or iPad without being vetted and offered through the Apple Store. He felt he knew better what the consumer wanted long before the consumer knew it. 

At the end of the book, Jobs is quoted as saying: “My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products.” He dreamed of creating a company so imbued with creativity that it would outlive him. By the time of his death, Jobs had built Apple into the most highly valued company on the face of the earth. Whether that legacy lives on without its flawed but intensely focused visionary leader, only time will tell.

*Some might call this a book review, but to my mind that implies some measure of critique. I do not feel qualified to critique the work of a writer with Mr. Isaacson's credentials. WAM