Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Book Review: "Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacson


Steve Jobs (2011)

5 Stars out of 5

Walter Isaacson

630 pages

The term “genius” is such an overused word to describe people of any notoriety: from basketball players good at sinking free throws to politicians that are capable of manipulating the press to celebrities famous for little more than being on a reality television program. In the case of Steve Jobs as described by Walter Isaacson in his 2011 authorized biography, “Steve Jobs” the term seems inadequate; and not just inadequate because the word has become trite through over-use, but quite frankly inadequate because if ever there was a person that simply cannot be summed up in a single word, then Steve Jobs is certainly that person. Here was an "orphaned" child growing up in the Silicon Valley-to-be (specifically, Palo Alto) with his adoptive blue collar parents (Paul and Clara Jobs) that was destined to play the pivotal role in shaping many of the consumer products to come out of the realized Silicon Valley. Here too was a man so filled with his vision of what was “great” that anyone that slowed his progress towards that perfect design for the objet de jour that this man could and would completely disregard any vestige of respect for his fellow as he vehemently castigated the problem co-worker; this B-team purveyor of “s**t”.

Walter Isaacson was the CEO of CNN, managing editor of Time magazine, and the biographer of Henry Kissinger (1992), Benjamin Franklin (2003), and Albert Einstein (2007) prior to being asked by Steve Jobs to write a biography of him. Knowing Jobs as well as he did, Isaacson initially refused Jobs’ request, fearing presumably a loss of control over the book. However, refusing Jobs is not a task easily accomplished and in 2009 Isaacson started a two year project on Steve Jobs that concluded with the biography being published a mere 19 days after Jobs’ death from cancer in October of 2011. Besides Jobs, Isaacson interviewed over 100 other people: friends and family, colleagues and enemies; all in order to get the authoritative biography of a man that wanted to leave a record for his son and two daughters that he had by Laurene Powell Jobs (well and maybe one more daughter – more on that below). Isaacson was given freedom to write as he would (except for the cover photo which was chosen by Jobs and was reported to be Jobs’ favorite photo of himself) – this one sentence alone is one of the most amazing facts of the biography; for if there was one thing that Jobs did not share, it was control.

There is a recurrent theme than runs through Isaacson’s book and Jobs’ life: dualism – there are few to no greys in the Steve Jobs’ story. It begins with Jobs being given up for adoption by his too young birth mother. Jobs would grow to despise his birth parents; “… sperm and egg banks”, Abdulfattah Jandali and Joanne Schieble Simpson (respectively and according to Jobs) and love to the very end his adoptive parents. The list of people that Jobs loved was a short one. But he greatly admired and was influenced by his mechanic father, Paul Jobs. While Jobs would grow to be rebellious to his infinitely patient adoptive parents, he would comment of Paul: “He loves doing things right. He cared about the look of things you couldn’t see.” It is very tempting to ponder how the role of "orphan" in the care of such loving parents, as well as the focus by Paul on “perfection” in the design and execution of projects would shape the growing Steve Jobs. Isaacson lists these influences but leaves it to the reader to draw his own conclusions. That the issue of what were the forces that shaped Steve Jobs is so important is partly due to the extremes of his personality and the accomplishments he would make, almost surely as a direct result of that personality.

The dualism theme continues in Jobs’ young adult years. He was not content to attend college, get a job and work his way up the corporate ladder. Instead, after working at Atari for a short while, he headed for India to live out some quasi-hippie dream of self-discovery. In time he returns to America and eventually reaches Reed College, a liberal arts school in the Portland OR area. He does not really learn much at school but he does continue his exploration of drugs and paradoxically various extreme vegan diets. I say paradoxically because he was convinced that good health was best achieved via diet, a theory that stands in stark contrast to his extensive experimentation with LSD and other hallucinogens.  And ironically may have contributed to his death from cancer as he tried to initially treat it with diet rather than medicine and surgery. Why Jobs felt food could damage his body but not the various drugs with which he experimented is one more of the mysteries of his life’s philosophy. Having finished his experiments in Portland, he returns to Palo Alto and begins the journey that was to demonstrate his “genius”.

It begins when he meets Steve Wozniak, the brilliant hardware engineer who would with Jobs and Ronald Wayne found Apple in 1976. Their first successful product would be the Apple II desk top computer. Jobs’ insistence of doing things his way would quickly become apparent. (Jobs would state in an interview with Isaacson that “he was usually right”; so despite the downside of verbally running over people, the ends clearly justified the means in Jobs’ view.) Whether or not Jobs was right about the Apple II design and that of its immediate successor or not, his behavior would open a breach between him and Wozniak that would essentially part them as co-workers forever. As would be his life-long pattern of “no greys”, Jobs would establish very early in his tenure at Apple that there were two ways: his way and the wrong way. This ethic would very well prove to be the driving force behind Jobs’ drive to force Apple into making the devices he fathered exactly as he wanted them. And the way he wanted them would include everything from the big picture of overall design to the shape of screw heads to the color of the factory machines that would build Apples’ products – even, as in this last case if it created formidable costs, delayed release dates, and even quality problems with the end product being manufactured.

One of the issues that would haunt Jobs from the time of the Apple II release was his illegitimate daughter Lisa. Jobs would father her with Chrisann Brennan, a woman from his hippie era at Reed College. Fearing (perhaps) that acknowledging Lisa at the time the Apple II was being released would tarnish it in the marketplace or perhaps simply because he was so focused on its release, Jobs refused to acknowledge Lisa or his relationship with Chrisann. Forced into court over his paternity, he eventually accepted his responsibility but he failed repeatedly in his role as father to Lisa. This created a decades-long tension between the two of them, and perhaps helped Jobs be a better father to the three children he had by Laurene; though even with the two girls (Erin and Eve), there was distance between father and daughter. Only with his son Reed, did Jobs pour himself into the role of father. Again, one is tempted to go back to Jobs’ own childhood and apparent sense of rejection by his birth parents to explain some aspects of Jobs’ failure as a father.

One family member that Jobs did adore and respect outside of this immediate family was the writer Mona Simpson. She was parented and raised by the same two that bore Jobs; though in her case and unlike Jobs, she was born after they were married. Like Jobs she is a brilliant and creative force, even writing a fictionalized novel about a Silicon Valley tycoon that would not acknowledge his daughter, “A Regular Guy” (1992). Interestingly enough, Jobs worked with Simpson to find their father, Jandali, but then having found him, Simpson alone would go to see him; and per a request from Jobs, she would not reveal to Jandali that she and jobs had found one another.

Besides his father Paul, other major influences on Jobs would be Bob Dylan’s music, Zen mysticism and the Bauhaus art movement. A major key to understanding Jobs can be found in these latter two disparate areas of study – both to some degree emphasize a return to simplicity. To Jobs, simplicity in design was where the true beauty in design could be found. This point of view from Jobs and from his later collaborator on design, Sir Jonathan Paul Ive (currently Apple's Chief Design Officer) would play a central role in all the devices Jobs would father: Apple II, Mac, Apple Stores, iPhone, iPad, and iPod. So thoroughly would this design philosophy shape Jobs, that it would even play a role in the layout of the Apple stores and the windows and floorplan in Apple’s headquarters building. And while it is not hard to argue that Zen helped bring Jobs to these design insights, it is hard to avoid noticing that the calm that Zen meditation normally brings its adherents clearly failed to help Jobs find his own inner peace. His drive to being an innovator, of being a perfectionist, of someone that would only bring a truly new piece of hardware or software to the market after it was as good as it could be made, was what likely made Steve Jobs the genius that he was at design, but also quite frankly the failure he was at human relations. This latter point would drive many highly competent employees away from Jobs, and like Wozniak, co-workers never to return.

Anyone that has worked in the various industries to be found in Silicon Valley or to be serving those industries will enjoy this book, if only for the superb history of that valley Isaacson has assembled. Anyone interested in how companies are birthed in the tech industry, how they are managed, and maybe driven into the ground will also find this book of considerable value. But in fact, anyone with any curiosity about human nature (admittedly human nature at one the extreme ends of its range) will find reading about Steve Jobs an informative and at times vexing experience. He was one that earned the title of genius, if only for his insistence on his way in design and for his inexorable willfulness in seeing his vision to fruition. It may well be, he is also an exemplar of how human nature can go astray. It really leaves the question though: did Jobs achieve his career long record of brilliance despite his personality defects, or because of them? This is a biography really worth reading in an attempt to answer that question.
 

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