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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