Reading Steve Jobs

The NeXT Steve Jobs
(AP photo)

A couple of weeks ago I noted that Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs bio was “a swing and a miss,” without going into any more detail than that, and now of course there’s a popular new Jobs bio from Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, called Becoming Steve Jobs. I just finished that one last night, so how do the two stack up?

The consensus — from Tim Cook down to the lowliest blogger — seems to be that Isaacson’s book was just no good and totally unfair to Jobs, and that the new book is filled with win. I don’t entirely buy into the consensus, although Becoming is a much better effort than Isaacson’s Jobs. I’ll explain why.

Whether or not Isaacson was “fair” to Jobs, he missed the most important story of Steve’s life, despite his book being authorized by Jobs and despite conducting dozens or hundreds of hours of interviews with his subject. I’ll leave the subject of “fairness” to people who knew the man in real life, but there’s no doubt he could be a monster, especially in his younger days. So what did Isaacson miss?

Jobs was tossed out of Apple in 1985 in a boardroom fight with the CEO whom Jobs himself had handpicked. Steve’s product record was spotty, his attention level was erratic, his personal life was a mess, and his ability to work with people was, shall we say, uneven. Twelve years later, Jobs came back to Apple and led a product renaissance unlike anything in business history. It started with the iMac and ended with the iPad. In between he slimmed down and revamped the Macintosh line, introduced the iPod, and with the iPhone created the bestselling and most profitable electronics device in history. Somehow he also found the time to reinvent the laptop, change the way we buy and listen to music, and create from scratch the world’s most profitable retail chain. The company he left to Tim Cook is now the most valuable in the world — and #2 ain’t even close.

Along the way, I can think of only two product misfires, and both of those were minor products. One was the Motorola ROKR, a flip phone with a crippled version of iTunes able to hold and play just 100 songs. Jobs himself looked embarrassed to introduce the phone. The other misfire was the Power Mac G4 Cube. It was beautiful, and an engineering and design marvel. But it was also underpowered and overpriced. Collectors still prize it and it holds a spot at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, but it never made a dent in the market. Nothing could have saved the ROKR, but the Cube was just a price cut and faster CPU away from being the hit it otherwise should have been.

Not a bad record — so what happened? How did the brat with the hit-and-miss product record, who got himself canned by his own board, come back after 12 years to become a solid family man and the Henry Ford and the Thomas Edison of our modern age?

The tale is to be found in Steve’s experiences with the two companies he ran during his wilderness years, NeXT and Pixar.

Isaacson’s book gave short shrift to that time period, and how Jobs changed and grew during it. He was a jerk at the beginning, he was a jerk at the end, and the reader never learns from Isaacson how that jerk did what he did.

That’s a big swing and a big miss.

Now the full title of Schlender & Tetzeli’s book is Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader. Right there in the title you’re given the impression that the authors — who also had long professional relationships with Jobs — explicitly intended their book to be
a correction to Isaacson’s. And they succeeded. You read their book and you will learn how that reckless upstart evolved into that visionary leader. It’s a great story, well told.

In my own interest of fairness is where I must break from the consensus.

Isaacson’s book has a fatal flaw, yes — but his time with Jobs allowed him to tell personal and business stories you never got to read anywhere else before. So Isaacson might have whiffed on the One Big Tale, but he got lots of little tales exactly right. The weakness of Schlender & Tetzeli’s book is that by now you’ve already read all of those little tales, so other than the One Big Tale, they don’t add much that many readers didn’t already know.

Isaacson’s book might be a better portrait of the troubled man Jobs often was, but Schlender & Tetzeli provide the story of the business leader Jobs willed himself into becoming. Both books might be necessary for truly understanding him, but Schlender & Tetzeli tell the much more important tale.