Book Summary: "Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography"- Walter Isaacson
Brief about the Book:
Jobs is one of the most enigmatic personalities of our time. Jobs was a bohemian who followed Zen Buddhism in pursuit of enlightenment. On the other hand, he became an entrepreneur and innovator catering to the technological and material world leading to the creation of a company which is one of the most valued companies with a market cap of half a trillion dollars. He never pined for wealth for himself but became the greatest wealth creator of all time. His almost ruthless ways of dealing with associates can be traced to his bitterness of being abandoned by his biological parents. Jobs’ obsession with perfection is also a concomitant outcome of his background and upbringing. Jobs contradictions show in every aspect of his life; “he who is abandoned turned around and abandoned his child” from his live-in girlfriend.
Jobs’ biography is a must-read for all management students and innovation/marketing students. His management style may be unconventional almost bordering on tyranny but it is worth examining his ability to innovate, think ahead of our times, design, execute and market products without the benefit of market research. Jobs himself is not an engineer but saw himself at the intersection of humanities and technology thus bringing sense to technology. This approach led to the design of products which are user-friendly and intuitive. He was the first to realize the potential of a graphical interface and introduce it in his Apple computers. The book talks about how he raided the Xerox R&D Center and stole their ideas; however, credit should be given to him for realizing the potential of graphical interface technology and executing the technology through his Apple products. Management gurus acknowledge that it is not the innovation but the execution and marketing of the idea that helps a product succeed. Jobs will be remembered in history as one of the greatest marketing geniuses who was able to translate ideas and innovations into products which delighted customers.
Book publication date: October 2011.
Brief about the Author:
Walter Isaacson:-
Walter Isaacson is a Professor of History at Tulane and an advisory partner at Perella Weinberg, a financial services firm based in New York City. He has been the CEO of the Aspen Institute, the CEO of CNN, and the editor of Time Magazine.
He is a host of the show “Amanpour and Company” on PBS and CNN, a contributor to CNBC, host of the podcast “Trailblazers, from Dell Technologies.”
Isaacson graduated from Harvard College and Pembroke College of Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.
He began his career at The Sunday Times of London and then the New Orleans Times-Picayune. He joined TIME in 1978 and became the magazine’s 14th editor in 1996. He became CEO of CNN in 2001 and the CEO of the Aspen Institute in 2003.
He is chair emeritus of Teach for America. From 2005-2007 he was the vice-chair of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, which oversaw the rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina.
President Barack Obama appointed him to serve as the chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which runs Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and other international broadcasts of the United States. He has also been a member of the U.S. Defense Innovation Board.
In 2023, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Joe Biden.
STEVE JOBS:- Book Review
Prologue:
The book throws light on Jobs’ approach to strategy and innovation. His approach to introducing and marketing a new product is very intuitive and not based on involved market research. He strongly believed that you should figure out what the customer wants and create the wow factor.
Walter Isaacson’s book will be a great read for all management graduates, managers and product innovators to get an insight into one of the most enigmatic and creative personalities in the business world. His approach to product development, design, and marketing is purely intuitive and defy all conventional theories of management. His obsession for perfection applied imagination, and innovation serves as a great case study for future managers and entrepreneurs.
Job’s arrogance and low emotional quotient led to his expelling from the company he founded. This whole experience has transformed Jobs making him more humble and enabling him to reinvent himself.
Jobs used this downtime to infuse his energy and creativity into building Pixar, an animation company making it a very successful venture. Eventually, Jobs was recalled to head up Apple and reverse its fortunes. Once he took reins of the Apple, Jobs unleashed his creative energies bringing out runaway successes like the iPad, iPhone, and iPod making Apple one of the most valuable companies in terms of market capitalization.
Section 1: Childhood: Abandoned and Chosen.
Steve Jobs was born in 1955 and adopted as a baby because his biological mother did not dare to marry Jobs’ biological father against the strong objections of her father. Jobs’ adoptive parents were always open about the adoption to Steve, and when Steve asked why didn’t his parents want him they replied that he was wrong, because they specifically chose him. Jobs would forever consider his adopted parents as his real parents and his biological parents as “a sperm and egg bank”. The fact that his adoptive parents told him they specifically picked him made him feel special, and they doted on Steve and provided a stable family life.
Steve Jobs was very much a child of the 60s, a decade of youthful rebellion. He was troublesome while growing up and played many pranks in school. Jobs held a disdain for authority and possessed a rebellious nature that would last throughout his life. This rebellious mentality would infuse itself into Apple’s brand image later on.
It was while attending Homestead High School in Cupertino, California that Steve Jobs met his future business partner, Steve Wozniak. Wozniak had also attended Homestead High earlier but had already graduated, and they were introduced through a mutual friend because both were into doing pranks and working with electronics. In addition to teaming up to play pranks on others, Jobs and Wozniak made money from the electronics they built, including a device to make long-distance calls for free, which they called the Blue Box.
The fact that Steve Jobs grew up in the middle of Silicon Valley probably contributed to his interest in technology. Before he founded Apple he worked at Atari as a technician, acquiring technical expertise.
Jobs attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and was immersed in the hippie culture of the time. He would adopt a vegan diet, attend Hare Krishna temples, become a practitioner of Zen Buddhism, and go live in hippie communes. He even travelled to India for 7 months to find spiritual enlightenment. His vegan diet and spirituality were not a temporary stint but would accompany him for the rest of his life.
After dropping out of Reed because he found the education meaningless, Jobs continued to attend some of the classes he was interested in and developed a special interest in calligraphy. It was this interest in calligraphy that later led to the development of multiple text fonts on personal computers.
Section 2: The Apple: The Dawn of a New Age.
Jobs moved back in with his parents and started working at Atari. He was back home with friends and family, including Wozniak, and was once again living in the middle of Silicon Valley.
The two Steves started attending the Homebrew Computer Club in 1975, and the next year they decided to start a computer company to sell the computers they were making. They named the company Apple Computer, after Jobs’ diet of apples and his walks in the apple orchard of the hippie commune he used to live in. They made computers at Jobs’ parents’ garage and sold them to local electronic dealers.
Apple Computer Company scaled quickly when the businessman Mike Markkula saw the potential the company had and invested $250,000 during Apple’s incorporation. He was soon joined by other investors.
With greater funding, a charismatic spokesman in Steve Jobs, and an engineering genius in Steve Wozniak, Apple developed the Apple 2, which was a giant success.
I won’t get into too much detail about everything Steve Jobs did during his career at Apple in the 1980s, there would be too much to write about, but there are a few insights into Jobs’ personality and management style during this time.
Jobs had a deep passion for the products he created. Instead of having the mindset of making products to generate profit, Jobs thought of profits as a way to fund the development of better products. He saw himself as an artist and the products he developed as works of art. Part of what made Apple so successful is that the engineers designing the products wanted to use them themselves.
But Jobs’ passion for creating great products can sometimes cross the line into bullying his team for anything short of excellence. He would yell and berate people for being “B players”, tell them their work is crap, and give extremely demanding deadlines.
Many who worked with Jobs described him as having a “reality distortion field”. As Bud Tribble, a member of the Macintosh team, explained, “In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he’s not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules”. Jobs’ charisma and indomitable will bent “any fact to fit the purpose at hand”. He would make seemingly unrealistic demands on his team, but his team sometimes managed to perform the unrealistic because Jobs convinced them they could. As one Macintosh team member described, “It was a self-fulfilling distortion…You did the impossible because you didn’t realize it was impossible”.
But Jobs didn’t always put people down. He would sometimes call people “insanely great” or a “total genius”. To Jobs, someone was either a genius or terrible, there was no middle ground.
Section 3: Building The Mac: The Journey Is The Reward.
The 1984 Macintosh commercial that portrayed IBM as Big Brother from the dystopian 1984 novel by George Orwell, and Apple as the liberating force that breaks Big Brother’s mind-numbing control of the masses, reflects the way Steve Jobs wanted to brand Apple as a company. The 1984 commercial is considered one of the most successful commercials of all time, and the Macintosh sold extremely well.
However, Jobs’ management style put him at odds with many people at Apple, including CEO John Sculley who would end up forcing Jobs out of the company he founded. After initially forming a strong friendship, Jobs would later repeatedly challenge Sculley’s ideas and decisions and talk badly about him behind his back. Furthermore, Jobs “was frequently obnoxious, rude, selfish, and nasty to other people”. In addition to frequently berating his staff, one common occurrence that multiple employees reported is that someone would go up to Jobs with an idea, have Jobs tell them that idea was crap, and in a few days Jobs would present the idea to the whole team as if it was his idea.
Eventually, the rest of the board forced Sculley to act and remove Jobs as the head of the Macintosh division and place him as the head of a new AppleLabs R&D group because even though Jobs was a toxic manager he had an incredible passion and talent for developing new products. Jobs refused the reorganization plan and tried to force Sculley out of Apple. There was a showdown at a board meeting where the board was forced to choose between Sculley and Jobs, and they sided with Sculley. Sculley remained conciliatory until he continued to hear reports of Jobs trying to enlist a rebellion to oust him, and so Sculley even removed the option of becoming the head of AppleLabs from the table. In 1985, less than a decade after Apple was founded, Jobs was forced out of his own company, one that became so successful in such a short period.
领英推荐
After he left Apple, Steve Jobs took a few top employees and founded NeXT Inc., a computer company focused on selling to the higher education and business markets. He received funding from the billionaire Ross Perot, and it became a mildly successful business.
Section 4: Pixar: Technology Meets Art.
Jobs found greater success, though, when he founded and took over the animation company, Pixar, in 1986. Pixar would later produce blockbusters like Toy Story (1995), A Bug’s Life (1998), Toy Story 2 (1999), Monsters, Inc. (2001), Finding Nemo (2003), The Incredibles (2004), and Cars (2006). Jobs had a special respect for artists and creative people and did not interfere too much with his creative chief John Lasseter. Disney would acquire Pixar in 2006 through an all-stock transaction, making Steve Jobs Disney’s largest shareholder.
Meanwhile, Apple declined after Jobs’ departure, doing very poorly in the 1990s. To Steve Jobs’ good fortune, Apple failed to create a new operating system in 1996 and decided to acquire Jobs’ NeXT company to use its operating system, bringing Jobs back into Apple. The CEO of Apple at the time, Gil Amelio, wanted Jobs to be the new head of operating system development, but Jobs’ hesitancy (he had his own responsibilities at Pixar) led them to put Jobs in a position as an advisor. Jobs made sure his people from NeXT transitioned well and were put in good positions, and contributed some much-needed advice to the company he founded.
Section 5: Think Different: Jobs as iCEO.
In 1997, because Apple was in such a poor state at the time, the board of directors wanted to fire Amelio and make Jobs the CEO. Jobs was hesitant, but the board fired Amelio anyway and made Fred Anderson interim CEO, with instructions to take his cues from Jobs. Jobs became more involved in his “advisor” role but was effectively the de facto CEO. Shortly after, Jobs formally took over as interim CEO, calling himself the iCEO. In 2000, he dropped the “interim” title and became the official CEO of Apple.
It was Jobs’ second tenure at Apple that most people today remember him for. The iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, and much more, all came from this time. The iMac completely revamped the personal computer industry. The iPod revolutionized the music industry, while the iPhone did the same for the phone industry, and the iPad did so for the tablet computing industry. Today’s smartphone-obsessed culture all began when Steve Jobs first introduced the iPhone in 2007, combining the purposes of an iPod, a computer, and a conventional phone all into one device.
One of the first things Steve Jobs did to turn Apple around was to cut down all the unnecessary products and focus on just a few. There were simply too many versions of similar products that made Apple an unfocused mess. He drew a chart with two columns and two rows. One column was titled “Consumer”, and the other “Pro”. One row was titled “Desktop”, and the other “Portable”. There would be four computer products to fit each of the four categories, and that was it.
Steve Jobs also rebranded Apple to get back to its roots, launching the immensely successful “Think Different” campaign, selling Apple as the computer company for people who want to challenge the status quo.
Moreover, Jobs was a brilliant marketer who used simple slogans to speak to people’s desires. The slogan for the iPod campaign, for example, was simply “1000 songs in your pocket”, and was incredibly successful.
The way Jobs was able to unveil products to a lot of media hype also demonstrates his marketing genius. A tactic Jobs used, even in his early days in the 1980s, was to offer multiple magazines and news agencies exclusive rights to a story about a product unveiling, so that when he unveiled a product the story would be on or near the front page of newspapers and magazines across the world, and on television reports as well. Jobs’ charismatic presentation style only added to the hype.
Section 6: New Battles: And Echoes of Old Ones.
For all his success as a businessman and inventor, Jobs had a complicated personal life. Abandoned by his birth parents as a baby, he would do the same to his out-of-wedlock daughter, Lisa, born in 1978 to his high school girlfriend Chrisann Brennan. At first, he denied paternity and had to take a paternity test, and even after that, he was pretty distant from Lisa. Jobs would later try to form a better relationship with his daughter, moving her into his house when she was in high school, but their relationship remained rocky up until Jobs’ fight with cancer and his looming death.
Jobs had several serious relationships and in 1991 married Laurene Powell, whom he met while giving a lecture at Stanford where she was a business student. By all accounts, they had a happy marriage and had three children.
Section 7: Legacy: The Brightest Heaven of Invention.
Steve Jobs died in 2011, aged 56, after a long fight with pancreatic cancer. Part of the problem was that he refused initial surgery because he believed in natural remedies through his vegan diet. When his cancer got worse, he had to relax his vegan restrictions to get more protein.
Steve Jobs lived a remarkable life and left a powerful legacy behind. The personal computer industry, which is now so ingrained in the modern lifestyle, was built through his desire to create computers for the masses, rather than focus on selling only to business people and professionals like most computer companies were doing up until the 1980s. Jobs transformed the animated movie industry, and many of the animated films we cherish today were created during his tenure at Pixar. His development of the iPod completely changed how music was consumed. The iPhone was even more revolutionary, introducing the new smartphone age where people today use these devices for so many different purposes, from making phone calls, texting, sending emails, using the Internet, ordering food, ordering an Uber or other car-sharing service, checking the weather, navigation, taking pictures, filming videos, watching movies or TV shows, reading a book, and the list is almost endless. Lastly, the iPad Jobs introduced became sort of a middle device between a smartphone and a computer. It is more portable and convenient to hold and place than a computer, but had a wider display than a smartphone.
Few men have had as much of an impact on the world as Steve Jobs, and his life is both an inspiration and a fascinating story of how many of the technologies we take for granted today came to be.
Conclusion.
Learning:
While Apple remains one of the most innovative companies in the world and the products that Steve built changed industries – whether it be the MacBook, the iPod, the iPad, iTunes, etc. – Steve lived outside of the box as a person and through his company as well.
Steve embodied innovation and creativity, and the book talks about just a few of his outside-the-box lifestyle decisions like how he wouldn’t shower for days, went on full fruit diets, didn’t furnish his mansion with more than a mattress and a few couches, and others.
This is more business-focused, but the reality is a lot of companies rely heavily on market research and focus groups. For the right businesses in the right industries this makes sense – but not for what Steve was doing.
For example, you couldn’t have a focus group where someone would say “I want an iPod”, because it didn’t exist yet. This was eye-opening because in a lot of high-tech, innovative type industries it may not be helpful to actually try and figure out what customers want – and Steve never did.
He didn’t do any market, industry or consumer research at all. Instead, he just went in and designed what he thought were amazing products and kept them simplistic and stylistic.
Research is important depending, depending on what you’re doing. If you’re trying to reinvent the wheel, as Steve was constantly, then you might not want to spend a lot of time and money on market research.
The obvious example of this is the big Coke fiasco (I think it was in the 70s or 80s) when they did focus groups because they wanted to launch a new formula for Coke. All the focus group results pointed to this new formula, but when they launched it, it completely flopped.
Yes, you want to know your customers, but sometimes they don’t always know what they want.
It’s become so common – you know the whole “Follow Your Passion” thing – but what does it mean?
If you read this book and learn more about Steve, you’re going to see one of the most honest examples of someone just ruthlessly following their passion – almost to a fault.
Not listening to other people, being extremely stubborn, being rude, treating people poorly, letting his health slide – that’s how badly and passionately Steve wanted Apple to succeed. I’m not saying you should do all of those things, and I do believe he probably could’ve been just as successful and maybe treated some people better in the process, but Steve embodied true passion and is an example of what can happen if you pursue yours ruthlessly for that long of a period.
Get the link to buy this book: https://amzn.to/46mj6qQ
Senior Manager at HDFC Bank | MBA, Strategic Leadership
7 个月Get the link to buy this book: https://amzn.to/46mj6qQ
Senior Manager at HDFC Bank | MBA, Strategic Leadership
9 个月Reading date: December 2020.