Book Review

Book Review: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

When I put the Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs on hold at the Free Library of Philadelphia, I was apparently like the 150^th person on line. So months later, it was finally my turn to take a crack at the tome.

Now, in full disclosure, I didn’t have a Mac or any apple products at all till my husband bought me an Ipod nano around 2006 or so. Despite learning to program with my dad when I was eight and being a computer science major, I hadn’t really gotten my hands on an apple product. Apple products weren’t made to be opened and messed with, so we didn’t have one. (One small experience in college trying to write in smalltalk to interface with excel was about the sum of my exposure.)

So it was curiosity more than anything that led me to the Isaacson’s book, which attempts to demystify Steve Jobs.  Jobs definitely lived his mythology – the wanderer who would go out into the wilderness and bring back wisdom to the masses. It’s a theme that repeats itself throughout his life. He wasn’t going to realize his full potential till he had traveled the wanderer’s journey in his own mind. He was going to go away to an expensive college far from home to gain wisdom.  Later he would travel to India and travel the villages looking for enlightenment. Interestingly, his best work at Apple was after he was kicked out, when he returned from exile. Jobs took time in exile seriously, he sold all of his stock when he was kicked out of Apple (except one share) and worked for free for several years when he came back. I think he may have almost drove Apple into the ground at the beginning because he was subconsciously trying to get kicked out. He needed to have a heroic return to fulfill his own prophecy. Because of this personal vision of his being a technology sadu as it where, Apple was always going to be a consumer company (versus Microsoft or Oracle, which mostly sells to institutions).

There was a lot about his personality and how he ran Apple that has a lot in common with cults and guru-disciple relationships. Tech people generally don’t have “reality distortion fields”.  However Jobs wasn’t a tech guy. He was a marketing and design guy mostly.  That’s one of the things that really surprised me; I had assumed the founder of Apple was a true tech guy. He wasn’t.  However, reading this I don’t think money and material things really mattered to him either. I think he was playing with a different set of rules in his head. He had some internal karma scale that weighed his decisions and how he approached things. The level of complexity he dealt with – in Apple and Pixar – was more about his own personal journey and mental ability and less about financial ambition (it was more of a spiritual and intellectual ambition).  

That there was some underlying mental illness is not in doubt.  He had personal qualities that could only be tolerated in a company he owned. Any employee who acted the way he did would be fired anywhere else in any organization.  That he accomplished a great deal is not in doubt – but was it worth the price paid? Is everything he did for technology worth the price his children paid? While there was much to be admired and learn (his laser like focus and quest for simplicity) there was much that made me cringe (family neglect). Overall it’s a book worth reading on many levels, though reading it with an eye to emulation carries some road hazards.