Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader
Brent Schlender, Rick Tetzeli
Language: English
Pages: 464
ISBN: 0385347405
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
#1 New York Times Bestseller
There have been many books—on a large and small scale—about Steve Jobs, one of the most famous CEOs in history. But this book is different from all the others.
Becoming Steve Jobs takes on and breaks down the existing myth and stereotypes about Steve Jobs. The conventional, one-dimensional view of Jobs is that he was half-genius, half-jerk from youth, an irascible and selfish leader who slighted friends and family alike. Becoming Steve Jobs answers the central question about the life and career of the Apple cofounder and CEO: How did a young man so reckless and arrogant that he was exiled from the company he founded become the most effective visionary business leader of our time, ultimately transforming the daily life of billions of people?
Drawing on incredible and sometimes exclusive access, Schlender and Tetzeli tell a different story of a real human being who wrestled with his failings and learned to maximize his strengths over time. Their rich, compelling narrative is filled with stories never told before from the people who knew Jobs best, and who decided to open up to the authors, including his family, former inner circle executives, and top people at Apple, Pixar and Disney, most notably Tim Cook, Jony Ive, Eddy Cue, Ed Catmull, John Lasseter, Robert Iger and many others. In addition, Brent knew Jobs personally for 25 years and draws upon his many interviews with him, on and off the record, in writing the book. He and Rick humanize the man and explain, rather than simply describe, his behavior. Along the way, the book provides rich context about the technology revolution we all have lived through, and the ways in which Jobs changed our world.
Schlender and Tetzeli make clear that Jobs's astounding success at Apple was far more complicated than simply picking the right products: he became more patient, he learned to trust his inner circle, and discovered the importance of growing the company incrementally rather than only shooting for dazzling game-changing products.
A rich and revealing account that will change the way we view Jobs, Becoming Steve Jobs shows us how one of the most colorful and compelling figures of our times was able to combine his unchanging, relentless passion with a more mature management style to create one of the most valuable and beloved companies on the planet.
sleek white plastic frame. The Power Mac G5 was a formidable upgrade of Apple’s tower computer for businesses and power users, and received critical hosannas. Laptop buyers were given the choice of white or matte black plastic iBook G4s or the aluminum PowerBook G4s, which came in three different screen sizes. But between the Internet, home networking, music, and the software applications division, Apple was now churning out much more than just personal computers. New versions of iMovie and
find myself tired, whenever I’m thinking about whether I want to launch into another creative project, I always think of Steve in that period when he was in trouble. I’ve always drawn sustenance from that. That’s a touchstone for me, that willingness not to capitulate.” Collins has specialized in the study of what makes great companies tick, and what marks the people who lead them. He sees something unique in Steve’s unorthodox business education. “I used to call him the Beethoven of business,”
told him all I could see was the risk of dividing my time, and he said, ‘Well, I look at it the other way. I see it as giving you a bigger canvas because I think you can handle it.’ “Then he said, ‘The number one thing is, I don’t want to change Pixar,’ ” Lasseter recalls. “He said, ‘I was at ABC for two acquisitions. The first one, with Capital Cities, was great. I learned a lot from Tom Murphy, the Cap Cities CEO. And then Disney bought Cap Cities/ABC, and everything about it was bad.’ ” Just
NeXT will be the best possible company if every single person working here understands the whole basic master plan and can use that as a yardstick to make decisions. Sure, there is some risk with giving everybody access to all the corporate information, and potentially some loss. But what you gain vastly surpasses what you lose. “The most visible sign of the open corporation at NeXT is our policy of allowing everybody to know what salary everybody else is making. There’s a list in the finance
The NeXT computer was designed from the ground up to be connected to a network. Computer scientists already knew this history, of course, but the broader public that was so fascinated with Jobs didn’t. Steve had always been able to describe the potential of obscure yet real technologies with such aplomb that he created something akin to lust in his audience. He had absolute self-confidence that he could sell people a sense of discovery in the form of technological products they previously didn’t