Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader
Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli
Crown Business (2015)

The Steve Jobs most people did not know…until now

In Becoming Steve Jobs, Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli attempt to portray him as those who knew him best described him (without fully explaining him) during lengthy and rigorous interviews. The narrative is presented in first-person singular for convenience’s sake but also because Schlender had a relationship with Jobs of almost 25 years.

This book also offers an alternative to Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography and it challenges that biography on several points. The research (especially the interviews) that Schlender and Tetzeli conducted questions, for example, Isaacson’s acceptance of Jobs’s denial of shortchanging partner Steve Wozniak $2,500 on one transaction. The accusation rings true “because it fits with a few other instances in which Steve took shortcuts with people who were close to him.”

I was especially interested in what Tim Cook has to say about Steve Jobs and his relationship with him, especially just before he died when Cook offered to be a liver donor. “No! I’ll never let you do that! I’m not doing that!” He only yelled at Cook four or five times during their thirteen-year relationship “and this was one of them.” What does Cook make of this outburst?

“This picture of him isn’t understood. I thought the Isaacson book did him a tremendous disservice…Steve cared. He cared deeply about things. Yes, he was very passionate about things, and he wanted things to be perfect. And that was what was great about him…A lot of people mistook that passion for arrogance. He wasn’t a saint. I’m not saying that. None of us are. But it’s emphatically untrue that he wasn’t a great human being, and that is totally not understood.”

According to Schlender and Tetzeli, countless others who were also closely associated with Jobs and knew him best insist that he really was a great human being. They agree with Cook that very little of what has been published offers any sense of why they would have worked so long and so hard for Jobs. “Those former employees share another common thread, too: the idea that they did their very best work of their lives for Steve.” One of them, Susan once said to Schlender, “If you weren’t good at your job, he owed to the rest of the team to get rid of you. But if you were good, he owed you his loyalty.”

These are among the dozens of passages of greatest interest and value to me, also listed to suggest the scope of Schlender and Tetzeli’s coverage:

o Steve Jobs’s manipulation of his public image (Pages 2-6, 9-10, 100-103, and 383-85)
o NeXT Computer, “a tragicomedy” (2-3, 5-7, 91-92, and 180-181)
o Personal traits of Steve Jobs (21-23, 45-46, 63-64, 812-82, 104-05, and 367-72)
o Steve Wozniak (28-29, 37-42, and 48-50)
o Jobs’s business principles and characteristics (40-46 and 229-233)
o Susan Barnes (81-82, 90-91, 96-97, and 103-104)
o Public opinion of Jobs (121-122 and 227-228)
o Pixar (130-46 and 166-79)
o Bill Gates and Steve Jobs (148-58, 231-32, 403-04, and 410-112)
o Decline of Apple (189-194)
o Larry Ellison (192-193)
oAvie Tevanian (197-199, 2r43-247, and 374-375)
o Jobs’s return to Apple (200-203 and 206-214)
o Apple Turnaround (208-216, 224-26, and 239-41)
o Ron Johnson and the Apple Store (278-281)
o Jony Ive (230-1236 and 354-359)
o Ed Catmull (232-237 and 342-43)
o Laurene Jobs and the Stanford commencement address (313-16)
o Bob Iger (328-29, 338-346, and 397-399)
o Tim Cook on Jobs (390-393)
o Death of Jobs (407-412)

I suggest that you read Becoming Steve Jobs and then decide what to make of him. Perhaps I’ll have as different opinion after I re-read Becoming Steve Jobs again but, for now, I am inclined to think that the two biographies, Isaacson’s and this one, have great value but for different reasons. I highly recommend both. As for the contradictions that Brent Schlender, Rick Tetzeli, and others cite, I cannot resolve them.

No one they spoke to had “a unified theory for the staying power of Steve’s childish behavior, not even Laurene,” his widow. In a review of the book for The New York Times, Brad Stone refers to the frustrating complexity of Jobs: “He was a control freak who seemed to care deeply for people around him, except when, suddenly, he didn’t.” So many contradictions. To paraphrase Walt Whitman, “Steve Jobs was large. He contained multitudes.