With all due respect to Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography of Steve Jobs, Brent Schlender developed a professional and personal relationship with Jobs over a period of about 25 years and co-authored a book with Rick Tetzeli, Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader, that has just been published by Crown Business.
During dozens of interviews of those who knew Jobs best, including his widow, Laurene, Schlender and Tetzeli gained perspectives on him such as these:
From Tim Cook, Jobs’s chosen successor as CEO:
Jobs’s response 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.” What are we to make of these perspectives?
From Jon Rubinstein, computer scientist and electrical engineer who played an instrumental role in the development of the iMac and iPod:
“Steve so much wanted to be a father figure. He’s just a year older than I am. But he had this father-figure thing going that was very funny because, you know, he thought he knew more about life than anyone else around him. He always wanted to know about my personal life.”
From Susan Barnes, controller of the Macintosh Division at Apple Computer and then joined Jobs and other Apple managers to cofound NeXT Computer, Inc. She served as Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of NeXT Computer from 1985 to 1991:
“If he’d get mad and start screaming, I’d hang up the phone. He is the only person I knew that you could hang up the phone on, and then pick it up and call him back, he’d be calmer. I mean, if you hung up on me, I would kill you. But with him, if yelling isn’t getting him what he wants, disengage. Leave the room and he will come back nicer, in a different way. I understood that this was something he could turn on and off, and that he would use if it worked.”
From Bill Campbell, Apple board member:
“Steve changed. Yes, he had been charismatic and passionate and brilliant. But I watched him become a great manager. He saw things others couldn’t see…In the last seven and a half years, as he became more vulnerable, he made sure that those he loved, those who were closest to him, knew it. To those people he exuded the phenomenal warmth and humor he shared. He was a true friend.”
And from Schlender when discussing Jobs’s commencement speech at Stanford:
“He was an empathetic man who want6 to give [the graduates] neat tools and great notions as they began their winding journey. Like Jim Collins, I had gotten close enough to Steve to see beyond his harshness and the occasional outright rudeness to the idealist within. Sometimes it was hard to convey this idealism within. Sometimes it was hard to convey this idealism to others, given Steve’s intensity and unpredictably sharp elbows. The Stanford commencement speech gave the world a glimpse of that genuine idealism.”
You can watch the video of that commencement address by clicking here.
It seems obvious (at least to me) that if you were highly intelligent, candid to the point of bluntness, did not suffer fools gladly, and had a thick hide, you and Jobs would get along just fine. Of greater importance to Apple shareholders, you would produce your very best work for him…and now for Tim Cook.
As I read and then re-read Becoming Steve Jobs, I was reminded of this passage in Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself:
“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
To paraphrase Whitman, Steve Jobs was indeed large…he contained multitudes.