In 50 Business Classics series, Tom Butler-Bowdon includes his discussion of Walter Isaacson’s brilliant biography of Steve Jobs.

These are among the dozens of insights that caught my eye:

o At first, Isaacson refused to write the biography of someone still alive. “Two things changed his mind: Jobs’s wife Laurene told Isaacson that her husband had pancreatic cancer, and so wouldn’t be around for ever; and the biographer’s realization that Jobs’s life had been played out at the intersection of technology and the humanities — much as Franklin’s and Einstein’s were.”(Page 121)

o “Leaving school in the early 1970s, Jobs was obsessed with Bob Dylan, existing on a fruitarian diet, spending time at a commune growing apples (yes, where the name cam from), and getting deeply into eastern spirituality…But while most hippies though of a computers as a tool for Big Brother, Jibs believed that it was a tool for liberation. After a stint working at a new computer games company called Atrari, he and friend [Steve] Wozniak hatched the idea to build a ‘personal’ computer, using Wozniak’s brilliance at circuit design.” (122)

o “Andy Hertzfeld, who worked on the Mac, said, ‘The goal was never to beat the competition, or to make a lot of money. It was to do the greatest thing possible, or a little greater.’ Jobs’s greatest achievement, Isaacson argues, was developing ‘no merely modest product advances based on focus groups, but whole new devices and services that consumers did not know they wanted.” (123-124)

o “The partnership between Jobs and British designer Jonathan ‘Jony’ Ive was crucial to the success if the new Apple. For both men, Jobs said, design did not mean the veneer of something, but ‘the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers.’ The way something is manufactured is as important as how it looks and performs.” (124-125)

o “Jobs’s Nietzschean ‘faith in the power of the will to bend reality,’ Isaacson suggests, is perhaps the mark of all great entrepreneurs. What is, is not good enough, and what could be, must be done. His Rasputin-like ability to hypnotize gave rise to the phrase, ‘reality distortion field,’ coined by Bud Tribble, an early Apple software developer.” (126)

o “Jobs’s intense desire to ‘make a dent in the universe’ was partly to do with his premonition that he would not live a long life, so he had to work twice as fast as others to fulfill his destiny…For most of his life he had succeeded in creating his own reality, but could not prevail against death itself.” (127)

50 Business Classics: Your shortcut to the most important ideas on innovation, management and strategy was published by Nicholas Brealey (2018)

Steve Jobs was published by Simon & Schuster (2011).