Reviewing the Bio

Image: courtesy of Cult of Mac

I recently finished the Steve Job biography by Walter Isaacson.  It was great.  I don't recall ever finishing a book as quickly as I did this book. (My wife says she can't recall the last time I finished a book...period.) I think the closest was when I read The Shock Doctrine a few years back.  I loved the crazy stories in the Jobs biography, the anecdotes and the pacing of the novel were all quite good.  I also found the parts that discussed his illness very moving.  I actually welled up on occasion.  But I'm also a softy so that's really not that hard to make happen.

There are some lessons to be found in the book to be sure.  Some are cautionary, others are opportunities for all of us to learn something.  All that has been discussed by many others around the net.  And to be fair I think this next criticism has as well.

As I read about Steve Job's time at NeXT and this miss-adventures with Pixar I came to realize something.  The stories were getting to the point where the Apple purchase of NeXT was just about to happen and it hit me.  Wait a minute.  What changed?

It struck me that the events described at NeXT and at Pixar where missing something They seemed to be lacking any real explanation of how Jobs had moved from a bratty kid with insane mood swings and a childish temper to a man retained some of those same faults, but seemed to have many of them tempered and was more in control of himself. How did he get to this place where he was allowing concessions that he would have never even considered previously.  Isaacson offeres up a morsel of an explanation (or hypothesis) to the reader by summing up of Steve Job's experiences with NeXT and Pixar as giving him some sense of humility due to the failures that they and he experienced.  Except that in both cases they ended up doing pretty well.  NeXT was failing for sure, but still managed to be rescued by Apple in the purchase that brought Job's home to Apple.  And Pixar flourished as it created animated hit after hit after hit even though it had a rocky start.  So what actually changed?

Maybe I just missed the point.  But I also found the hammering home of this idea that Steve somehow embodied the cross-roads of technology and the liberal arts is a bit silly. Not that the notion of working at that cross-roads is silly.  Nor is it silly for a business such as Apple to attempt to own that area.  But I just felt like the book kept hitting that note so hard and so obviously that it failed to deliver the message very artfully.  Also that's not really the theme I was personally hoping to gleam from the book.

I really wanted to know how the journey between leaving Apple and returning to save it effected him and changed him into the man who could save it and build something as impressive he did from what was a company on the brink. That's what I was looking for.  Not this rather bland idea that you he just stayed true to this one ideal and that's what guided him and was injected into the DNA of Apple and that's all it took.  I don't buy it.  There needs to have been more.  Given what I read of his early days at Apple, something changed.  But what was it that influenced those changes?

Regardless of my own thoughts however, I would still wholeheartedly recommend anyone who's thought about starting a company, or really enjoyed any of Apples products, or who is just amazed by the things that Steve Jobs accomplished would definitely enjoy giving this book try.