Jobs Creator, Steve Jobs

This article originally appeared in the Apr. 9, 2012 issue of Forbes magazine.

If you haven’t read the bestselling, superb biography and inspiring business book, Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster, $35), do so. Steve Jobs asked Isaacson to write it and urged friends and foes to cooperate with the undertaking. Jobs never asked to read the manuscript, but true to character he designed the book jacket. When it came to products, Jobs believed we do indeed “judge a book by its cover,” a principle he relentlessly applied to the look and packaging of his products.

This absorbing chronicle ­doesn’t sugarcoat the less attractive aspects of Jobs’ personality—rudeness, petulance, yelling, thoughtlessness. But clearly there were powerful positives that enabled this man to become arguably the foremost business executive of our era. Many talented people learned to work around his often exasperating quirks because they realized he possessed a genuine genius for innovation and could recognize great talent in others. Jobs had that extraordinarily rare combination of dazzling vision and excruciating attention to detail. He demonstrated the profound truth that science and the liberal arts are not polar opposites but two sides of the same coin.

Critics may carp that Jobs wasn’t an inventor à la Thomas Edison, but neither did Henry Ford invent the automobile. For example, Jobs got the idea of the mouse and onscreen icons from his famous visit to Xerox PARC in the late 1970s. But it was his vision that turned those breakthroughs into usable, consumer-friendly features. Jobs relentlessly pursued perfection with manic energy. For instance, he demanded that the innards of his machines be simple and beautiful, even though the buyer would likely never see them.

Here’s how Isaacson sums up what Jobs wrought:

• The Apple II, which took [Apple cofounder Stephen] Wozniak’s circuit board and turned it into the first personal computer that was not just for hobbyists.

• The Macintosh, which begat the home computer revolution and popularized graphical user interfaces.

• Toy Story and other Pixar blockbusters, which opened up the miracle of digital imagination.

• Apple stores, which reinvented the role of a store in defining a brand.

• The iPod, which changed the way we consume music.

• The iTunes Store, which saved the music industry.

• The iPhone, which turned mobile phones into music, photography, video, e-mail and Web devices.

• The App Store, which spawned a new content-creation industry.

• The iPad, which launched tablet computing and offered a platform for digital newspapers, magazines, books and videos.

• The iCloud, which demoted the computer from its central role in managing our content and let all of our devices sync seamlessly.

• And Apple itself.

Jobs learned through his always intense and tumultuous career how to be a superb CEO and to create a company that could endure for years to come.

“[Jobs’] imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected and at times magical,” writes Isaacson. “He was, indeed, an example of what the mathematician Mark Kac called a magician genius, someone whose insights come out of the blue and require intuition more than mere mental processing power.”

Thus Jobs absolutely disdained market surveys: “Our job is to figure out what [customers] are going to want before they do,” he famously remarked.

Despite his less-than-Oprah-like personality, Jobs deeply believed in collaboration. “Instead of a development process in which a product would be passed sequentially from engineering to design to manufacturing to marketing and distribution, these various departments collaborated simultaneously. … This approach also applied to key hires. He would have candidates meet the top leaders rather than just the managers of the department where they wanted to work.” He deeply feared the rise of independent corporate fiefdoms, which he felt had severely damaged great companies such as Sony.

In the real world achievements don’t come smoothly. Jobs’ handpicked CEO at Apple in the 1980s ended up throwing him out of the company, an ouster Jobs brought on with his mercurial behavior. Jobs’ next company, NeXT, produced an innovative machine, but it was too big and cost too much to become a great commercial success. He bought the animation unit of Lucasfilm, Pixar, for a song but lost tens of millions of dollars before the company hit the big time in partnership with Disney.

Then Jobs was back at Apple, where he demonstrated his real talents as CEO. To save the troubled company he slashed product lines, laid off thousands of workers and acted on his deep conviction that success would come by concentrating on big things—and they came in rapid succession: iMac, iPod (saving the music industry from itself), iTunes, iPhone and iPad.

Jobs reinvented the way a new product should be introduced to the public. His stage shows were masterpieces in creating excitement, persuading people that the product was dazzlingly revolutionary and something they could no longer live without. (Too bad Hollywood never got him to stage the Academy Awards.)

Jobs exemplified the paradox that your strength is also your weakness. He was notorious among his colleagues for his so-called reality distortion field, which drove him to ignore traditional restraints and obstacles and push designers and engineers, bringing about miraculous feats and breakthroughs. But this iron will also destroyed him. Although Jobs was diagnosed with a rare cancer, immediate surgery could have saved his life. He insisted, however, that he was going to beat it through various diet regimens—he was well-known for his highly idiosyncratic eating habits and belief in the powers of the foods he consumed. Board members, appalled, pounded him about cancer’s not being treatable with diet. When Jobs finally had surgery, it was too late.

When a great man dies, termites invariably eat away at his reputation. In the case of Jobs one can imagine the put-downs: his lack of political correctness when it came to management personnel; his involvement in the back-dating stock-options scandal; his lack of interest in philanthropy; and that his achievements won’t look so impressive in the future. This book will keep the termites at bay—for a while. And when they do come, this masterpiece will form the centerpiece of the counterattack.

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