Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson (2011)

 

Steve Jobs has been our bedtime reading the last four months (656 pages!). My son is an Apple fan, and this book has given us several opportunities to talk about products, the people who make them, and the mega power of marketing. We also had several conversations around personal behaviour and accountability. We talked about leadership, kindness, the cost of being part of Steve Jobs's team of A-players. Yes, he was charismatic, a great showman, a visionary; but he was also obnoxious, perverse, cruel, a bully.

Jobs did not believe in market research because he thought that people do not know what they want until you show it to them.

The full text of the 1996 Apple “Think Different” ad goes:

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. But the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward.

Maybe they have to be crazy.

How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels? We make tools for these kinds of people.

While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

I appreciate the geniuses behind innovation. They do move the human race forward. At the same time, I am on guard of the manipulative muscle of marketing. Isaacson pointed out that Apple spent $75 million of advertising money to the iPod, even though the category didn’t justify one hundredth of that. That meant that Apple completely dominated the market for music players. It outspent everybody by a factor of about a hundred.

This human race can be led to believe a lot of things especially now with social media. To go after wants rather than needs, to desire flash over substance.

I am not an Apple user, so I haven't come anywhere near Steve's or the echoes of post-Steve’s reality distortion field. I’ll likely be the kid who shouts, "But the emperor has no clothes on!". I am still wondering how it is that this man wasn't dragged to court for his conduct at the workplace (or was he, and his lawyers and publicists quietly hushed things up?).

Isaacson is a wonderful author. He can make readers feel sympathetic towards his subject while at the same time give readers the chance to take a step back and see things from a bigger perspective.