Apple to the core

Walter Isaacson’s biography of the late Steve Jobs reveals his innovation and drive, as well as his less laudable traits, but ultimately neglects to reveal what made him tick, writes Brian O’Grady

STEVE JOBS’S death was the top news item for networks across the world. It’s hard to think of a precedent for any business leader being credited with affecting so much change on any era since Henry Ford introduced mass manufacturing and affordable cars, and certainly it is this sort of legacy that many expect for Jobs from his work with company he founded, Apple, which employs more than 3,000 people here.

Jobs’ newly published biography by Walter Isaacson is being anticipated as a best-seller, not least because Jobs rarely gave interviews and Apple employees are prevented from speaking to the press (and quite paranoid about doing so, as they risk dismissal).

Such secrecy has nurtured a fascination about how Apple functions, especially as it began to release so many “game-changing” products over the last decade. Perhaps uniquely, Apple’s product launches have been genuine news events as the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad were released to an unsuspecting public. And how we love them. There are 100 million iPhone users worldwide — and it doesn’t come cheap.

The upshot is that Apple is now the second most valuable company in the world, after oil giant Exxon. In the third quarter of this year, when the company reached its zenith just weeks before Job’s death, Apple had more cash than the US government.

In less than a decade, Apple moved from being a computer manufacturer facing imminent closure (in 1997 it had only months’ of cash left, when Jobs returned after being sacked) to becoming the world’s biggest music retailer, followed by becoming the world’s biggest seller of smartphones, all by harnessing technological inventions into beautifully designed lightweight products with ingenious innovations and interfaces.

In the process, Apple took on the biggest market players in industries it had never competed in before and beat them all through the power of its innovations, outperforming the likes of Sony, Nokia and long-term rival Microsoft (Apple is now worth more than Microsoft, HP and Dell combined). The reason for the fascination with Steve Jobs is that he is unanimously credited as being the man who made all this happen.

Jobs was, in the fullest sense of the term, a charismatic leader. Most leaders are loud and aggressive despots who run their companies ruthlessly and have reputations for issuing impromptu dismissals and yield absolute power, but who also command extraordinary loyalty, especially from their core teams of acolytes.

Jobs, however, had taken the sullied reputation of charismatic leaders to innovatively new lows through his tantrum-throwing and regular crying at meetings. The biography chronicles regular blubbing during confrontations, and stunts of stunningly bad behaviour.

He believed his vegan diet meant his body would not produce odour. It did, copiously. A visit to tech giant Xerox in 1985, when Apple had little more than potential, ended before it began, when Jobs told the Xerox chairman: “You guys don’t have any clue what you’re doing”, later explaining: “I couldn’t help myself”.

And though the crying diminished as he aged, the bad behaviour didn’t. At lunch last year in an upmarket restaurant, the author tells how Jobs “ordered freshly squeezed juice which he sent back four times, declaring that each offering was from a bottle, and a pasta primavera which he shoved away as inedible after one taste. But then he ate half my crab salad...”

And yet there is a charm to Jobs that is apparent from the book and from those who worked with him. Not exceptionally smart, but “a genius” is how Isaacson describes him in the final chapter, and many dozens of interviewees seem to hold him in high regard and affection.

Of course, much of this may be down to sentimentality, as Jobs had been quite publicly suffering from liver cancer for the past seven years. (He attempted alternative medicine cures and dietary treatment for nine months after the first diagnosis instead of undergoing surgery, by which time the cancer had spread.)

Isaacson’s 600-page biography is a warts-and-all account, with exhausting detail and 40 interviews with Jobs and many, many others. We get details, we get trivia, we get restaurant menus, we get tangents and simply way too much information in this 1.5kg, curiosity-quenching monstrosity.

But we get some marvellous bits too, such as his bizarre affair with folk singer Joan Baez. And how, for all his marketing genius, he fought to call the Apple Macintosh “the Bicycle”, or how he mastered the common managerial trait of adopting employees’ ideas as his own.

But above all, the book gives a sense of Jobs, whose brattishness, arrogance, impatience and vision inspired fantastic work and inventions. The book gives a great insight on the ongoing conflict within Apple, as product designers fought with the engineers who had to turn concepts into products, and with the operations and supply chain people who had to make it all work. It was Job’s passion, charisma and obsession with detail that made these come together to deliver what must be among the most successful technology products ever created.

Jobs was unsympathetic and intolerant of excuses or explanations, but through charm or aggression or both he transformed the computer industry. Having spoken to people at Apple, there was a pervading sense of Jobs, and not all of it benign.

One story widely told within the company is how he regularly confronted people at random in the Apple canteen, asking them what they had done for Apple today, and was said to have sacked some for having inadequate answers. Whether true or not (although, on reading this book, it seems entirely plausible), the anecdote is part of Apple’s folklore, which has helped create the culture of fast, unparalleled innovation that has made it the success it is now. The downside is that it is more than occasionally quite brutal, the upside is that people seem to be extraordinarily proud to work there.

On of the most telling anecdotes in the book is from an early colleague from the southern US, who compared Jobs to Baptist preachers. Jobs’ associates said he created “a reality-distortion field” around him that managed to suspend reality for all within his grasp, so they agreed to doing impossible things. Bill Gates, who appears throughput the book and offers some very candid interviews, sneers at Jobs’ lack of realism, but clearly envies Apple’s ability to deliver the apparently impossible. And that must surely be Job’s legacy: Not that he was, in his own words, “an asshole”, but that he inspired, cajoled and terrified people into accomplishing near-impossible feats, which for a business leader is a useful attribute.

Unfortunately, this book comes no way near explaining how he did it. Instead it just narrates what he did, and disappointingly squanders the last interviews with Jobs to fill in the details of the already well-documented history of Apple, and the extraordinary tale of Jobs’ dismissal from his own firm and his return, or “second coming” as the book terms it. While Isaacson’s book provides insight, it speculates but fails to explain Jobs or, more importantly, his philosophy, his reasons for doing what he did. There is little on his intellect, what he read or believed. For that, instead, we fortunately can turn to his Stanford University address, which is free on YouTube (12 million hits and counting) and is a far worthier — and succinct — testament to one of the great men of our age.

* Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs is out now