Walter Isaacson's biography follows Steve Jobs from his adoption and childhood in California through the founding of Apple, his ousting, the NeXT and Pixar years, his return, and the run of products that made Apple the most valuable company in the world. Jobs gave Isaacson full access and asked for no control over the result, and it shows: the book is admiring and unsparing in equal measure.
The product obsession
The thread through every chapter is Jobs's insistence that products should be simple, beautiful and complete, down to parts customers would never see. He pushed for the integration of hardware and software, made his teams cut features rather than add them, and treated design as how a thing works, not how it looks.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
Focus as a strategy
When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, the company was making dozens of products. He cut the line-up to four: consumer and professional, desktop and portable. Deciding what not to do, he argued, matters as much as deciding what to do. It's the clearest lesson in the book for anyone setting priorities.
The difficult side
Isaacson doesn't hide the costs. Jobs could be cruel, dismissive and unfair. His "reality distortion field" pushed people to achieve things they thought impossible, and also burned many of them out. The book lets you take the lessons about standards and focus without mistaking the behaviour for a model.
Key ideas
Focus means saying no.
Jobs cut Apple's product line from dozens to four. Strategy is mostly deciding what you won't do.
Care about the parts nobody sees.
Quality all the way through, even inside the case, builds a culture that cares about quality everywhere.
Integrate end to end.
Owning hardware, software and services together let Apple control the whole experience.
A players hire A players.
Jobs believed great people attract great people, and that tolerating mediocrity spreads it.
Intensity has a cost.
The same drive that produced breakthrough products also damaged relationships. Take the standards, not the cruelty.
My take
A lesson in standards and focus, and a warning about how not to treat people.
I come back to two chapters often: the return to Apple, when he cut the product line to four, and the long stretch on the design of the original Macintosh. Both are about the courage to say no and the discipline to finish things properly.
What I don't take from it is the management style. You can hold a very high bar and still treat people with respect. The best leaders I've worked with did both.
Who should read it
- Leaders setting product or technical direction.
- Engineers interested in how great products get made.
- Anyone curious about the history of personal computing.