Steve Jobs
Walter Isaacson, 2011
Simon & Schuster
656 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781451648539
Summary
Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.
At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination.
He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology. He built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering. Although Jobs cooperated with this book, he asked for no control over what was written nor even the right to read it before it was published.
He put nothing off-limits. He encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. And Jobs speaks candidly, sometimes brutally so, about the people he worked with and competed against. His friends, foes, and colleagues provide an unvarnished view of the passions, perfectionism, obsessions, artistry, devilry, and compulsion for control that shaped his approach to business and the innovative products that resulted. Driven by demons, Jobs could drive those around him to fury and despair.
But his personality and products were interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 20, 1952
• Where—New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
• Education—B.A., Harvard University; M.A., Oxford University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—Washington, D.C. area
Walter Isaacson is an American writer and journalist. He was the President and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan educational and policy studies organization based in Washington, D.C. He has been the chairman and CEO of Cable News Network (CNN) and the Managing Editor of Time. He has written biographies of Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Henry Kissinger, and Leonardo da Vinci.
Early life and education
Isaacson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, the son of Irwin and Betty Lee (Seff) Isaacson. His father was a "kindly Jewish distracted humanist engineer with a reverence for science," and his mother was a real estate broker.
Isaacson graduated from Harvard University in 1974, where he earned an A.B. cum laude in history and literature. He later attended the Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar, where he studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) and graduated with first-class honors.
Journalism
Isaacson began his career in journalism at The Sunday Times of London, followed by a position with the New Orleans Times-Picayune. He joined Time magazine in 1978, serving as the magazine's political correspondent, national editor, and editor of new media before becoming the magazine's 14th editor in 1996.
Isaacson became chairman and CEO of CNN in July 2001, two months later guided CNN through the events of 9/11. Shortly after his appointment at CNN, Isaacson attracted attention for seeking the views of Republican Party leaders on Capitol Hill regarding criticisms that CNN broadcast content that was unfair to Republicans or conservatives.
He was quoted in Roll Call magazine as saying: "I was trying to reach out to a lot of Republicans who feel that CNN has not been as open to covering Republicans, and I wanted to hear their concerns." The CEO's conduct was criticized by the left-leaning Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) organization, which said that Isaacson's "pandering" behavior was endowing conservative politicians with power over CNN.
In 2003, Isaacson stepped down as president at CNN to become president of the Aspen Institute. Isaacson served as the president and CEO of the Aspen Institute from 2003 until 2017, when he announced that he would leave to become a professor of history at Tulane University and an advisory partner at the New York City financial services firm Perella Weinberg Partners.
Writing
Isaacson is the co-author, with Evan Thomas, of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (1986). He is the author of Kissinger: A Biography (1992), Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003), Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007), and American Sketches (2009).
In 2011, Steve Jobs, Isaacson's authorized biography was published, becoming an international best-seller and breaking all sales records for a biography. The book was based on over forty interviews with Jobs over a two-year period up until shortly before his death, and on conversations with friends, family members, and business rivals of the entrepreneur.
Next came another bestseller, The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (2014), which explores the history of key technological innovations — notably the parallel developments of the computer and the Internet.
Isaacson's biography, Leonardo da Vinci, came out in 2017 to great fanfare and, even before it's actual publication, became the object of a Hollywood bidding war. Leonardo DiCaprio's production company won the film rights with DiCaprio planning to play the title role of da Vinci.
Government positions
In 2005, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco appointed Isaacson vice chairman of the Louisiana Recovery Authority to oversee spending on the recovery from Hurricane Katrina.
In 2007, President George W. Bush appointed him as chairman of the U.S.-Palestinian Partnership, which seeks to create economic and educational opportunities in the Palestinian territories.
He also served as the co-chair of the U.S.-Vietnamese Dialogue on Agent Orange, which in January 2008 announced completion of a project to contain the dioxin left behind by the U.S. at the Da Nang air base and plans to build health centers and a dioxin laboratory in the affected regions.
During the Obama administration, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appointed him vice-chair of the Partners for a New Beginning, which encourages private-sector investments and partnerships in the Muslim world.
In 2009, President Obama appointed him as chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which runs Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and the other international broadcasts of the U.S. government; he served until January 2012.
In 2014, he was appointed by New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu to be the co-chair of the New Orleans Tricentennial Commission, charged with planning the city's 300th-anniversary commemoration in 2018.
In 2015, he was appointed to the board of My Brother's Keeper Alliance, which seeks to carry out President Obama's anti-poverty and youth opportunity initiatives.
Isaacson is the chairman emeritus of the board of Teach for America.
Honors
Time magazine selected Isaacson in 2012 to be on its list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Isaacson is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and was awarded its 2013 Benjamin Franklin Medal. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and an Honorary Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford.
In 2014, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Isaacson for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. The title of Isaacson's lecture was "The Intersection of the Humanities and the Sciences." (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/3/2017.)
Book Reviews
[Jobs's] story calls for a book that is clear, elegant and concise enough to qualify as an iBio. Mr. Isaacson's Steve Jobs does its solid best to hit that target…[It] greatly admires its subject. But its most adulatory passages are not about people. Offering a combination of tech criticism and promotional hype, Mr. Isaacson describes the arrival of each new product right down to Mr. Jobs's theatrical introductions and the advertising campaigns. But if the individual bits of hoopla seem excessive, their cumulative effect is staggering. Here is an encyclopedic survey of all that Mr. Jobs accomplished, replete with the passion and excitement that it deserves.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
Isaacson's biography can be read in several ways. It is on the one hand a history of the most exciting time in the age of computers, when the machines first became personal and later, fashionable accessories. It is also a textbook study of the rise and fall and rise of Apple and the brutal clashes that destroyed friendships and careers. And it is a gadget lover's dream, with fabulous, inside accounts of how the Macintosh, iPod, iPhone and iPad came into being. But more than anything, Isaacson has crafted a biography of a complicated, peculiar personality—Jobs was charming, loathsome, lovable, obsessive, maddening—and the author shows how Jobs's character was instrumental in shaping some of the greatest technological innovations of our time.
Michael S. Rosenwald - Washington Post
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Steve Jobs:
1. Talk about Steve Jobs as a human being, the man beneath the myth and the hype. What kind of person was he—in his private as well as professional life? Jobs told his Isaacson to leave out nothing, to lay bare his flaws. He also told his friends to stint on nothing. Does Isaacson lean too far in any one direction: or does he steer a steady course between Jobs's Jekyll and Hyde?
2. What aspects of Steve Jobs's life disburbed you and /or impressed you most? Did Jobs's dark side overwhelm his good side?
3. Isaacson raises the question of whether feelings of abandonment in childhood shaped Jobs's personality. Is his argument convincing?
4. At the end of the book, Jobs answers the bedeviling question "What drove me?" Do you find his answer satisfying ... thoughtful ... self-serving ... or incomplete?
5. What would Jobs have been like to work with...or for? He was clearly a demanding boss. Was he unfairly so—abrasive and unrealistic in his demands? Or was he simply a strict task master who had a vision to be communicated? How might you have fared as a colleague or employee?
6. What was Steve Jobs's concept of beauty—what was his aesthetic vision? Why were aesthetics such a crucial part of his life?
7. Jobs was eliminated from Apple, the company he founded, and in his absence the company foundered. Why? And when Jobs returned to Apple, he guided its meteoric comeback. Why was Jobs so critical to the company? Why was its performance lackluster without his leadership?
8. How would you characterize Isaacson's book: as an intimate study of a visionary or a treatise on the rise and fall of one of the world's most successful companies? Were your expectations, either way, fulfilled by the book?
9. Can you describe the Reality Distortion Field? What exactly is it, and how did it serve Jobs?
10. Talk about the way in which Jobs wrestled with his contradictions—a counterculture rebel who became a millionaire; a disdain for objects yet someone who shaped others' desires for the products he made? Was he ever able to resolve those dilemmas?
11. Talk about Steve Jobs's legacy. On what do you believe he will he have a lasting impact? How much did he change the landscape—in technology, design, or gadgetry?
12. In his "Think Different" ad, Jobs wanted to convey his belief that the ones who are crazy enough to think they might change the world are the ones who end up doing so. Do you agree? Can you think of other examples of singular individuals whose vision changed the world? Does that statement apply to all of us...or to the very talented few?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)