How Steve Jobs Tamed His Explosive Genius

A new biography allows some of Steve Jobs' closest colleagues and friends to give their take on his legacy.
Steve Jobs and Tim Cook speak together following an Apple product presentation at the company039s headquarters in...
Steve Jobs and Tim Cook speak together following an Apple product presentation at the company's headquarters in Cupertino in 2007.Monica M. Davey/epa/Corbis

One thing has become exceedingly clear in the run-up to the new biography Becoming Steve Jobs: The people closest to Steve Jobs do not like that other biography of Steve Jobs. And with this one, they're eager to set the record straight.

The criticism for Walter Isaacson's official biography, which was rushed to press following Jobs' death in 2011, has flowed steadily from Apple's inner-sanctum in the weeks preceding the new book's release. First, there was Jony Ive in the New Yorker, saying his regard for Isaacson's book "couldn't be any lower." Then, we heard from Apple exec Eddy Cue, who tweeted that Becoming Steve Jobs was the "best portrayal" of his former boss and "first to get it right." Finally, there's Tim Cook, in the pages of Becoming Steve Jobs itself, saying Isaacson's tome did Jobs a "tremendous disservice."

"It was just a rehash of a bunch of stuff that had already been written, and focused on small parts of his personality," Cook is quoted as saying. "You get the feeling that he's a greedy, selfish egomaniac. It didn’t capture the person."

The new book lets many of Jobs' closest colleagues give their own take on his legacy. It's a highly favorable account of his gifts, acknowledging some of Jobs' well-documented flaws while often seeking to minimize them. More than anything, it sets out to show how Jobs grew over the years, becoming both a more effective CEO and, at least in some ways, a gentler person. That last bit is debatable, but you could say this: The book convincingly traces a trajectory from a young man whose ego and monomania repeatedly thwarted his ambition to an older one who was occasionally a jerk but mostly just because he was burning to get things done. As Jim Collins, bestselling business author, says of Jobs in the book: "He's not a success story. He's a growth story."

A Lifetime of Access

Becoming Steve Jobs was written by Brent Schlender, along with Fast Company editor Rick Tetzeli. Schlender knew Jobs for more than 20 years, first as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and later at Fortune. Over the course of dozens of encounters, they became about as friendly as Jobs got with any reporter. Once, Jobs invited Schlender and his kids over to his house to watch an early cut of Toy Story.

Random House

Schlender first interviewed Jobs in 1986 shortly after he'd been pushed out of Apple. His extended exposure to Jobs through his "wilderness" years and subsequent return to Apple informs the thesis of the book: The common formulation of Jobs as equal parts genius and asshole is simplistic. As Schlender and Tetzeli see it, Apple's success following its founder's return in 1997 was made possible by the ways Jobs grew as a both a man and a manager.

Schlender and Tetzeli make a compelling case for this argument, tracing how Jobs became a better delegator and a shrewder negotiator. They compare his impetuousness in negotiating with IBM when he was CEO of NeXT, for instance, to how deftly he sold AT&T on the benefits of signing an exclusive deal to carry the first iPhone, sight unseen, as Apple's CEO years later.

The authors also show how Jobs became more flexible and adaptable in his second act at Apple, without sacrificing his exacting standards. As an example, the book points to how Jobs abandoned his initial enthusiasm for iMovie and consumer video editing when his executives urged that music would be a more popular play. As the success of iTunes and the iPod proved, they were right.

At times, Schlender and Tetzeli's argument seems a little too tidy. Sure, Jobs may have changed for the better, but he was still capable of being a colossal jerk until the end. "Steve was quick to judge people," we hear from Bob Iger, the Disney President who worked closely with Jobs leading up to Disney's acquisition of Pixar in 2006. "If he got better on that, it wasn't something I saw." Many of Jobs' well-covered foibles and shortcomings from the last twenty years are bundled up in a single chapter later in the book.

Story arc aside, Schlender's access to Jobs over the years yields several interesting new insights and anecdotes. We learn, for example, that Tim Cook oversaw the bulldozing of tens of thousands of unsold Macs into a landfill in early 1998. We hear how Jobs not only described OS X's visuals as "lickable," but, at least on one occasion, actually licked a computer screen to get the point across. More substantially, we hear how Bill Gates' keynote at CES in January, 2000---one where he envisioned a future in which Microsoft was at the center of a wide-reaching computing ecosystem in the home---triggered an emergency off-site meeting where Apple began to form its "digital hub" strategy.

We also read that Jobs told Disney President Bob Iger his cancer had returned in January 2006, literally moments before they were to tell Pixar employees about the company's sale to Disney. Iger was the third person to know, before Jobs' kids or the Apple board. The Pixar deal was going to make Jobs Disney's largest shareholder, and Jobs wanted to give Iger a chance to pull out of the deal, if he so desired. Iger thought about it and decided to move forward. As he recalls telling Jobs, "We're buying Pixar, we're not buying you."

Some of these anecdotes are revealing, others are trivial. But there's always interest in new Jobs lore, and there's a good bit of it here.

The Jobs They Remember

Schlender writes the book in the first-person, but Becoming Steve Jobs is filled with the voices of colleagues and friends close to Jobs. After initially rebuffing the Schlender and Tetzeli's overtures, Apple executives eventually agreed to be interviewed, and the book quotes at length from conversations with Cook, Cue, Ive and others. It also leans heavily on material from people like Ed Catmull and John Lasseter, of Pixar, Bob Iger, and Jobs' long-time frenemy Bill Gates.

The reminisces all share a vibe of knowing legacy-making. They are very sympathetic. But they are often interesting.

Ron Johnson, the former Target VP of merchandising brought in to shape Apple's retail stores, offers evidence of Jobs' eagerness to delegate during Apple's most prolific period. On some things, Jobs was a legendary micromanager, but as Johnson recalls, the first time the two met, Jobs said, "I want to be good friends, because once you know how I think we only have to talk once or twice a week. Then when you want to do something you can just do it and not feel that you have to ask permission."

Catmull and Lasseter, the famed Pixar bosses, give perhaps the most persuasive account of how Jobs changed over the years. "Watching our collaboration, seeing us make ourselves better by working together, I think that fueled Steve," says Lasseter. "I think that was one of the key changes when he went back to Apple. He was more open to the talent of others." The book, which spends considerable time on Jobs' involvement with the animation company, gives a clear impression that Pixar was Steve Jobs' happy place.

Near the end of the book, Jony Ive offers an interesting take on what Apple's eventual success really meant to his mentor. "I think Steve felt a vindication. This is important. It wasn't a vindication of 'I'm right' or 'I told you so.' It was a vindication that restored his sense of faith in humanity. Given the choice, people do discern and value quality more than we credit for."

This insight resonates with what we read throughout. Steve Jobs was always driven, often to the point of callousness to those around him, but as he got older, his ego was less and less a part of that equation. The thing driving him wasn't, "I'm right." It was, "I know how to get this right."

None of the people in Becoming Steve Jobs try to hide their admiration and affection for the man. Nor do its writers; at one point, Schlender admits he'd "gotten close enough to Steve to see beyond his harshness and the occasional outright rudeness to the idealist within." To some, presumably like Cook and Ive, this will make the biography a richer, more considered portrait than previous books. To others, it will give the new book an air of hagiography. Whatever the case, Jobs was a complex man when he founded Apple in 1976, and he was a complex man when he left it 2011, perhaps in different ways. This book adds valuable texture to that story.