Malcolm Gladwell in conversation with CBC’s Eleanor Wachtel at Toronto Public Library (May 2012) and more …

“Malcolm Gladwell, bestselling author of Blink and Outliers celebrates 50 years of Jamaica’s independence. In conversation with CBC’s Eleanor Wachtel. Malcolm Gladwell’s books including his latest, Blink are available at Toronto Public Library.”

Pay special attention to Part 3 where Malcolm gives insightful (and some may argue harsh) assessment of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

Update: Bonus Malcolm clips. I found the following clips and I thought I might as well include them here.

Hannibal and Me – A book Review

 

“Meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.” from Rudyard Kipling‘s poem “If –“, first read in “Hannibal and Me“

Andreas Kluth is The Economist‘s US West Coast correspondent and author of a new book “Hannibal and Me: What History’s Greatest Military Strategist Can Teach Us About Success and Failure“. I’ve been reading Andrea’s blog for some time, so I knew I would like his book but I ended up loving Hannibal and Me!

The following is my review of the book, video interview clips, plus some additional bonus materials about characters trimmed from the book.

*** Book Review ***

I love biographies in general and reading Hannibal and Me to me was like reading the crucial slices of lives of many interesting people’s stories of “successes“, “failures“, and sometimes “impostors” (successes that actually lead to failures, or failures that become foundation of future successes) all in one book woven into many cohesive lessons.

To give you an idea of the “who’s who” in the book, take a look of this partial list of characters featured in the book: Hannibal, Andreas (the author himself), Barack Obama, Eleanor Roosevelt, Steve Jobs, Amy Tan, Meriwether Lewis (and Thomas Jefferson, William Clark), Douglas MacArthur and Harry Truman, Ludwig Erhard, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Tiger Woods, Cleopatra, Lance Armstrong, Liu Shaoqi (and Mao Zedong), plus Albert Einstein.

In Andreas’ throughly researched and eloquently written Hannibal and Me, the lives of modern day people like Steve Jobs, Tiger Woods, Amy Tan, Eleanor Roosevelt, Douglas MacArthur and Harry Truman were woven into the spectacular venture tale of Hannibal, bring every characters to live.

Don’t let words like “history“, “military strategist“, “Hannibal” in the title deter you from reading the book. I had to study history for six years and pretty much hated every minute of it. Andreas’ Hannibal and Me managed to bring all these characters to life to teach me, Kempton, teach us, readers of the book, important life-changing lessons. I originally thought I would have to skip a few pages so I can get to the interesting/fascinating modern real life stories sooner. To my pleasant surprise, I ended up reading every page over a few days. I find the lives, decisions and actions of the charters in the book absolutely fascinating and illuminating.

Ultimately, each reader will learn different lessons from the book depending on our own life experiences and life stages. Hannibal and Me is one of the best books I have read for years. To me, the book crystallized some of the life decisions I have made over the last few years and will be making in the future. I know I will be re-reading Hannibal and Me again and again over time as I grow older and gain more experiences. I hope you will enjoy the book as much as I did.

*** Video interviews with Andreas ***

Here is the main video interview clip. (My previous post about my multiple interview video clips with Andreas.)

Andreas on Eleanor Roosevelt

Drive Different – How Steve Jobs Legally Drove Without a License Plate

Love this Steve Jobs drove without License Plate story for a Friday. See CA DMV law section 4456 (c) (1) &(2) at the bottom of the page.

Drive/Think Different

See also my Steve Jobs biography review/”best of” series.

HT these articles which gave partial answers (without the legal reference).

Steve Jobs biography review/”best of” – Think Different, Jobs as iCEO

I am adding “Chapter 26 Think Different, Jobs as iCEO” to my Steve Jobs biography review/”best of” series.

Think Different has a very special place in my heart. I wrote this many years ago,

“Here’s to the crazy ones”,
a timeless Apple Computer advertisement that showcases
the core DNA of ideas Revolutionaries.
We aspire to Think Different

This chapter now completes my knowledge of the back story re the creation of the Think Different campaign. For this alone is probably worth the price of the book for me as I’ve spent many hours (without success) to find out the info in this chapter.

See is my personal “best of” in the “Think Different, Jobs as iCEO” chapter (click to read the high res capture).

To me, this excerpt in the Think Different chapter is very telling in Jobs’ thinking (emphasis added),

Jobs couldn’t decide whether to use the version with his voice or to stick with Dreyfuss. [...] When morning came, Jobs called and told them to use the Dreyfuss version. “If we use my voice, when people find out they will say it’s about me,” he told Clow. “It’s not. It’s about Apple.”

Steve Jobs narrates The Crazy Ones

Richard Dreyfuss narrates The Crazy Ones

Walter Isaacson talks about “The Leadership of Steve Jobs“

Steve Jobs biography review/”best of” – Design Principles, The Studio of Jobs and Ive

I am adding “Chapter 25 Design Principles, The Studio of Jobs and Ive”  to my Steve Jobs biography review/”best of” series.

Design has always interested me, so I actually looked up the Jony Ive section and jumped to this chapter first after I read the Introduction chapter.

See is my personal “best of” in the “Design Principles, The Studio of Jobs and Ive” chapter (click to read the high res capture).

To me, this excerpt in the Design chapter is extremely telling (emphasis added),

They [Jobs and Ive] began to have lunch together regularly, and Jobs would end his day by dropping by Ive’s design studio for a chat. “Jony had a special status,” said Laurene Powell. “He would come by our house, and our families became close. Steve is never intentionally wounding to him. Most people in Steve’s life are replaceable. But not Jony.“

Walter Isaacson talks about “Steve Jobs’ Innovation“

Steve Jobs biography review/”best of”

I admire Steve Jobs and have bought many Apple products over the years but I am not an Apple “fan boy” as I removed Apple from my list of admired companies last year.

But I still eagerly picked up a copy of Steve Jobs (biography) yesterday so that I can learn from it. I think Steve Jobs is an important book that it should be made required reading for all serious and self-respecting competitors of Apple. There are many good insights that entrepreneurs and business executives can learn from Apple and Jobs. It will be foolish to think we can replicate and copy Jobs but it will be stupid to not to try to understand, to learn, and may be to be inspired.

In this post, I’m doing a review/”best of” Steve Jobs similar to my extensive review/”best of” The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life). I will start the review/”best of” with the chapters that intrigue me the most.

*******

Here is my personal “best of” in the introduction chapter (click to read the high res capture). I will include links to other chapter’s entries (some with video clips, etc) to this post later.

Here is an excerpt from the introduction chapter (emphasis added),

‘She [Laurene Powell, Steve Jobs' wife] is one of the smartest and most grounded people I have ever met. ‘There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that’s the truth,” she told me early on. “You shouldn’t whitewash it. He’s good at spin, but he also has a remarkable story, and I’d like to see that it’s all told truthfully.”‘

Steve Jobs memorial at Calgary Apple Store

aaa

Steve Jobs: iQuit

Well, Chinese communist party-run English newspaper Global Times decided in its journalistic “wisdom” to title Steve Jobs‘ obit as Steve Jobs: iQuit!

Creative may be but creative about someone’s obit?! Yikes, too much!!!

P.S. It has been a sad few days since Jobs’ passing. I hope Steve Jobs: iQuit put a smile on your face in the expense of the communist party-run English newspaper Global Times! :)

Goodbye Steve – Thanks for the Apple computers

Goodbye Steve. Even we disagreed in a few things, but I have fond memories of my Apple computers and I’m happy that I never have to buy a PC for home use.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II_series#Apple_II (started with a tape recorder and later installed a 128K Ram disk)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_Portable
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Quadra_660AV
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TiBook#Titanium_PowerBook_G4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Mac_G5
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_Pro

Goodbye Steve Jobs (1955 – 2011)

Goodbye Steve.

Here is an excerpt from my favourite 2005 Steve’s speech (text),

“When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

[...] Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” – Steve Jobs

News media reports: CBC, NYT, Reuters, CNN, CNet, Bloomberg, The Guardian, THR.

Oct 30, 2011 Update:

* THR, “Steve Jobs’ Sister Recalls the Apple Co-Founder’s Final Words“

“Mona Simpson, Steve Jobs‘ sister, gave a moving eulogy for the Apple co-founder at the memorial service held on Oct. 16 at the Memorial Church of Stanford University, which the New York Times posted in full.”

Oct 24, 2011 Update:

Sir James Dyson: My ‘Apple Moment’

* Steve Jobs, part 1 – 60 Minutes – CBS News

* Steve Jobs, part 2 – 60 Minutes – CBS News

Nov 2, 2011 Update:

* Kevin Roberts, “Absence Defines Presence“

Jan 27, 2012 Update:

* The Telegraph, “Bill Gates: ‘I wrote Steve Jobs a letter as he was dying. He kept it by his bed’” [HT Apple Insider]

“The atmosphere changed in 2007 when Gates left Microsoft to set up the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with his wife. “Steve and I did an event together, and he couldn’t have been nicer…I got a fair bit of time with him in his last year. Some months before Jobs died, Gates paid him a long visit. “We spent literally hours reminiscing and talking about the future.” Later, with his old adversary’s death imminent, he wrote to him. “I told Steve about how he should feel great about what he had done and the company he had built. I wrote about his kids, whom I had got to know.”

That last gesture was not, he says, conciliatory. “There was no peace to make. We were not at war. We made great products, and competition was always a positive thing. There was no [cause for] forgiveness.” After Jobs’s death, Gates received a phone call from his wife, Laurene. “She said; ‘Look, this biography really doesn’t paint a picture of the mutual respect you had.’ And she said he’d appreciated my letter and kept it by his bed.””

Third Apple co-founder Bloomberg interview

Have a watch of this rare interview via Apple Insider, “Third Apple co-founder sold 10% stake to avoid paper pushing, risk“

Steve Jobs’ biography “iSteve: The Book of Jobs” coming in 2012

Walter Isaacson, author of Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007) and Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003), has been writing the biography of Apple CEO Steve Jobs since 2009. Looks like an potentially interesting book to check out.

More from CNN, TIME.

Steve Jobs: Apple succession planning policy

Steve Jobs is a visionary in the computer industry and Apple has continued to be an innovative company under Steve’s leadership. But Steve is seriously ill. And many people have rightfully criticized Apple’s secrecy and CEO succession planning. I think Apple board of directors is irresponsible (even it may be legal) to Apple’s shareholders and stakeholders for it to remind secretive about Steve’s health condition and Apple’s CEO succession plan.

Excerpt from MarketWatch “Apple to face CEO question at annual meeting – Fund wants more transparency on succession plan in Jobs’ absence“,

“Apple has faced similar questions in the past. Jobs skipped the annual meeting two years ago, when he was in the midst of a six-month leave of absence for a then-unspecified health condition. It was later learned that he underwent a liver transplant in that period.

Five years before that, Jobs had surgery to treat pancreatic cancer. He took off a month in mid-2004 to recuperate.

Last month, Jobs told Apple employees that he would be taking another leave of absence “so I can focus on my health” but he withheld specifics of his condition. As in times past, chief operating officer Tim Cook was handed the reins during Jobs’ absence.

Resolution on the ballot

What’s different today is a shareholder group has formally demanded that Apple provide more details about its CEO succession planning.

John Sculley On Steve Jobs

Interesting read, “John Sculley On Steve Jobs, The Full Interview Transcript“.

[HT Andreas]

Is Steve Jobs dishonest with iPhone 4′s dropped call rate?

I loved Apple, so it pains me to write this post, removed Apple from my list of admired companies/lovemarks and now ask “Is Steve Jobs dishonest with iPhone 4′s dropped call rate?“

Looking at the Slate.com article “Here’s Your Free Case, Jerk – Apple’s condescending iPhone 4 press conference“,

“While Jobs did admit this fact in his press conference, he mangled the stats to make the iPhone 4′s dropped call increase look minor. “The iPhone 4 drops less than one additional call per 100 than the 3GS,” he said. As Jobs sees it, that’s not a big rise in dropped calls. Yet that’s not an obvious conclusion. Last year, an AT&T spokesman told me that AT&T’s average iPhone dropped-call rate is 1 percent—in other words, the old iPhone dropped one call out of 100. If the iPhone 4 drops nearly one additional call out of 100, that could be close to a 2 percent dropped-call rate—or double the dropped-call rate of the old iPhone. That sounds a lot more serious, doesn’t it?”

You see, I had some doubt when Mr. Jobs said, “iPhone 4 drops less than one additional call per 100 than the 3GS” and wondered in my mind, what was the call drop rate before? If the Slate reporter Farhad Manjoo is correct with the stats of the old AT&T average iPhone dropped-call rate, then while Mr. Jobs might not have legally told a barefaced lie, unfortunately, the way Mr. Jobs presented the stats would qualify as dishonest.

Mr. Manjoo concluded (emphasis added),

“I just wish Jobs could have handled this mini-crisis in a classier way. His data clearly show that the new iPhone is dropping more calls than the old one. He could have admitted a problem, offered a fix, and said, “We’re sorry for any trouble we caused you.” Instead, he sounded wounded and paranoid, as if we were all being ungrateful for not recognizing Apple’s contributions to the world. “We love our users so much we’ve built 300 Apple retail stores for them,” he claimed at one point. Wow, thanks, Steve—all this time, I thought you built those stores just to sell stuff! [...]

What I’d prefer, since Jobs is asking, is a company that doesn’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s the “most revolutionary rain storm ever!” A free case is all well and good. Just lose the attitude, Steve. You screwed up. We know it. You know it. Just admit it.“

Apple iPhone 4 PR messages – How Steve Jobs turned a finger spot into a death grip

Anyone interested in damage control or PR spinning should watch Steve Jobs’ press conference last Friday. Steve managed to turn an iPhone design flaw into something worthy of global attention and chances to plug Apple and iPhone 4. Too bad it didn’t work for me (Apple: removed from “Admired Companies”/Lovemarks list).

Unfortunately, as this fortune reporter wrote in “How Steve Jobs turned a finger spot into a death grip” (emphasis added),

At the Apple (AAPL) press event on Friday, somehow, right in front of a crowd of journalists (depicted at the end of the Taiwanese video below), the ‘finger spot’ that cut signal somehow turned into a more universal ‘death grip’ which also cuts signal but in just about every mobile device ever made.

More stories:

* “Here’s Your Free Case, Jerk – Apple’s condescending iPhone 4 press conference“, Slate.com

* RIM to Apple: we don’t have your antenna problem – BlackBerry doesn’t need an insulating case, RIM notes, TorStar

* Handset world: Don’t speak for us, Steve Jobs, cNet

* RIM to Apple: Bull, cNet

* Official statement from RIM [via blogs.blackberry.com] (emphasis added),

“Apple’s attempt to draw RIM into Apple’s self-made debacle is unacceptable. Apple’s claims about RIM products appear to be deliberate attempts to distort the public’s understanding of an antenna design issue and to deflect attention from Apple’s difficult situation. RIM is a global leader in antenna design and has been successfully designing industry-leading wireless data products with efficient and effective radio performance for over 20 years. During that time, RIM has avoided designs like the one Apple used in the iPhone 4 and instead has used innovative designs which reduce the risk for dropped calls, especially in areas of lower coverage.

One thing is for certain, RIM’s customers don’t need to use a case for their BlackBerry smartphone to maintain proper connectivity. Apple clearly made certain design decisions and it should take responsibility for these decisions rather than trying to draw RIM and others into a situation that relates specifically to Apple.”

- Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie

* “iPhone rivals call out Steve Jobs“, LA Times

It is so unfortunate that Apple, instead of doing the right thing and admit to its design flaw and fix the problem, it tried to claim other cell phone manufactures have the same problem which is not true because they don’t have an easily accessible single point of failure (where users can easily touch and drop calls at some areas).

P.S. Here is a Fast Company article talking about Steve Jobs’ presentation techniques “Learn Steve Jobs’ Presentation Techniques From iPhone 4 Conference“.

Duct taped iPhone 4 – Consumer Reports

July 15 Updates: “It’s Time Apple Fixed the iPhone 4 Antenna Problem” Wired News
“Apple Engineer Said to Tell Jobs IPhone Antenna Might Cut Calls” Bloomberg

***

Check out Why Consumer Reports can’t recommend the iPhone 4!

See also MarketWatch, “Another ‘thumbs down’ for the iPhone 4” and “Consumer Reports says it can’t recommend iPhone 4
Magazine cites reception issue, tells readers to wait for a fix from Apple“.

I wonder what Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive think when they saw an iPhone 4 with duct tape from Consumer Reports!

In case you get sued … by Steve Jobs or Bill Gates

Good article, “Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal“.

In the name of guarding Steve Jobs’ secrets

This has probably gone too far.

Reporter roughed up by Apple supplier – Kicked and dragged for taking photos of a Foxconn plant from a public road in China.

Apple is not guilty directly but should be held responsible because we know where the desire for secrecy comes from. What is illegal (kidnapping and illegal confinement) in US should be illegal in China when done in the name of Apple’s desire for secrecy.