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.

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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.”‘

Now, let me address the question that how come this book came out so quickly after Jobs‘ death, is it an opportunistic and poorly researched “quicky bio”?

Well, actually in summer of 2004 when Steve Jobs knew he was sick (but almost no one knew yet), he tried but failed to convince author Walter Isaacson to write a biography of him as Isaacson said it was too early, “Maybe in a decade or two, when you retire.”

Quoting Isaacson from the introduction chapter of the book,

“But in 2009 his wife, Laurene Powell, said bluntly, “If you’re ever going to do a book on Steve, you’d better do it now.” He had just taken a second medical leave. I confessed to her that when he had first raised the idea, I hadn’t known he was sick. Almost nobody knew, she sid. He had called me right before he was going to be operated on for cancer, and he was still keeping it a secret, she explained.”

A video of Walter Isaacson on Steve Jobs

Here is review/”best of” (in the order that intrigues me) [WORK-IN-PROGRESS]

Chapter 26 – Design Principles, The Studio of Jobs and Ive

Chapter 25 – Think Different, Jobs as iCEO

See also “Drive Different – How Steve Jobs Legally Drove Without a License Plate”

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Charlie Rose interviews: Here is 53 minutes interview of Walter Isaacson on Charlie on Oct 25, 2011

Here is A Tribute to Steve Jobs with David Carr, Marissa Mayer, Marc Andreessen and more on Oct 7, 2011 (longer list: Walter Isaacson, Walter Mossberg, Ken Auletta, Marissa Mayer, Lawrence Ellison, Eric Schmidt, Bob Iger, David Carr, Marc Andreessen and Steve Wozniak)

* A celebration of Steve’s life.

~9:15 Never ask what would Steve do. Do whats right, he said.

* eWeek, Steve Jobs’ Biography Details Apple Design Lab, Process

* Insightful “Nightline from ABC News: ‘Steve Jobs’ Book: Tale of Two Steves”