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A review by gadicohen93
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
4.0
Before I'd started Isaacson's Steve Jobs, I'd never really known what Steve Jobs' capacity at Apple was. I actually still don't really know. Was the only thing he did as CEO screaming at his employees that their work was "shit"? Shit, shit, shit? I don't think they were shit. SJ’s perfectionism was downright arbitrary at times, and perhaps that’s why he succeeded so well. His dictatorship, ruled out of a pair of guerilla-glued-on reality distortion goggles, took its inspiration from Stalinist Russia’s governance structures of Five-Year Plans and forced industrialization. The kind of efficiency he mined out of his workers reminds me eerily of an anecdote my Current Global Macroeconomic Challenges professor David Wyss kept resorting to when discussing China’s growth: One day a government official tells a neighborhood block to find a new home, and the next day there’s a highway in its place. Apple didn’t get things done because of an inherently efficient structure of talent; it got things done because Steve Jobs’ taste buds ruled over Apple like Vladimir over Russia.
Commendable taste buds they were. His web of philosophies, all poking out of a center of zennish Simplicity, guided his every move – though, in the end, it was his gut feeling that really seemed to intuit whether he liked a product or not. Well, duh. CEOs should have gut feelings about things and should usually let their gut feelings dictate those things. Or the gut should, at least, act in an editorial capacity. And I think most of Steve Jobs’ role as Apple CEO could be translated into EAL: editor-at-large – he’d pour over a product, examine it, let his gut grunt its yeas or nays, and either scream his fucking head off or take credit for the idea’s beautiful success.
More than the fact that SJ was a complete asshole, I learned a few things. I learned that life philosophy can drive people in their quests for better products. I learned that customers don't know what they want. Like, graphical user interfaces on computers? Those were not a thing -- not even an intuitive thought, until someone (I forget who) came up with it three decades + ago. I learned that CEOs and company executives and engineers and designers bicker. A lot. They bicker about the price of the product, the materials of the product, the way the products looks, feels, the way it's marketed and advertised, the way it's packaged and sold even.
Overall, this book was pretty illuminating in the way it delved into all of Apple's personalities and products and organizational structures. It was a fast, simple, if not as completely elegant as one of Steve's products.
Commendable taste buds they were. His web of philosophies, all poking out of a center of zennish Simplicity, guided his every move – though, in the end, it was his gut feeling that really seemed to intuit whether he liked a product or not. Well, duh. CEOs should have gut feelings about things and should usually let their gut feelings dictate those things. Or the gut should, at least, act in an editorial capacity. And I think most of Steve Jobs’ role as Apple CEO could be translated into EAL: editor-at-large – he’d pour over a product, examine it, let his gut grunt its yeas or nays, and either scream his fucking head off or take credit for the idea’s beautiful success.
More than the fact that SJ was a complete asshole, I learned a few things. I learned that life philosophy can drive people in their quests for better products. I learned that customers don't know what they want. Like, graphical user interfaces on computers? Those were not a thing -- not even an intuitive thought, until someone (I forget who) came up with it three decades + ago. I learned that CEOs and company executives and engineers and designers bicker. A lot. They bicker about the price of the product, the materials of the product, the way the products looks, feels, the way it's marketed and advertised, the way it's packaged and sold even.
Overall, this book was pretty illuminating in the way it delved into all of Apple's personalities and products and organizational structures. It was a fast, simple, if not as completely elegant as one of Steve's products.