Unseen side to the genius of Steve Jobs

The relationship between journalists and Steve Jobs could often be fraught, but there were always a handful of reporters he liked and trusted. They included John Markoff of The New York Times, Steven Levy, formerly of Wired magazine (he’s now at Medium), Walt Mossberg, the longtime technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal (he’s now at Re/ code), and Brent Schlender of Fortune. They had known Jobs for decades.

As Schlender writes in Becoming Steve Jobs, the forthcoming book he coauthored with Rick Tetzeli, he first met Jobs in April 1986, eight months after the Apple co-founder had been ousted by John Sculley, then Apple’s chief executive. Jobs, who had started a new company called NeXT, was 31. Schlender, who had just joined The Wall Street Journal’s San Francisco bureau, was 32.

During the next quarter-century, Schlender conducted “more than 150 interviews and informal conversations” with Jobs. He wrote cover stories for Fortune about Apple, some of which Jobs liked, and some of which he hated. On occasion, he visited Jobs at his home in Palo Alto, California. What began as a subject-journalist relationship evolved into something deeper — “a long, complicated and mostly rewarding relationship”, as Schlender characterises it in the book.

So it is not a huge surprise that Schlender — and his friend Tetzeli, a former Fortune deputy managing editor — would see Jobs in a different light than most. (Disclosure: I worked with Schlender and Tetzeli during my decade at Fortune.) After Jobs died, they write, the coverage reflected “stagnant stereotypes”. On the one hand, “Steve was a genius with a flair for design” whose powers of persuasion were such that he could convince people that the sun rose in the west and set in the east. On the other hand, he was also “a pompous jerk” who humiliated employees and “disregarded everyone else in his singleminded pursuit of perfection”.

It is Schlender’s and Tetzeli’s contention that Jobs was a far more complex and interesting man than the half-genius/ half-jerk stereotype, and a good part of their book is an attempt to craft a more rounded portrait. What makes their book important is that they also contend — persuasively, I believe — that, the stereotype notwithstanding, he was not the same man in his prime that he had been at the beginning of his career. The callow, impetuous, arrogant youth who cofounded Apple was very different from the mature and thoughtful man who returned to his struggling creation and turned it into a company that made breathtaking products while becoming the dominant technology company of our time.

For Schlender and Tetzeli, the crucial period was the most overlooked part of Jobs’ career: the years from 1985 to 1997, when he was in exile from Apple and running NeXT. As a business, NeXT was a failure. Begun as a company that was going to bring affordable yet superior computers to the higher education market, it eventually had to abandon the hardware side of the business and become a pure software company. The point that is normally made about NeXT is that when Jobs returned to Apple, he brought with him the NeXTSTEP operating system, which became the foundation for a new generation of Macs and was a critical component of the company’s revival.

Every bit as important, though, was that Jobs brought his core group of executives with him to Apple, and they stayed with him for years. At the same time he was running NeXT, Jobs also owned Pixar, the animation studio he bought from George Lucas. It took years before Pixar came out with its first full-length movie, Toy Story. During that time, he saw how Ed Catmull, Pixar’s president, managed the company’s creative talent. Catmull taught Jobs how to manage employees.

When Jobs returned to Apple, he was more patient — with people and with products. His charisma still drew people to him, but he no longer drove them away with his abrasive behaviour and impossible demands. He had also learned that his ideas weren’t always the right ones.

Perhaps the most important example of this was the App Store. Jobs had initially opposed allowing outside developers to build apps for the iPhone, but he did a quick about-face once he realised he was wrong.

The App Store has been hugely important in making the iPhone perhaps the most profitable consumer electronic device ever.

Jobs has long been hailed as one of the great creative minds of modern business. His genius for creating products and his marketing flair have also been rightly hailed. All of that comes through in Becoming Steve Jobs.