3. Walter Issacson
Born : May 20, 1952 (age 61)
New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
Residence : Washington, DC
Occupation : Author
Spouse(s) : Cathy Isaacson
He is the President and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a
nonpartisan educational and policy studies
organization based in Washington, D.C. He has been
the Chairman and CEO of CNN and the Managing
Editor of Time. He has written biographies of Henry
Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, Albert
Einstein and Steve Jobs.
By VISHAL PATEL
4. STEVE JOBS
Born : Steven Paul Jobs
February 24, 1955
San Francisco, California, US
Died : October 5, 2011 (aged 56)
Palo Alto, California, US
Cause of death :
Metastatic Insulinoma
Residence : Palo Alto, California
Nationality : American
Alma mater : Reed College
Occupation : Co-founder, Chairman
and CEO,
Apple Inc.
Co-founder and CEO, Pixar
Founder and CEO,
NeXT Inc.
Years active : 1974–2011
Board member of : The Walt
Disney Company,
Apple Inc.
Religion : Zen
Buddhism (previously Lutheran)
Spouse(s) : Laurene Powell
(1991–2011, his death)
By VISHAL PATEL
5. Bibliography
1. Amelio, Gil. On the Firing Line. HarperBusiness, 1998.
2. Berlin, Leslie. The Man behind the Microchip. Oxford, 2005.
3. Butcher, Lee. The Accidental Millionaire. Paragon House, 1988.
4. Carlton, Jim. Apple. Random House, 1997.
5. Cringely, Robert X. Accidental Empires. Addison Wesley, 1992.
6. Deutschman, Alan. The Second Coming of Steve Jobs. Broadway Books, 2000.
7. Elliot, Jay, with William Simon. The Steve Jobs Way. Vanguard, 2011.
8. Freiberger, Paul, and Michael Swaine. Fire in the Valley. McGraw-Hill, 1984.
9. Garr, Doug. Woz. Avon, 1984. Hertzfeld, Andy. Revolution in the Valley. O’Reilly, 2005.
10. Hiltzik, Michael. Dealers of Lightning. HarperBusiness, 1999.
11. Jobs, Steve. Smithsonian oral history interview with Daniel Morrow, April 20, 1995.
12. Kahney, Leander. Inside Steve’s Brain. Portfolio, 2008.
13. Kawasaki, Guy. The Macintosh Way. Scott, Foresman, 1989.
14. Knopper, Steve. Appetite for Self-Destruction. Free Press, 2009.
15. Kot, Greg. Ripped. Scribner, 2009. Kunkel, Paul. AppleDesign. Graphis Inc., 1997.
16. Levy, Steven. Hackers. Doubleday, 1984.
17. Insanely Great. Viking Penguin, 1994.
By VISHAL PATEL
6. Book Description
Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two
years—as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members,
friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has
written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense
personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and
ferocious drive revolutionized six industries :
1. Personal computers,
2. Animated movies,
3. Music,
4. Phones,
5. Tablet computing,
6. Digital publishing
By VISHAL PATEL
7. • At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain its innovative
edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build digital-
age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness
and applied imagination.
• He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century
was to connect creativity with technology. He built a company where
leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of
engineering.
• Although Jobs cooperated with this book, he asked for no control
over what was written nor even the right to read it before it was
published. He put nothing off-limits. He encouraged the people he
knew to speak honestly. And Jobs speaks candidly, sometimes
brutally so, about the people he worked with and competed against.
Continue…
By VISHAL PATEL
8. Continue…
• His friends, foes, and colleagues provide an unvarnished view of the
passions, perfectionism, obsessions, artistry, devilry, and
compulsion for control that shaped his approach to business and the
innovative products that resulted.
• Driven by demons, Jobs could drive those around him to fury and
despair. But his personality and products were interrelated, just as
Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an
integrated system. His tale is instructive and cautionary, filled with
lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values.
By VISHAL PATEL
9. ODD COUPLE [The Two Steves]
While a student in McCollum’s class, Jobs became friends with a
graduate who was the teacher’s all-time favorite and a school legend for his
wizardry in the class. Stephen Wozniak, whose younger brother had been
on a swim team with Jobs, was almost five years older than Jobs and far
more knowledgeable about electronics. But emotionally and socially he was
still a high school geek.
Like Jobs, Wozniak learned a lot at his father’s knee. But their lessons
were different. Paul Jobs was a high school dropout who, when fixing up
cars, knew how to turn a tidy profit by striking the right deal on parts.
Francis Wozniak, known as Jerry, was a brilliant engineering graduate from
Cal Tech, where he had quarterbacked the football team, who became a
rocket scientist at Lockheed. He exalted engineering and looked down on
those in business, marketing, and sales. “I remember him telling me that
engineering was the highest level of importance you could reach in the
world,” Steve Wozniak later recalled. “It takes society to a new level.”
By VISHAL PATEL
10. Continue…
One of Steve Wozniak’s first memories was going to his father’s
workplace on a weekend and being shown electronic parts, with his dad
“putting them on a table with me so I got to play with them.” He watched
with fascination as his father tried to get a waveform line on a video screen
to stay flat so he could show that one of his circuit designs was working
properly. “I could see that whatever my dad was doing, it was important
and good.” Woz, as he was known even then, would ask about the resistors
and transistors lying around the house, and his father would pull out a
blackboard to illustrate what they did. “He would explain what a resistor
was by going all the way back to atoms and electrons. He explained how
resistors worked when I was in second grade, not by equations but by
having me picture it.”
Woz’s father taught him something else that became ingrained in his
childlike, socially awkward personality: Never lie. “My dad believed in
honesty. Extreme honesty. That’s the biggest thing he taught me. I never lie,
even to this day.”
By VISHAL PATEL
11. My Review
The interviews with Jobs are fascinating and revealing. We get a
real sense for what it must have been like to be Steve, or to work with
him. That earns the book five stars despite its flaws, in that it's
definitely a must-read if you have any interest at all in the subject.
The book is written essentially as a series of stories about Steve. The
book continuously held my interest, but some of the dramas of his life seem
muted. For instance, he came close to going bust when both Next and Pixar
were flailing. There was only the slightest hint that anything dramatic
happened in those years. In one paragraph, Pixar is shown as nearly
running him out of money. A few brief paragraphs later, Toy Story gets
released and Jobs' finances are saved for good.
By VISHAL PATEL
