Rick Howard's Reviews > Steve Jobs

This is what I learned about Steve Jobs after reading this book. He was a complete Dick. I mean, I already knew that; but, as Walter Isaacson laid out the belt fed ways that Mr. Jobs showed his Dickishness, you cannot come away from this book with anything else than thinking Jobs was a complete asshole on many levels. He completely believed that he was right and everybody else was wrong on everything.

Here is the thing, though. Because he always thought he was right, Jobs was also a master negotiator from the get go. He turned Wozniak's idea into the first Apple computer. He turned Apple into a real company. He built the Next Company from scratch after getting unceremoniously fired at Apple. He took over Pixar and went head to head with Disney and won. He negotiated his way into returning back to Apple to make it great again. And he did. His negotiations with the record labels to allow him to sell their music in iTunes was a master stroke.

And he held a completely opposite view from the rest of Silicon Valley in terms of the importance of engineering vs design. Most Silicon valley companies let their engineers innovate new products and turned to the designers to make the product fit into a consumer device after the engineers were done. Apple designed the consumer device first and told the engineers to make it fit. And he changed the world:

Apple II
Macintosh
iMac
Mac OSX
Macbook
iTunes
iPod
iPhone
iPad

To be fair, he did have failures too:
Apple I
Apple III
Lisa
Next





The take-aways for me are two-fold:
1: Leaders must exude confidence in the direction they are taking their team.
2: Design is important and leaders should be involved.