BECOMING STEVE JOBS
The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Visionary Leader
Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli
Crown Business; 447 pages; $30
The main point of the new business-oriented biography Becoming Steve Jobs, by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, is that Steve Jobs has been misrepresented. Blame Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs (2011), as the authors do, for the public perception that Jobs never outgrew the managerial style of the scheming, screaming, cheating, smelly hothead he may - may - have been in his early years. Instead, Mr Schlender and Mr Tetzeli say in their new book, Jobs developed a wise, mature, deliberate executive style for which he is seldom given credit, one that helped lead Apple to glorious heights.
Ordinarily, that revelation wouldn't make waves. But a battle has broken out between these two biographies. Mr Isaacson's book was the officially authorised version. But Apple's top brass has noisily endorsed Becoming Steve Jobs as a corrective, and Apple history can't get much more official than that. If the Isaacson book ruffled Apple feathers, its executives had better brace themselves for Alex Gibney's documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, which just had its premiere at the South by Southwest festival. It's one thing to read about someone's behaviour. It's quite another to watch the extensive archival footage of the unguarded Jobs that shapes Mr Gibney's portrait.
Writing about and interviewing a powerful person always requires making some kind of deal with the Devil. Mr Isaacson says his subject did not meddle, but his book clearly is only as personal as Jobs would allow it to be. In any case, his book wisely split its attention between the man and his creations, celebrating the reasons his legacy would matter. Published just three weeks after Jobs's death, the book had the emotional heft of an epitaph and the user-friendly feel of an Apple product.
Meanwhile, Mr Schlender (who has worked for Fortune and The Wall Street Journal) and Mr Tetzeli (a former editor of Fortune, now executive editor of Fast Company) also do work that depends on access to business titans. Although he wrote this book with Mr Tetzeli, Mr Schlender makes himself a character in the book. Mr Schlender, who began covering Jobs in 1986, makes frequent reference to their close friendship, which was surely very close indeed; he was one of the few who attended Jobs's burial. But reporter-titan relationships, no matter how warm, have an aspect of expediency. Becoming Steve Jobs would have been better had it been more alert to the power games Mr Schlender had to play. But it sounds more proud than insightful about them.
Becoming Steve Jobs pays major attention to a time period that the authors feel has been overlooked: the interregnum between Jobs's two stints as head of Apple. That was the time, they think, when his impulsive, impractical younger self began giving way to a much more pragmatic visionary, better equipped to lead. Since that is so much less newsworthy than the more tabloidy aspects of his story, they present it with an air of discovery. And they have many anecdotes to flesh out that time. What they don't have is a deep and consistent insight into what, beyond aging, was at the heart of this growth. This book also has no clear idea of what kind of readership it's after. So it rehashes some of the most familiar parts of Silicon Valley lore; if you know why the January 1975 cover of Popular Electronics is, in some circles, sexier than the best Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue ever - because it depicts the world-changing Altair 8800 computer kit - you don't need to be told about it again. If you don't know why it's important, then there's a lot you need to be told, and it's basic computer history you won't find here.
Along the same lines, the book rehashes familiar parts of the Jobs mythology but leaves out some of the most colourful ones, from his fateful wooing of John Sculley to the fact that the author Mona Simpson is his sister. Becoming Steve Jobs emphasises competition, sales and computer specs at the expense of anything beyond business. The result is a book too spotty to be a good introduction to Jobs lore.
The authors are at their best when analysing the products Jobs created, especially during the wilderness years spent away from Apple. They write of how by the time he was forced out, he had lost his sense of practicality as well as some of his best early collaborators, whom he did a fine job of alienating. Instead, he created the company NeXT with a new extravagance and no real grasp of the business machines it was supposed to be building. As Becoming Steve Jobs makes clear, he had a great feel for devices he himself might use, but a desktop machine that needed to connect to other desktop machines? More money was spent on the design of a good-looking factory than on the computers it would build. And the factory never had cause to manufacture many.
© The New York Times News Service 2015
