Becoming Steve Jobs (Brent Schlender & Rick Tetzeli, 2015)

If it's not obvious from the date stamps, I kinda...uh...to put it in PG terms, "soiled the bedsheets" in the last few months, both in terms of reading anywhere near my goal (I fell ten books short) and posting reviews in a timely manner. This was the last book I read for 2015 and I'm posting this closer to Easter than New Year's Day. Sigh.

I recently created a "bizlit" category for some of my more practical reading, but rather than stuff it with a bunch of dry advice-type books, I punctuated it with interesting business biographies. This one came to my attention thanks to an article built around an excerpt where now-CEO of Apple Tim Cook essentially offered up his liver to save the failing one inside Steve Jobs. If you don't have the patience to read the article, Jobs's reaction was an immediate and vehement refusal, which is many ways encapsulates the man presented in this book.

On the spectrum of Jobs-lit one can go from Hatred (0) to Gush (10). This one probably falls around a 6, a little more flattering of the subject than average, but with qualifications. It mostly hinges on the insights gleaned from journalist Brent Schlender (Rick Tetzeli is openly acknowledged as secondary and whenever the first person is used, it is Schlender playing the role of "I"). Schlender had a bit of a love-hate relationship with Jobs in their various encounters, though four years after Jobs's death Schlender is more inclined to refute the haters than tear into Jobs himself. There is a clear attempt to put some distance between this book and the Walter Isaacson tome.

Probably the most interesting part of the story is not Apple's early days or later renaissance, but Pixar. I came away from this book thinking that it may actually have been Pixar that re-framed Steve Jobs, transforming him from the petulant man-child of the first chapter (even Schlender won't dare sugar coat that time) to the sagely CEO-slash-genius we all know and love now. It really help to solidify his parallel work-family ethic, creating somebody who could be both a megalomaniac of a businessman and humble as a person, though the latter took some time to figure out. And even in the final days of his life Jobs and Schlender regrettably bumped heads one last time and it was never resolved. This is definitely not a handbook to understanding the psyche of Jobs. The man remains as complicated as ever, even beyond the grave.