A wonder called Steve

D. S. Cheema

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, both fierce competitors at one point of time, are perhaps the most chronicled entrepreneurs in the world. When Walter Isaacson published Steve’s biography in 2011, it was considered the last word about this creative genius. However, Tim Cook, the Chief Executive of Apple, felt Isaacson work did Jobs “a tremendous disservice” and “didn’t capture the person”.

 The biography by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli has been accepted as a more balanced view. Apple calls it, “Only book about Steve recommended by the people who know him best,” and posted free excerpts on i-Books. Brent had covered Steve Jobs for the Wall Street Journal and Fortune for nearly 25 years. Coauthor Rick has experience of covering technology for two decades. The man who birthed and nurtured Apple and scripted the great American success story continues to inspire many even four years after his death. 

It is intriguing that the person, who created a company like Apple, suffered humiliation of demotions and was fired from the same company later. In Steve’s absence Apple had applied market-driven strategy without any significant technological breakthrough, which pushed the great dream of Apple into oblivion. Efforts were made to sell the company, which had become undisciplined, to Sun Microsystems, AT& T and IBM, as it could soon become bankrupt.

Steve was pained to see Apple in dire straits. He loved the company and that is why he always retained one share of the Apple stock. Initially, he returned as an advisor with a mission to save Apple. He was certain that most of the workers had retained the ‘Apple spirit’, he and the co-founder Woz had instilled in them. Almost everyone in the market felt that Steve was the only one who could save Apple, as only he understood the soul of Apple and he rose to the occasion.

During the 11 years, when he was away from Apple, Steve tried to reinvent himself and learnt many lessons to improve himself personally. He learnt the importance of progressing only in steps and not in leaps and bounds. He was now more focused and had learnt the tricks of making smart, sensible, surgical decisions quickly and not impulsively, as was the case in his first tenure. He learnt the value of patience and absorbed some proven management principles. 

Steve was a man of infinite intellectual restlessness and demanded perfection from himself. He embraced minimalism, which came from his Zen devotion to simplicity. Steve was a visionary. He changed the entire board, cut down drastically on dead inventory and downsized the company, assembled a dedicated team and delegated authority to it and used the time he saved in micromanagement to prepare new strategies. In his own words, ‘getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.’

It would be unfair to portrait Steve only as a man of disruptive behaviour working with whom was impossible. Admittedly, Steve was out of sync with conventional wisdom and had many personality traits, which made people dislike him instantly. But he had a positive side of being sensitive to his employees and to his family. He was a billionaire and a broke at different times but never let money run his life. The New York Times bestseller is a detailed and fair assessment of the legend, a must for everyone who wants to make sense of entrepreneurship.