Robert de Niro notwithstanding, if Puzo and Coppola had made the younger Don Corleone as the first Godfather movie rather than the second would it have worked? And if they had not fleshed out characters like Fredo and Clemenza would Brando’s character been so riveting?
I asked these questions as I read Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. Stylistically, I would have loved for him to have the started the book around 2000 and spent 3/4 of the book on the amazing string of Apple and Pixar achievements since then, and SJ’s own just as amazing willpower and strength through all the medical procedures he endured, and woven in as appropriate snippets from SJ’s previous history. But Walt presents a chronology from birth so the first half of the 600+ pages is somewhat plodding and repetitive. Plenty of references to vegan diets, body odor, drugs, piercing glances and “reality distortion” fields. And it leaves him much less space to flesh out so many interesting people and incidents around SJ. I would love to have seen more on Laurene Powell, Tim Cook, Apple’s retail stores, its Apps ecosystem. Did SJ ever worry about AT&T’s network problems with the iPhone? What did he think of Foxconn and its employee suicides and other labor issues as it assembled most of his iPods, iPhones and iPads?
My nitpicking aside, the book has plenty of humorous moments – you have to laugh at SJ’s audacity in many of his dealings the book documents. Larry Ellison talks about the torture of being a guinea pig of SJ’s perfectionism – as he showed him various pre-production versions of Pixar’s Toy Story and later endure multiple weekend trips to the warehouse which was a mockup of Apple’s retail foray. SJ’s wedding cake, describes Walt, “was strictly vegan – devoid of eggs, milk, or any refined products – more than a few guests found it inedible”
And there are plenty of tender moments.
One of my favorites is when Walt asks him if he often thought of being put up for adoption.
“These days, he said, he thought more about getting older than about his birth. That led him to play Joni Mitchell’s (on his iPad) greatest song “Both Sides Now” with its lyrics about being older and wiser”.
I wanted to read the book as soon as it came out to see if I needed to change much in my next book’s manuscript in sections about Apple. Since he focuses more on the man, and my book more on its operations, the answer is no. But I may need to change to change the Corning case study in the book. Presumably, because of an NDA with Apple they would not acknowledge if the iPhone used their Gorilla Glass. Walt spends two, again humorous pages, describing how the deal between SJ and Corning’s CEO, Wendell Weeks got done.
The book will shock you, touch you, entertain you. Get a copy. But when the movie is made about SJ, I hope they start with the later life – the Brando version if you will.
Cross-posted on the Deal Architect blog
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