Steve Jobs

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The author, Walter Isaacson was the former CEO of CNN and managing editor of Times Magazine. He wrote this book with Steve Jobs consent which makes it the only authorized biography about Steve Jobs. Isaacson conducted over forty interviews with Steve Jobs over the last two years before his death.

Steve Jobs grew up in a middle-class neighborhood; Job recalls that his father had a good sense of design. As Jobs was showing Isaacson around his childhood home, he couldn’t help but stop to tell a story about the fence his father built 50 years before and is still standing. He said his father had told him that it was important to craft the backs of the things he would build- like cabinets and fences even though they are hidden from view. Jobs carried this passion of creating great products with him throughout his life and career.

Steve Jobs was as fascinating as he was successful. His vision and ability to innovate left a landmark in the universe. His dream started taking form when he set out with Steve Wozniak as they launched Apple computers from their garage in Palo Alto. He was a man who created this massive vision for Apple out of his reality distortion field (RDF). What RDF means was once Steve decided that something should happen, he would bend reality to his will until it came true. This attitude extended to everyone around him. With this, he could convince a sleepless team of engineers to work another 10 hours on Macintosh font because it would become the most celebrated computer in the world.

To Jobs, the product was so important that when he came back to Apple, he decided that Jonathan Ives, the lead designer should report directly to him. In most companies, the design team does not have a seat in the boardroom. The engineering team tells the design team the specs they want, and they build a nice case around it. But at Apple, the reverse is the case; the design team tells the engineering team how they need to configure their contribution to the end product. The dominating theme of any Apple product from the beginning of the company is Simplicity. Job continually forced Apple to search for the simplicity on the far side of complexity.  Jobs believed ignoring reality is fine when you are attempting to get people to see beyond their limit. This ability does not always manifest itself in positive ways. He would demand more from his reams than anybody else could expect, often pushing people over the edge. As people who have worked with him would tell, it often worked. Jobs tells about one of his outsourced jobs which he was supposed to be working on at Atari. It was outsourced to Wozniak telling him that he needed it to be done in few days even though most engineers would take at least a few months. Wozniak finished it in four days and turned in a design that was efficient and elegant beyond belief. Jobs has used this skill multiple times in his career pushing people beyond their limit and producing remarkable results. However, the dark side surfaced when he was diagnosed with cancer.

Steve Jobs, one of the most remarkable visionary product designer and the best CEO’s of all times was a great example worth emulating when it comes to his ability to give attention to details and curiosity about how the world works.

THE BIG THREE – KEYPOINTS

Key point #1: Steve Jobs would pull impossible feats into the realm of possible through charisma, persistence, and marketing. He operates in his reality distortion field

Key point #2: Jobs constantly force Apple to search for the simplicity on the far side of complexity

Key point #3: He chose to say no to hundred other ideas that exist by focusing on the most important things and eliminating everything else.

One Last Thing 

“One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.”
― Walter Isaacson

Innovators

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Walter Isaacson, a biography writer, reveals the story of the people who created the computer and internet. It is a standard history of digital revolution and an indispensable guide to how innovation was birthed. He describes the talents that allowed confident entrepreneurs to turn their visionary ideas into a disruptive leap, why some succeeded and why some fail.

The book started with a genius named Ada Bryon, the daughter of Lord Bryon. She was tutored in math which she further nurtured herself in adulthood and also studied art. She had a burning passion for one and felt the other helped discipline herself. She soon met Charles Babbage, a science and math whiz who invented the difference engine, the giant calculating machine. Soon, Ada started using her sense of art and mathematical ability to expand upon an improved version of the difference engine, the analytical engine. This machine would be able to process different problems and even switch between what to solve on its own. When translating a transcript of Babbage’s description, Ada added her own notes which envisioned the modern computer. Mostly, she described computer as we know them, Versatile general-purpose machine. Sadly, Babbage’s machine was never invented, and he died in poverty. Ada got married to William King who later became the Earl of Lovelace which led to her being known as Ada Lovelace.

Another group of genius’ was Eckert and Mauchly who served as counterbalances for each other making them typical of many digital-arts leadership duos. Eckert drove people with a passion for precision while Mauchly tended to calm them and make them feel loved. Eckert conceded that neither could have done it alone. In 1946, they both formed their commercial business that created the next big computer maned UNIVAC, which became a celebrity on election night in 1952 by predicting the winner early. With Grace Hopper, the first workable compiler came into existence. She allowed ordinary folks to write programs in something that looks like English. She started the open-source approach by sending her workout for others to improve and lead the creation of COBOL, the first cross-platform language for computers.

The next prominent actor on our stage wasn’t a single player but a team assembled at AT&T Bell Labs. By bringing theorists and engineers who had vision and passion, they set the stage for the development of the solid state device known as the transistor. The three players who earned the Nobel prize for this discovery were William Shockley, Walter Brattain and John Bardeen Brattain. Bardeen produced the first crude transistor in 1947 and Shockley produced an improvised version soon after. It wasn’t long before transistors were replacing the vacuum tubes in radios and finding their way into computers.

Other recognized players in this book include John Von Neumann, a Hungarian-born mathematician. He contributed expressly to figuring out how to store a program in computer memory. He also figured out how to make a computer modify its program based on the results it was getting. Robert Noyce led a team that made a better and more efficient microchip. The idea of a microchip was to place multiple devices like transistors on the same piece of silicon and was brought into existence by two major companies. Jack Kilby led the first team. Kilby’s product featured gold wires connecting the device while Noyce’s chip laid down a grid of copper on the chip to connect the chips. The race was to make microchips smaller, faster, cheaper and more powerful. Ultimately, both companies worked it out so they could benefit. Kilby finally received the Nobel prize in 2000 while Noyce died in 1990. Tim Berners Lee created the necessary tools needed to bring his vision to life. His vision was to create a single global web of information which led him to use hypertext to connect one document on one computer to another elsewhere on the internet.

The final story in this book involves two graduate students from Stanford who were both rejected by MIT. While Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s Google search engine wasn’t the first of its kind, it did become most famous.

This book is full of people who stood at the time of intersection of the arts and science and made their contributions.

THE BIG THREE – KEY POINTS

Key point #1: Innovation is rarely one single individual’s effort as it’s based on collaboration integration and incremental improvement

Key point #2:  These innovators were willing to share their ideas, thoughts and work with people that make them significant

Key point #3: Progress doesn’t happen overnight or behind closed doors. It’s only when people come together to share, collaborate, create and negate that ideas will amount to something that can change the world.