Steve Jobs, the exclusive autobiography, by Walter Isaacson

In the last blog, I reviewed the newspaper articles after his death; this time I review the book of his life. It is not the first book about Jobs that I have read but it is by far the best. After finishing it, my feelings were that I would love to have met such an amazing icon but also relieved that I never had the opportunity to work for him. Because this was a man who could be engaging and impossible on the same day to the same people and only the tough could survive his bipolar behaviour. He rated people as either ‘insanely great’ or as a ‘total bozo’ with very few in the middle.

Yet despite his bizarre and unkind behaviour, he had the ability to retain those that he really needed and to inspire them to work impossible hours and deliver against impossible targets. And despite the way he treated them, they were prepared to follow him from one obsessive project to another. And this author, more than his previous biographers, reveals some of the secrets of his genius.

Those who were following him in the mid 1980s - when he was sacked from Apple and was floundering at his corporate creation NeXT - must have wondered whether they had made the right choice. But it was here that luck played a part. A company that he bought for its hardware - Pixar - proved to have software that would change the world of animated films and propel him on the road to success as saviour of Apple and genius of the 21st century.

Rather than describe his phenomenal success during his second phase with Apple, it is perhaps more useful to think of the strategic lessons for the rest of us mere mortals. But this is where it gets dangerous, because Jobs broke all the rules of marketing and strategy. His view was that market research is for bozos and that all he had to do was look in the mirror each morning. He knew what customers would want in the future much more clearly than they could possibly imagine.

So what are the lessons from this extraordinary life? Certainly the lesson from his first time at Apple was that, if you have a genius who lacks people skills, find him a role that exploits his genius rather than pushing him out. The lesson from his time with Pixar and his second spell with Apple, is that the driver of success is not usually the inventor but the one who sees the potential. Right from the time when he first visited Rank Xerox’s laboratory and saw the potential of the mouse, through to his belief that Apple could enter and conquer both the music and the telephone markets, he showed quite extraordinary foresight. He had the vision to see potential that the inventors could not imagine. And this talent made Apple, for a few weeks in 2010, the most valuable company in the world.

The final lesson from Jobs life that recurred time and again during his career, was the importance of design. Apple’s computers, MP3 players, telephones and tablets do not perform any better than the competition but, because of Jobs’ flair for design and his obsession with the look and feel of his products, customers are willing and proud to pay over the odds.

He should have died a happy man, knowing that his obsessions paid off and that the bozos who sacked him from Apple were proved wrong a thousand times over. But after reading the book you are left uncertain whether anyone so driven, so obsessive, so angry, could ever have found complete fulfilment.