The Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs, titled as such, is a critical item on the to-read list in the process of prying into the minds of the world’s great leaders.
Equally interesting is, I think, looking at the reviews popping up around the internet as written by the people who have been following all things Apple for years and years…and they’re mostly very negative.
Thomas Q Brady sums up a lot of the criticism in part of his review:
But all Isaacson’s armchair, Psychology Today thinking rendered from the source materials was a self-absorbed, immature, emotionally unstable control-freak. There are two reasons that’s a complete shame.
1) We already knew that about Steve Jobs.
2) I know lots of people that could be described that way (we seem to have been breeding them in the US over the last couple (few?) decades), and none of them started a company in their garage that became one of the most valued corporations in the world.
What we’re looking to explore with Dent is, in part, the question: “what made Steve Jobs different than all those other people?”
I think Thomas has a very interesting theory about at least one thing that changed for Jobs in between NEXT and his return to Apple.