Steve Jobs
“I read the Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs. It actually changed my behavior going into the office.”
Why it is worth your time
Steve Jobs is Walter Isaacson's 2011 biography, published 19 days after Jobs died. Isaacson, a former editor of Time and chief executive of CNN, had written lives of Franklin and Einstein. Jobs asked him to write it and sat for more than 40 interviews. The book runs from the Los Altos garage to the iPad and covers the NeXT and Pixar years in between. Friedberg said on the Aug 11, 2023 episode that reading it changed his behavior when he went into the office. He was running The Production Board and its companies at the time, and the sections on focus, product taste and direct feedback are the ones a chief executive would take away. It suits anyone managing a product company. The caveat is that Tim Cook later said the book did Jobs a 'tremendous disservice' and painted him as a greedy, selfish egomaniac, and Jony Ive said his regard for it 'couldn't be any lower'.
