The Steve Jobs story most people know skips the twenty years of failure in the middle. Using Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli's Becoming Steve Jobs, we walk through the 5-year-old at his workbench, the firing, NeXT, Pixar, and the return to Apple, and we pull out the lessons worth applying to your own business.
Today, I am sharing what I learned by reading the book Becoming Steve Jobs by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, a book written by a journalist who knew Steve for 25 years, and the one that finally gets at the part of the story most people skip: the twenty years of failure in the middle.
We start at a workbench in a Mountain View garage, where a father named Paul Jobs clears a section and tells his five-year-old son, "Steve, this is your workbench now." That single afternoon shows up decades later inside a NeXT computer, where Steve forces his engineers to build a perfectly square motherboard nobody would ever see. There was as much beauty on the underside as the top side. He learned that before he could read a schematic.
From there we follow the whole arc. A fourteen-year-old looking up Bill Hewlett in the phone book and just calling him. Blue boxes sold to college kids at $150 a pop. A twenty-five-thousand-dollar order from the Byte Shop that Steve accepted despite never having manufactured at scale, never having financed a business, and never having taken an order. He didn't care about the nevers. He just started.
Then the fall. The Lisa. The Mac. Three failures in a row, the board turning on him one by one around a conference table, and an exile designed to humiliate. NeXT burning through $12 million of his own money, $20 million of Ross Perot's, and $100 million of Canon's on Ansel Adams prints, custom magnesium cases, and a factory that promised 600 machines a day and delivered 600 a month.
And then Pixar, which is where this book earns its title. Ed Catmull refused to back down, walked Steve through how a movie actually gets made, and taught him something no one at Apple ever could: that sometimes the best management technique is to get out of the way and let talented people work. Steve spent months preparing a two-and-a-half-hour presentation to unveil a NeXT computer that wasn't finished. Pixar showed 90 seconds of a hopping desk lamp and got a standing ovation before it ended. That contrast changed him.
We finish with the return, the Think Different campaign, the four-quadrant product plan, the Microsoft deal Steve closed in one phone call after Amelio had faxed paperwork back and forth for months, iTunes, the iPod, the stores, and the iPhone. Along the way, Steve borrows a page straight from John D. Rockefeller, running SoundJam as if it had never been bought.
And near the end, an hour before announcing the Pixar sale, Steve pulls Bob Iger aside on a bench, tells him the cancer is back, and offers him a way out of the deal.
Some of what we pull out of this one:
Please go buy the book. There's no way I could cover a fraction of what's in it.