iCon- Steve Jobs, The Second Greatest Act in the History of Business
Book Review: iCon: Steve Jobs, The Second Greatest Act in the History of Business
Almost everyone who is acquainted with the word ‘Apple’ knows who Steve Jobs is. But very few are aware of the way he ran a company that he had dreamt about for years, and which found him out in the cold, thanks to some horrendous decision-making.
Even if he has revolutionized three industries – computers, movies and music – in recent times, he has, as with all enterprising entrepreneurs, had to begin small somewhere.
But no matter what, an Apple product has stood out every time pushing the limits of our imagination, and regardless of which type of industry it belonged to.
Personally speaking, and after all these years in awe of Jobs, I’ve grown to really like Linus Torvalds instead. For one, he just created the world’s most brilliant operating system but most of all – and unlike Jobs and Gates – he just gave, quite literally, it away for free.
As ridiculous as that sounds, that’s just the way Linus decided to do it but that’s the story for another day.
In stark contrast, Jobs was a true salesman. Well, technology was in and he wanted to get rich just like all aspiring entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley – and rich, he did get. Yet he did have very noticeable flaws – flaws that cost him his position at his very own company.
And the unauthorized biography titled “Steve Jobs, The Second Greatest Act in the History of Business” tells this story well enough.
Steve Jobs – Belligerent Salesman, Brilliant Innovator or Both?
If there’s one thing that’s true about Steve Jobs, it is the fact that he was the embodiment of charisma, or so the book and its interviewees say. He knew what he wanted, and would do everything in his power to get it. Better still, he wanted everything yesterday…
As intimidating as that would turn out to be, not surprisingly, he was considered to be a walking contradiction, in being both a Zen devotee and a wannabe businessman. Blame it on the folly and exuberance of youth or just being a child of the 60s…
And in the ‘journey is the reward’ fashion that Steve Jobs lived by, his exploits are captured meticulously – perhaps an unflattering look at the way he did business. In fact, the most you look at the way Steve did business, the more disappointed you become in his impatience and pursuit of perfection.
Yet what stands out about the book is the way he overcame failure, both professionally and personally to rise again – only this time to use his failures from NeXT and his vision for Pixar but with a more human touch.
But the best was yet to come with Apple needing its founder to revitalize the company, and history was in the making, leading Jobs to find more success than most people can dream of in Silicon Valley, and for that matter, in the world.
One can’t help but see how events neatly tied back together, something that he described so well in his most famous quote at a Stanford commencement speech which reads, “Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have in trust in something – your gut, destiny, Life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my Life.”
In Closing
No matter what you think of this book and the dark side that it exposes, the truth is that it still is a triumph against great odds to succeed by a man who possessed sheer will and determination to do so.
On the other hand, if you couldn’t get enough, then you could also get a copy of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs…