Book Review: Becoming Steve Jobs

Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader

Reviewed by Eclecticity

Authors: Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli

Publisher: Signal McClelland & Stewart, Random House of Canada Limited, Penguin Random House Company, hardcover, 447 pages, including: Authors’ Note, Prologue, 17 Chapters, Source Notes, Bibliography, Acknowledgments, and Index

Authors: At the time of publication, Brent Schlender was a premier chronicler of the personal computer revolution, who wrote about every major figure and company in the tech industry, He covered Steve Jobs for the Wall Street Journal andFortune for nearly twenty-five years. Rick Tetzeli, executive director of Fast Company, covered technology for two decades. He was former deputy editor of Fortune and the editor of Entertainment Weekly.

Brief Observations

Steve Jobs was one of the most influential persons in the Silicon Valley computer industry. His biological parents were Joanna Schieble, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, and Abdulfattah Jandali, a Syrian PhD candidate studying political science. Only a few days after his birth, Steve was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs, a lower-middle-class couple, living in Mountain View, California. Steve’s widow wife said of Paul and Clara: “He felt he had been really blessed by having the two of them as parents” (p. 25). His parents wanted Steve to have a good education. A bright student, he skipped grade six, eventually he would go to college, only to drop out. His dad, Paul had many jobs, including a machinist and car mechanic. He encouraged Steve to pay attention to detail while working, showing him how to take things apart and put them back together. He gave Steve a workbench in the garage to repair and built things. 

Eventually Steve met Stephen Wozniak, who was an “engineering genius.” “Woz,” as he is called in the book, learned engineering from his Lockheed engineer dad. Schlender and Tetzeli describe the formation of the Jobs and Wozniak company, Apple in 1976, the development and sale of the first Apple personal computers, and eventually Woz and Steve grew apart as their company grew. Not only did Woz and Steve grow apart, but in the mid-1980s, Steve had major disagreements with key people in the Apple company, who supported each other to demote Steve, which led to him leaving the Apple company that he had co-founded. 

The authors then describe Steve’s new company NeXT, hoping it would be a better company than Apple, its ups and downs, as well as the purchase of the Pixar business, which created the Toy Story animated movie and others, and eventually he sold the company to Disney. By then Steve had become a billionaire. After several years, Steve did return to Apple and become its CEO, and the company became a huge success worldwide. 

Much of the volume contains content from interviews by the authors of Steve’s company employees, friends and others. In addition, there is a lot of detailed information about technological products, including: Apple computers, iMac, iPod, iTunes, iTune App Store, iPhone, iPad, and others. 

The book also describes the complex personality of Steve. While he was thought of as a genius, a visionary, a brilliant aesthetic designer, a loyal friend, an inspiring leader and mentor, and a loving husband and dad; he also came across as overly critical, an unrealistic perfectionist, over confident and arrogant, aggressive, rude, and lacking empathy. 

Steve was a vegan and a Buddhist, and for a time he had a Zen monk mentor-teacher. In Buddhism, one belief about human beings is that we are always in a state of becoming—hence the title of this volume, and one of the personality traits of Steve was his constant restlessness to seek for something better in his life and work. 

The volume also includes Steve’s Stanford University commencement address, and his wife Laurene’s tribute at the memorial service on October 17, at the Memorial Church on Stanford University’s campus. Steve had died October 5, 2011, after a lengthy battle with pancreatic cancer and a liver transplant. 

Steve Jobs has indeed left a legacy in the personal computer world that lives on, and some believe he and his legacy have made this world a better place. 

Even though in their “Authors’ Note,” they stated that the first person singular referred to Brent Schlender, my critique in that regard is readers may not really know which sections were specifically written by Tetzeli. 

This volume will mostly appeal to computer geeks.