One of the last times I saw him, after I had finished writing most of the book, I asked him again about his tendency to be rough on people. His petulance and impatience were part and parcel of his perfectionism. He acted as if the normal rules didn’t apply to him, and the passion, intensity, and extreme emotionalism he brought to everyday life were things he also poured into the products he made. The essence of Jobs, I think, is that his personality was integral to his way of doing business. Some of those readers have been insightful, but I think that many of them (especially those with no experience in entrepreneurship) fixate too much on the rough edges of his personality. In the months since my biography of Jobs came out, countless commentators have tried to draw management lessons from it. Apple’s “Think Different” commercial, 1997 In this essay Isaacson describes the 14 imperatives behind Jobs’s approach: focus simplify take responsibility end to end when behind, leapfrog put products before profits don’t be a slave to focus groups bend reality impute push for perfection know both the big picture and the details tolerate only “A” players engage face-to-face combine the humanities with the sciences and “stay hungry, stay foolish.”

He built the world’s most valuable company, and along the way he helped to transform a number of industries: personal computing, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, retail stores, and digital publishing. That personality was integral to his way of doing business, Isaacson writes, but the real lessons from Steve Jobs come from what he actually accomplished. The author, whose biography of Steve Jobs was an instant best seller after the Apple CEO’s death in October 2011, sets out here to correct what he perceives as an undue fixation by many commentators on the rough edges of Jobs’s personality.

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