Steve Jobs

American entrepreneur (1955–2011). Co-founder of Apple, chairman of Pixar, and the subject of Walter Isaacson’s 2011 biography Steve Jobs. Known for end-to-end control of hardware and software (a philosophy Isaacson compares to a curated Zen garden), an exacting, often harsh management style, and the belief — stated to Isaacson directly — that the best product he ever built was not the Macintosh or the iPhone but the team that made them.

Isaacson’s account, drawn on at length in Walter Isaacson on Genius, Creativity, and the Craft of Biography, centres on a question Isaacson put to Steve Wozniak at the end of his reporting: did Jobs have to be so harsh? Wozniak’s answer — that a kinder Apple probably would not have shipped the Macintosh or the iPhone — became Isaacson’s working thesis for reading Jobs’s cruelty as inseparable from his standards, not a personal flaw layered on top of them. Jobs told Isaacson, in language Isaacson later heard Elon Musk use almost verbatim, that people who prize being liked (‘velvet gloves’) cannot tell a team the truth when its work falls short.

In the wiki

• Walter Isaacson on Genius, Creativity, and the Craft of Biography — Isaacson’s central case for management severity as a deliberate trade-off against comfort; the ‘team as best product’ quote; the ‘reality distortion field’ term applied to Musk

See also

• Walter Isaacson — biographer
• Elon Musk — the subject to whom Isaacson repeatedly compares Jobs