Becoming Jobs is not an easy exercise

Who was Steve Jobs? Half-genius and half asshole? A new book, Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader by business journalists Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli (published by Sceptre; distributed by Hachette India, pages 447, Price Rs 699) grapples with the question again.

The earlier, the authorized biography of Jobs by Walter Isaacson was an intense portrayal of the man. Becoming Steve Jobs, however, is blessed by the Apple management. A quote from Apple CEO Tim Cook which authors Schlender and Tetzeli have included in the book reveals what Becoming Steve Jobs is all about: “I thought the Isaacson book did him a tremendous disservice. It was just a rehash of a bunch of stuff that had already been written, and focused on small parts of his personality. You get the feeling that [Steve’s] a greedy, selfish egomaniac. It didn’t capture the person. The person I read about there is somebody I would never have wanted to work with over all this time.”

Schlender and Tetzeli have a written this book for the business community, with its focus on products and how Job’s leadership changed over the years. Isaacson’s effort, which was commissioned by Jobs himself, was focusing less on business and more on the man’s life, his struggles, tussles and triumphs. Schlender and Tetzeli have stayed away from ‘the reality distortion field’ but Becoming Steve Jobs is an equally interesting and important book that one should not miss out.

The book’s value lies in its argument that Steve is a great object lesson in someone who masterfully improved his ability to make better use of his strengths and to effectively mitigate those aspects of his personality that got in the way of those strengths.

Becoming Steve Jobs notes that Jobs’s negative qualities did not go away, nor were they replaced by new good traits.

The strength of the book derives from the fact that Schlender has been a kind of a tech industry insider having covered Apple and Jobs over the years for Fortune and The Wall Street Journal and having a working relationship with the man himself. Becoming Steve Jobs has relied on a series of interviews with people who worked with Jobs at Apple, NeXT and Pixar. May be one significant voice that is missing from here is that of the other Steve—Wozniacki.

The authors bring in—not that it is something new—Jobs’s spiritual life. They write that “the spiritual sensibility contributed greatly to the unusual breadth of his intellectual peripheral vision, which eventually led him to see possibilities—ranging from great new products to radically reinvented business models—that escaped most others.”

Jobs, who came to India seeking spiritual awakening during his under graduate days, was tempted by Buddhism. Schlender writes that Buddhism made Jobs feel justified in constantly demanding nothing less than what he deemed to be perfection from others, from the products he would create, and from himself.

Then explaining the book itself, he writes: “In Buddhist philosophy, life is often compared to an ever-changing river. There is a sense that everything, and every individual, is ceaselessly in the process of becoming. In this view of the world, achieving perfection is also a continuous process, and a goal that can never be fully attained. That’s a vision that would come to suit Steve’s exacting nature.”

And the book is an effort in telling how Steve became from an upstart to visionary leader—from setting up Apple to getting kicked out by his own recruit—CEO John Sculley, the Pepsicola man—and moving on to create NeXT and owning and backing Pixar. And finally returning chastened to Apple first as iCEO and then taking full control and coming up with a whole new range of products.

Schlender goes back to Joe Nocera’s Esquire profile of Jobs to tell us how he felt about getting ousted from Apple. “Apple is like an intensive love affair with a girl you really, really like, and then she decides to drop you and go out with someone who is not so neat.” At 30 you won’t blame Jobs for thinking that. The conclusion is that the Steve Jobs of 1986 was too raw, too self-centred, and too immature to successfully pull off the balancing act required of a big-time CEO. And that again explains the need for this book.

The NeXT did not bolster Jobs’s image but acquiring Pixar, a company of outrageously talented creative people, changed him. Pixar became the place where he really learned, albeit slowly and reluctantly and against his natural instincts, that sometime the best management technique is to forgo micromanagement and give good talented people the room they need to succeed. The authors make the conclusion that without the lessons at Pixar there would have been no great second act at Apple in 1997. May be then the best thing that could have happened to Jobs was getting kicked out by Sculley in May 1985.

So, what did Jobs learn at Pixar? His negotiating style gained new subtlety without losing its ballsy brashness. It is at Pixar that he started to develop patience—without losing any of his memorable, and motivating edge. Jobs also understood that true artists “keep risking failure just as Bob Dylan and Picasso did.”

But, then, I’m left with this question. As India Inc tries to kick start itself, I repeatedly wonder would a Jobs’s story be possible here? An abandoned baby at birth [more than an orphan]—not a teaboy—building from scratch one of the world’s most successful tech companies without any help from the government (land handouts and other freebies, licences) and the family?

Do we think too much? Or, not enough?

Clearing your mind of thought may help calm you down, but cannot help resolve  issues!

Thoughts are like wild horses. They gallop on unfettered, kicking up dust. But if reined in and trained, they accept the mind as master and trot in more planned, useful ways. Thoughts don’t need quieting as much as a sense of direction and focused application.

Most of us believe that our chaotic minds are the result of thinking too much. But, I suspect the cause is that we probably think too little. The chaos in our minds need not necessarily be the result of too much thinking, too many ideas and too much work. It results from allowing thoughts and ideas to accumulate, and aspirations and desires to mount. We do not allow ourselves to sort out, analyse and de-clutter the mind– ­ by giving enough thought and sharp focus to what we really want or what is good for us.

Like with most other things, our natural instinct is to put aside issues that need to be thought through. Just as ignoring work leads to a desk piled with papers, an Inbox screaming with unread mails and a pile of washing– similarly, thinking that is not indulged in, ends up cluttering our mind. Rather than examining our emotions, responses and dreams, we tend to just let things flow, and matters build up till we reach a breaking point.

From here it is easy to allow the mind to be seduced by talk of calming activities that blank our minds, creating an empty, calm space. That half-hour in the bathtub; staring out of the window; that time between sleep and wakefulness; gardening; stargazing, and, of course, meditation! We come out of such an exercise feeling peaceful– ­ till the next turbulence hits us.

But though a somnambulating mind, blank of thought, may help rejuvenate and re-energise us, is that the solution? In order to arrive at a permanent state of calm, those moments of meditative calm must be balanced by moments of focused meditation.

Most religions advocate some type of meditation aimed at taking your mind away from normal everyday activity and focusing on the inner self. Some suggest clearing the mind of all thought, others teach meditation for a purpose– ­ be it health or cultivating emotional equanimity. Buddhism teaches meditating while aware of everyday activity around us.

Taking a cue from the mindfulness that Buddhism teaches, it is important to focus on the thoughts and issues that bother our minds, rather than trying to blank them out. Sleeping over an issue does help us calm down our heartbeats and lower blood pressure, but sometimes it may end up in pushing back the worry altogether rather than dealing with it.

It is important to pay attention to our anxieties and worries because they are indicators of what needs fixing.

How can you sort out your thoughts and anxieties? Putting things down in black and white is always a good beginning. Write down your thoughts, worries and anxieties. Categorise them, figure out which of these are continuing, recurring or are new worries. Identify one problem at a time to focus on. Try to get to the root cause of the issue and begin there.

Think the issue through like you would a problem at work. Stay objective through the exercise. Try and look at it as somebody else’s problem; that will make it easier for you to figure out the advice you need to give yourself.

How would you ideally like to deal with the situation? What stops you from taking it head on? Can you live with the issue or is that impossible?

Focusing on and resolving your issues one by one will give you a similar calm as the one meditation and calming activities do– ­ with the added bonus that your problems would have been dealt with as well.