Walter Isaacson, the biographer of Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs’ idea of simplicity was not narrowing. What was narrowing was spending 50 years with television,” says Walter Isaacson, a former boss of Time magazine and CNN and the author of a bestselling biography of Apple’s founder Steve Jobs.

A veteran journalist who began his media career at London’s Sunday Times, Isaacson was in India as president of Washington-based think tank Aspen Institute. In a chat with some journalists in New Delhi this week, he discussed his work as a biographer and writer, and clarified that his Steve Jobs biography was not meant to be a “role model” book.
“A lot of people who read the book said ‘I am like Steve, a tough boss’. But it’s easy to be tough, not so to be inspiring. People were very loyal to Steve, despite the fact that he was very impatient.”
Isaacson recounts his first meeting with Jobs in 1984 when he got to see the two sides of his personality come together — petulance with a passion for perfection. It is the synthesis of these two sides of his complex personality that form the 600 pages of the book, he says.
Isaacson has also written biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Henry Kissinger and Albert Einstein. He says unlike the book on Benjamin Franklin, he had made a decision to keep his views out in case of Steve Jobs as people had such strong opinions about him. He admits that writing the biography of a living person is a “nerve-wracking experience”, something he had realised while doing Kissinger’s biography.
At the end of that book, Isaacson says, he had thought he would never do the biography of another living person.
“But with Steve I got to know a thousand times more than what I did with Franklin or Einstein. It was an amazing opportunity.”
“We had almost 50 long conversations lasting all afternoon. I was spending day after day with him, and he was telling me everything.” And so, despite Jobs being a “seductive” person who could also be very rude, Isaacson admits he ended up liking him quite a lot. “Jobs was very honest and he wanted the book to be honest too,” he says. It was easy to be captured by his charm, and therefore, says Isaacson, he “tried to stay out of the way of the book”.
Jobs liked to be in control of his life, he explains, saying: “He could be a jerk at times, yet was intensely passionate.”
Comparing Jobs with Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, the writer adds: “They (too) were flawed in some ways. But we forget their personalities and remember them for being inventors, for what they created. When it comes to Steve Jobs, his innovations were more important than whether he parked in the handicap zone or if he was a jerk at times.”
Jobs thirsted for perfection when it came to design and beauty. Isaacson says: “Bill Gates was brilliant too, but perhaps he did not have the same artistic taste.”
Jobs had a very clear policy, he explains. “You either put the product first, or profits.” He understood that if you put the product first, you will create something that will fetch you great profits, whereas if you put profits first, you will be cutting edges and compromising quality. “This was something that was in his soul.”
Jobs was contemptuous of people who use their talents to create average products for financial ends, he added.
Jobs believed that money was not important, creating a lasting device was, he says, going on to wonder what Jobs would have said about Mark Zuckerberg’s IPO venture given that he had been an admirer of the Facebook CEO.
Talking about philanthropy, Isaacson feels Steve Jobs did not do as much as he could have. “There are people who give money towards philanthropic efforts, but Jobs felt he would be able to do more (for education) by creating an iPad. So he focused on the iPad instead of doing many things at the same time. This could also be because he had less time. But if he would have done it, he would have perhaps been known as a better person.” Given a chance, Isaacson adds, he would have liked to do an interactive book with Jobs, one with embedded videos and applications where readers can contribute and the book can be constantly improved.
How did Jobs deal with his cancer? Isaacson says that by the time he started working on the book, Jobs had already made his medical choices. “He was doing the most advanced medicine possible. The only question remains today is if he should have been operated upon when the cancer was diagnosed in 2003?”
In Jobs’ death, says Isaacson, there is a lesson for the big names in business, that they could also connect to people emotionally through their products. “The fact that there was such an emotional outpouring for an innovator, something that you see in the case of rock stars... Steve was an emotional guy. The beauty of the product was the way he connected with people.”
Isaacson says the challenge before Apple now was to come up with new products. Personally, Isaacson has moved on to his new book on the history of inventions of the digital age.
Talking about India, he says the country is best at bringing odds together. “Wish Ben Franklin would have been in India,” he says with a smile. He personally believes in free markets and feels that a more open economy would be better.
Asked for his views on the Walmart debate that is now raging in India, Isaacson says that contrary to the apprehensions of some in his own country, “when Walmart came, it helped everyone. Even the small shopkeepers survived and moved on to specialised products. But the government and the people will have their arguments, which should be heard.”
Would he like to write a biography of any Indian? He says he could perhaps choose from among the scientists.