Inside Steve's Brain
by Leander Kahney
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Book Reviews of Inside Steve's Brain
Book Review: Steve's brainstorms
Summary: 4 Stars
There have been plenty of books that tell the story of Apple Computers' origins and the early days, and as correctly pointed out by some other reviewers there has been a lot of press about Steve Jobs and Apple over the years. However, I find it useful and interesting to have many of those stories collected in a single book, especially if it mostly deals with Apple's recent resurgence. Steve Jobs, somewhat predictably, does not feature too prominently in this book. This may be surprising considering that the book's title promises to deal with nothing less than Steve's brain. However, Steve Jobs is notoriously private person and his interaction with the media is very limited. There have been very few interviews that he gave over the years, and those that he did give reveal very little about his own personal life, musings or misgivings. Most of what we know about him comes from people who had closely observed him work, mostly his current and former employees. One such employee is Jonathan Ive, the designer that is the great driving forces behind recent surge of Apple success. He is the designer behind iPod, iMac and a host of other products. The book is very good at documenting how some of these products came about, but it still doesn't reveal too much as much of it remains in the realm of industrial secrets. Each chapter ends with a few bullet-pointed "lessons" that we are supposed to take away from the way that Steve Jobs approaches design and business decisions. Most of these are rather trite and are reminiscent of the self-help manuals. They also detract from the main narrative of the book, but fortunately they are very short and don't really affect the overall message.
To conclude, this is an interesting look at Steve Jobs and Apple, especially over the last ten years or so. If you are not a die-hard Mac fanatic who follows each and every Mac-related story that comes out in the press you will learn a lot about these topics. Even if you are a walking Mac encyclopedia, it might still be fun to read a book that documents much of the recent Mac lore in an accessible and self-contained form.
Book Review: Don't however expect any tangible `business lessons'
Summary: 2 Stars
In a nutshell: If you like to know a bit more about Steve Jobs and his business practices, this book is an `ok' read. Don't however expect any tangible `business lessons' like the book suggests in the cover.
This book is for people who don't know where Steve Jobs came from. There shouldn't be many of you out there, since he is the world's most well known CEO and his story is told in blogs, magazines and the news about every 2 hours.
The book was finished in late 2007 when Apple had just launched the iPhone and there was no iPad in sight, which surely was an interesting time in Apple's history. At the time the iPhone was a closed platform, so there was no app store either (launched mid 2008).
Downsides
268 pages for this book is waaaay too much. There is too much repetition and all the information contained in some chapters could have just been said with one or to paragraphs. 150 pages would have been enough.
Then again, some crucial things were barely mentioned. Although the book talked a about a few mistakes Jobs had made throughout the years, it didn't lay any insight to some of the more crucial mistakes Apple made while Steve was there, such as with Apple's Lisa, the predecessor of the Apple Macintosh; it was only mentioned ONCE! Also, the only thing the book mentioned about Steve's departure from Apple in 1985 was that "he quite before Sculley could fire him". Hmm.. I would have would like to have read a bit more on than, how about you?
Upsides
On the plus side, the book did offer some information that I didn't know although I've been following Apple closely since 1999.
Book Review: Not insanely great
Summary: 2 Stars
The premise of this book is "part biography, part leadership guide". Well, I guess. While the book is generally tolerable, there are weaknesses. For one thing, Kahney needs to check his facts. One page 3 he mentions the launch of the iPhone in June 2006. Any sentient human being knows the phone was announced in January 2007 and first sold in June of that year.
Kahney also goes on to describe a competition among three ad agencies to craft an Apple ad shortly after Jobs' return to the company. Yet a number of interviews have mentioned that Jobs simply called Lee Clow at Chiat Day and gave him a week to write the Think Different ad. Although there certainly may have been a competition, I tend to believe Jobs just went back to his favorite copywriter.
On the back cover, there is the quote "I want to put a ding in the universe". I've always seen that quote as "I want to put a DENT in the universe."
Such easy miscues undermine the credibility of the rest of the text. Meanwhile, the Lessons from Steve are interesting, although also quite general, particularly for anyone who has read interviews with Jobs.
Reading this book won't cause blindness. Perhaps boredom.
Book Review: Re-hash
Summary: 3 Stars
Overall this book is not written too well with a lot of repetitions and badly organized chapters. I had a hard time reaching any conclusion after each chapter which did have a sensational title, but the content did not follow the context. Also most of the stories were picked up from newspapers and interviews of Steve Jobs's and the writer kept quoting from the same two or three interviews throughout the book. It seemed that he had not done any major research into the company or personally interviewed any of its executives to truly capture the inspirational leadership qualities of Steve Jobs.
On a more positive note, I did enjoy reading or should I say re-reading, the stories of how he came back to apple and took control of company by creating a culture of excellence and greatly reducing the product line-up to be simple and high quality.
Book Review: If you know what is right thing to do, stick to it - and learn
Summary: 4 Stars
In short, this book was really inspiring, short and simple. I have to say it was interesting to be inside Steve's Brain and to get more understanding on the whole Apple as a company. For me, it was again nice to see and read that some ideas take tens of years to mature - like Apple's vision on do end to end their products.
Products by definition are usually seen as one unit, but modern business is more like handling end to end. In Apple and to Steve this means to managing business from iPod to iTunes to Customer.
Steve seems to be really big, charismatic and contreversial character, which makes him and Apple to be interesting as well.
I really enjoyed this experience, it was simple and easy. As are Apple's products