JOLLY DAYS

Steve Jobs and Pixar

This tale of Pixar and Steve Jobs confirms the self-evident. Steve Jobs is some kind of business genius. This is evident in a book that was not even trying to emphasize that point.

Without Jobs’s relentless drive, Pixar would have been an inferior and probably bankrupt competitor to Sun Microsystems, not the most important movie studio of our era (and certainly the only one interesting enough to write a book about).

Jobs not only conceives great products, beautifully produced (if not always as reliable as they once were), he creates entirely new categories that impact the general culture, from iPhones to iPods to the Apple stores. Jobs is one of the few business leaders who can really lay claim to oft-heard corporate-talk: Jobs really does have “the vision thing”.

But, as with all things human, there are ambiguities…

…Jobs appears socially awkward and unsentimental to a fault…The longtime Pixar romantics are heartbroken to realize they’re actually working at a business. “What am I doing?” one employee asks in a moment of clarity. “I’m sitting around here trying to make Steve Jobs richer in ways he doesn’t even appreciate.”

Business leadership seems to require a simple, optimistic, aggressive nature. Such a personality matrix is often also accompanied by a lack of emotional depth.