Inside Steve's Brain by Leander Kahney
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Book Reviews of Inside Steve's Brain
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: My opinion
Summary: 3 Stars
Hi,
I found this book by mistake. In that moment I was a brand manager in México for a French organization. I never imaging that this book was so interesting because let you improve your capabilities as a brandmanager.
Before this book, I thought that the loyalty to the MAC rpoducts was only Marketing. After read this book, I understand the complex strategy and effort of Steve and his team.
This guy is not Henry Ford. But in my opinion, the author let you see his strenghs, its weaknesses between differents situations and the kind of decisions and ...maybe this guy is so close to create that kind of change that ford did last century.
Enjoy it!!
Valenzo
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: Very biased
Summary: 2 Stars
This book is very sympathic towards Steve Jobs and Apple. It is very difficult to get any objective facts from it. The lessons that are summed up on the end of the chapters are a good laugh sometimes but almost never contain any solid advise. Simple advise like 'Never compromise' or 'fire all dumb people' is not really the business advise I expected.
But if you do your best to filter out all this 'Steve is a god' stuff you will get an overview of how Steve tends to work. I think there is a lot of information in the book but it is extremely difficult to read between the lines and pick out the lessons that are valuable.
For me this book was disappointing.
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