The highly anticipated new biography Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution Of A Reckless Upstart Into A Visionary Leader by longtime Steve Jobs and Apple reporter Brent Schlender and Fast Company executive editor Rick Tetzeli is due in bookstore on March 24th–and we’ve already had an exclusive look at this close examination of Steve Jobs’s life.
The book is chock-full of revealing stories about the late Apple cofounder–details which paint a vivid picture of both Jobs the businessman and Jobs the human being, a person who cultivated some very special friendships throughout his life and career.
For example, the Becoming Steve Jobs illustrates the close friendship between the Apple cofounder and The Walt Disney Company’s Bob Iger toward the end of Steve Jobs’s all-too-short life. Before Jobs’s liver transplant in 2009, the two would talk “three or four times a week”–and their decisions together have had lasting ramifications in Silicon Valley today.
His relationship with Iger had become so strong that Steve had wanted Iger to join the Apple board, which Iger couldn’t do for fiduciary reasons. In fact, because of their friendship, Iger also turned down an invitation from Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt to be on Google’s board. “He told me he’d get jealous,” says Iger.
Although Iger didn’t join the Apple board until after Jobs’s death in 2011, he paid him frequent visits in Cupertino. In fact, whenever he was in town, Iger was one of the few people on the planet granted access into Jony Ive’s top secret design lab.
“We would stand at a whiteboard brainstorming,” recalls Iger. “We talked about buying companies. We talked about buying Yahoo together.”
Stay tuned to Fast Company online and in our forthcoming April issue for exclusive coverage and excerpts from Becoming Steve Jobs you won’t find anywhere else in the days to come.
Interview with Rick Tetzeli, author of Becoming Steve Jobs:
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