Steve Jobs: A Biography

　　這本賈伯斯唯一授權的傳記，完整記載他的一生。但這本書談的不只是賈伯斯。

　　人人都知道賈伯斯不遺餘力地捍衛隱私，這位傳奇性的企業家從未寫過回憶錄，但他在兩年間，接受本書作者艾薩克森多達四十次的深入訪談，並允許他遍訪他的朋友、親戚、競爭對手、仇人和同事，總數超過一百人。

　　艾薩克森寫出「最真實的賈伯斯」，書中描述這位創造力旺盛的企業家雲霄飛車般驚險刺激的一生。賈伯斯執著的個性、追求完美的熱情和狂猛的驅力推動六大產業革命，包括個人電腦、動畫、音樂、電話、平板電腦和數位出版。

　　這不只是賈伯斯的故事，也是一本談創新的書。在這個數位時代，很多企業都努力走在創新的最前頭，許多國家也汲汲於建立創新經濟，但就獨創、想像和創新，賈伯斯無疑是標竿人物。他深知要在二十一世紀創造出有價值的東西，必然要讓創造力和科技結合，因此他打造的公司，不但要有跳躍的想像力，更要呈現鬼斧神功般的科技工藝。

　　賈伯斯和蘋果的同事就是能力行不同「凡想」的一群人：他們不只精益求精，推出改良的產品，也設計、生產出全新的產品或服務，讓不知道自己需要這種產品的消費者大為驚豔。

　　儘管賈伯斯對本書撰寫充分配合，卻不要求控管內容，也不要求出版前先看過。甚至鼓勵認識他的敵人或前女友跟作者談談，他也不曾設限。

　　賈伯斯旺盛的企圖心就像一把火，不但鞭策自我，也讓周遭的人受不了。但他的個性和熱情已和他的產品密不可分，就像蘋果的硬體和軟體已結合成一個整體。我們可從他的人生故事得到啟發、學到教訓，但就創新、個性、領導力和價值而言，他絕對是最好的學習教材。

　　※ 繁體中文版《賈伯斯傳》由天下文化發行

作者簡介

華特．艾薩克森Walter Isaacson

　　現任國際非營利組織亞斯本研究院（Aspen Institute）執行長暨總裁。該機構聲譽卓著，不僅是美國當代最著名的政策研究與教育機構，在歐洲、亞洲也設有研究分院，透過邀集各界精英舉辦高峰會、研討會和執行研究計畫等，積極促進國際領導人才交流，並提出政策建言，是美國最具影響力的研究機構之一。

　　艾薩克森畢業於哈佛大學文學院，後以羅德學者身分在牛津大學進修，並取得哲學及政經碩士學位。曾任《時代》雜誌執行總編輯、CNN董事長兼執行長，在歐巴馬總統上任後，被指派擔任美國廣播理事會（BBG）主席。

　　艾薩克森不僅是一位傑出記者，更是備受讚譽的傳記作家，寫作功力一流。著有《愛因斯坦》（Einstein: His Life and Universe）、《富蘭克林傳》（Benjamin Franklin: An American Life）、《季辛吉傳》（Kissinger: A Biography）等暢銷傳記。

From the author of the bestselling biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein, this is the exclusive, New York Times bestselling biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years--as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues--Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.

At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology. He built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering.

Although Jobs cooperated with this book, he asked for no control over what was written nor even the right to read it before it was published. He put nothing off-limits. He encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. And Jobs speaks candidly, sometimes brutally so, about the people he worked with and competed against. His friends, foes, and colleagues provide an unvarnished view of the passions, perfectionism, obsessions, artistry, devilry, and compulsion for control that shaped his approach to business and the innovative products that resulted.

Driven by demons, Jobs could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and products were interrelated, just as Apple''s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values.

Childhood Abandoned and Chosen

The Adoption

When Paul Jobs was mustered out of the Coast Guard after World War II, he made a wager with his crewmates. They had arrived in San Francisco, where their ship was decommissioned, and Paul bet that he would find himself a wife within two weeks. He was a taut, tattooed engine mechanic, six feet tall, with a passing resemblance to James Dean. But it wasn’t his looks that got him a date with Clara Hagopian, a sweet-humored daughter of Armenian immigrants. It was the fact that he and his friends had a car, unlike the group she had originally planned to go out with that evening. Ten days later, in March 1946, Paul got engaged to Clara and won his wager. It would turn out to be a happy marriage, one that lasted until death parted them more than forty years later.



Paul Reinhold Jobs had been raised on a dairy farm in Germantown, Wisconsin. Even though his father was an alcoholic and sometimes abusive, Paul ended up with a gentle and calm disposition under his leathery exterior. After dropping out of high school, he wandered through the Midwest picking up work as a mechanic until, at age nineteen, he joined the Coast Guard, even though he didn’t know howto swim. He was deployed on the USS General M. C. Meigs and spent much of the war ferrying troops to Italy for General Patton. His talent as a machinist and fireman earned him commendations, but he occasionally found himself in minor trouble and never rose above the rank of seaman.



Clara was born in New Jersey, where her parents had landed after fleeing the Turks in Armenia, and they moved to the Mission District of San Francisco when she was a child. She had a secret that she rarely mentioned to anyone: She had been married before, but her husband had been killed in the war. So when she met Paul Jobs on that first date, she was primed to start a new life.



Like many who lived through the war, they had experienced enough excitement that, when it was over, they desired simply to settle down, raise a family, and lead a less eventful life. They had little money, so they moved to Wisconsin and lived with Paul’s parents for a few years, then headed for Indiana, where he got a job as a machinist for International Harvester. His passion was tinkering with old cars, and he made money in his spare time buying, restoring, and selling them. Eventually he quit his day job to become a full-time used car salesman.



Clara, however, loved San Francisco, and in 1952 she convinced her husband to move back there. They got an apartment in the Sunset District facing the Pacific, just south of Golden Gate Park, and he took a job working for a finance company as a “repo man,” picking the locks of cars whose owners hadn’t paid their loans and repossessing them. He also bought, repaired, and sold some of the cars, making a decent enough living in the process.



There was, however, something missing in their lives. They wanted children, but Clara had suffered an ectopic pregnancy, in which the fertilized egg was implanted in a fallopian tube rather than the uterus, and she had been unable to have any. So by 1955, after nine years of marriage, they were looking to adopt a child.



Like Paul Jobs, Joanne Schieble was from a rural Wisconsin family of German heritage. Her father, Arthur Schieble, had immigrated to the outskirts of Green Bay, where he and his wife owned a mink farm and dabbled successfully in various other businesses, including realestate and photoengraving. He was very strict, especially regarding his daughter’s relationships, and he had strongly disapproved of her first love, an artist who was not a Catholic. Thus it was no surprise that he threatened to cut Joanne off completely when, as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, she fell in love with Abdulfattah “John” Jandali, a Muslim teaching assistant from Syria.



Jandali was the youngest of nine children in a prominent Syrian family. His father owned oil refineries and multiple other businesses, with large holdings in Damascus and Homs, and at one point pretty much controlled the price of wheat in the region. His mother, he later said, was a “traditional Muslim woman” who was a “conservative, obedient housewife.” Like the Schieble family, the Jandalis put a premium on education. Abdulfattah was sent to a Jesuit boarding school, even though he was Muslim, and he got an undergraduate degree at the American University in Beirut before entering the University of Wisconsin to pursue a doctoral degree in political science.



In the summer of 1954, Joanne went with Abdulfattah to Syria. They spent two months in Homs, where she learned from his family to cook Syrian dishes. When they returned to Wisconsin she discovered that she was pregnant. They were both twenty-three, but they decided not to get married. Her father was dying at the time, and he had threatened to disown her if she wed Abdulfattah. Nor was abortion an easy option in a small Catholic community. So in early 1955, Joanne traveled to San Francisco, where she was taken into the care of a kindly doctor who sheltered unwed mothers, delivered their babies, and quietly arranged closed adoptions.