Since the death of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs last year, interest in the tech pioneer’s life has accelerated. A journalist who interviewed Jobs extensively over the course of 25 years has recently unearthed audio recordings of those meetings which shed new light on the man, the myth and the legend.
AppleInsider is reporting on new audio recordings of Steve Jobs recently unearthed by journalist Rob Schlender, who has published “select stories and snippets” from the interviews on the Fast Company website. Recorded over a 25-year span of time, the interviews reveal how Jobs matured during his so-called “wilderness years” outside Apple.
"Many [of the tapes] I had never replayed -- a couple hadn't even been transcribed before now," Schlender writes. "Some were interrupted by his kids bolting into the kitchen as we talked. During others, he would hit the pause button himself before saying something he feared might come back to bite him."
After being famously cast aside at Apple in 1985, Jobs founded NeXT and purchased Pixar, two experiences that would prove vital when he returned to Apple more than a decade later. Having a family would also prove to be an important part in Jobs’ leadership skills as well.
"In hindsight, Jobs's having a real family might have been the best thing to happen to Pixar,” Schlender notes. “He was most effective as a marketer and a business leader when he could think of himself as the primary customer.”
Schlender had “hours of source material” with Jobs, which have been pared down to notable quotes, such as Jobs claiming to have modeled his own management style after one of his favorite bands, The Beatles.
"The reason I say that is because each of the key people in the Beatles kept the others from going off in the directions of their bad tendencies," Jobs explained. "It was the chemistry of a small group of people, and that chemistry was greater than the sum of the parts."
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