BOOK REVIEW: STEVE JOBS By WALTER ISAACSON

An Abandoned Apple

By Harish Bijoor

When Steve Jobs first landed at my desk (Please note: the book at hand has just no title. It is called Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson), I fell in love with the jacket design. Pure and pristine ‘Apple white’ background with a huge mug shot of Steve Jobs in stylish contemplation, ready for the camera.

‘Apple white’? Remember, if God defined the apple to be red, Steve Jobs did it differently. If you think of an Apple today, the color you think of is white! Not red! Thanks to Steve Jobs!

Back to the jacket then. The jacket design was as clean and clear as Steve Jobs would have wanted it to be. Impractical AS Jobs himself: yes. The  jacket will soil with the continued long handling it will require to read this 571 page tome. But clean. And single-mindedly focused on Steve Jobs. The guy behind it all.

Who hasn’t heard of Steve Jobs by now? My driver says he knows the guy. My cousin’s mother-in-law says she saw him on television the day he died. Many know Mr. Jobs only after his death, but the fact is that the man is known by all. Steve Jobs, in some way or the other, touched every life there was to touch, either with his products, or with the envy or glee, for what he has done to the world of friendly technology that touches lives and makes them richer for it.

Walter Isaacson, the CEO of the Aspen Institute does a great bit of elaborately researched justice to the persona of Steve Jobs. This is true at least of those parts of the persona Steve Jobs chose to part with for public consumption. This is of course not to say that Isaacson has not done justice through an elaborate process of work and interview, and it is equally not to say that Isaacson tells us only what is palatable to the persona of Jobs. Isaacson does a lot, but as I discovered on going through this massive tome, no one book can do justice to the multiple persona of Steve Jobs.  There are pieces of Steve Jobs painstakingly put together, but somehow the jig-saw that is Jobs is not complete.  The pieces are all there, but there is something missing for sure.

The small little pieces put together painstakingly in this book tell us many things about this guy who revolutionized several spaces. Personal computers, animated movies, music phones, tablet computing and digital publishing to name a few. The 140 interviews that went to make this book happen just as Steve Jobs breathed his last, bring to us a guy who is not all that perfect as all of us would want to believe. Steve Jobs got his girlfriend pregnant when he was 23, and botched it all up in terms of how he handled it . Steve jobs was greedy all the time and there are live accusations from all around that some of the best ideas he commercialized were stolen from someone else. Either stolen outright, or paid just too little for what was delivered. The guy was obsessive about quality and crazy as a coot as well, when it came to exciting new ideas that even told him that he need not have to bathe for days if were to be on a full fruit diet. Never mind the stink he created all around his personal living and working space. He followed it diligently, to the chagrin and smelly-discomfort of all around.

Steve Jobs was therefore as flawed as they come, “self-centered” as most call him, mercurial as ever, cranky and tough always, and more. Never mind. He was a genius. And that made up for it all!

Walter Isaacson does justice not only to Steve Jobs in this big white book of Jobs, but gives us some very special glimpses of Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, John Sculley and Mike Scott as well. All persons who dared to cross the path of Steve Jobs at some point of time or the other. With some he got his way, and with others such as Bill Gates, he fought his way, but didn’t quite get there.

The book has an India-twist to it as well, as it describes  this avid Beatles’ fan’s experiences with India and his brief but truncated spiritual journey with Neem Karoli Baba( a pronounced  and adopted Guru of the hippie movement of the sixties), who he just does not get to meet as he is dead by the time he arrives. Steve Jobs wanted to get onto this quest of spirituality as he seems to have had  a professed hole in his persona, which he was trying to fill. India was a journey in that quest. India was meant to be the filler.

In many ways, as one reads through Walter Isaacson’s brilliantly laid out prose, one cannot but help feel for a fact that the one constant theme in Jobs’ life was the theme of abandonment. Something that seemed to have come by as a fact of his abandonment in early life. Having led the life of an adopted kid, Jobs forever juggled with the thought of being left aside from it all. As someone abandoned. As someone not wanted. In many ways, this is one theme Jobs turned turtle. The desire was clear. Steve Jobs was to be one of the best names there was in the business of touching people’s lives through technology. He wanted it. He got it. And how!

This is a nice book to rad. A nice book to keep on your book-shelf as well. It looks good. It reads good. Not as good as what Steve jobs himself wrote though. And I am referring to his moving Stanford commencement address in 2005. Read this book and then read that. You get a better glimpse of the man, his passion, and indeed his mercurial madness.

The author is a brand-strategy specialist  & CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.

Twitter.com @harishbijoor

BOOK REVIEW: ADAPT By TIM HARFORD

F +ve: Failure Positive

By Harish Bijoor

‘Let us try for once not to be right’

-Tristan Tzara

That was classic Tristan Tzara for you. And who is Tristan Tzara to the un-initiated?

A Romanian and French Avant Garde poet, essayist and performance artist. A passionate voice of the anti-establishment Dada movement, which later began to be called Dadaism.  In facetitious sum, a guy who in many ways believed there was a lot of merit in not being correct all the time.

Over to Tim Harford now. Having been a fan of his ‘The Undercover Economist’ column in the Financial Times and an equal fan of his best-selling book of the same title, I picked “Adapt” with a near reverential feeling of wanting to savor and experience. I picked this book to read with a feeling of wanting to discover something new.  Harford however disappoints. This is very old wine in a very new bottle.

It is a mix of the philosophy of Tzara and a very old truth in business, marketing and all of life in reality: Failure is good. Failure teaches us. Failure strengthens us. Failure makes us that much more resilient and that much more innovative. If you have not been a failure, you cannot be a great big success.

Harford essentially treads the path of this old and very resilient truth, and takes us through a very diverse and seemingly un-related tapestries of the battleground of failure. He makes us go through a spaceport in Tequila land to the ruthless street shootings in Iraq and a myriad set of tapestries that make you wonder where you are going.

As you meander through these diverse sets of ground experiences you wonder where you are going once again. Somewhere on the way, you know what he is talking about,  and you literally want to drop the book.   If however you plod on, you will encounter a very compelling basis of logic. You will also enjoy the handcrafted words of Tim Harford, sprinkled with wit and research.

The good part of the book is the very diverse sets of research that lead to this just one compelling argument which is the spine of the book. Failing is good. 

If Tim Harford does anything significant with this effort of his, it is the fact that he underlines the fact that life, management and all business is indeed today very amoebic. There is just no systemic pattern out there. Making meaning out of this pattern lies in the hands of the manager. The Chameleon manager even. The one who fails learns a lot faster than the one who does not. The one who fails is that much more resilient a manager.

Harford is a master with words. Add to it his uncanny ability to weave together psychology, evolutionary biology (whatever that is), anthropology, physics, and his favorite economics, and you have a book that is a good read. A good read not for a path-breaking thought that will take you somewhere, but a feel-good read that tells you that all the failures you have been through have been actually very good for you. You are a richer being today.

Did I have to read this to know this? No.

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Email: harishbijoor@hotmail.com

BOOK REVIEW: A TIME OF TRANSITION By MANI SHANKAR AIYAR

Mani: Nothing Can Stop An Idea!

By Harish Bijoor

Mani Shankar Aiyar must be a very difficult man to manage. His views are strong, his backbone is rigid, and his spirit is passionate. The ex-diplomat and current politician is a writer to boot as well.  A writer with a style all his own. Strong, contentious and loaded with vitriol and thought.

“A Time of Transition”, a near 400-page collection of his columns from the Indian Express, spans a set of writing years from 1996 to 2004, a time–range he prefers to brand as a time of transition, from Rajiv Gandhi to the 21^st century.

Is he a fawning and adoring Rajiv Gandhi Congressman type? Adoring, he is. Fawning, most certainly not. Not really, as he is all ready to discuss his “boss, mentor and friend”(as he describes him), with all his flaws and chinks, as he traces the recent political history of India as it unfolds in the years laid out.

Mani looks at India and its polity centre-stage. He looks at it through the nuggets of his columns as someone who is out there in the play-field of prurient and patient politics. Never mind the position he holds, there is plenty of open-ness and plenty of candor. One really wonders how his party ever let him write on.

Mani comes through stark naked, as a lovable guy who calls a shovel a shovel. There is a process to his columns.

His columns endear him to you first very refreshingly. In a world of politics which typically hides itself behind the whiter-than-white Khadi kurtas, Mani Shankar Aiyar is the bold ‘Tambram’ who is willing to write of jiving(with his wife) on the dance floor in “regulation khadi-kurta pyjama” at The Haystack in Goa with the Suresh Kalmadi couple, just as the Congress party is hearing of its decimation at the hustings (Circa 1996).

Having endeared himself with his candor and open-ness, Mani will then tell you clearly through his writings that he is a wordsmith par excellence. His every word, tone and tenor of narration is carefully chosen.  And that’s a second way he makes for a loyal readership of his columns.

As you then read on, you realize this guy is really the thinker whose time had really come. In hindsight he is really the guy his political bosses should have listened to. Would India and its development oriented politics be of a different color altogether if that were to be?

There is nothing outside the tapestry of comment of this diplomat turned politician.  The book is packed with issues that relate to the Constitutional polity of India, the Congress party at large, Chief Election Commissioners who came and went (the column on TN Seshan is titled,” See you later, alligator”) Panchayati Raj, Enron, and scores of issues that touched India in these years of transition.

The politics of India at times puts you off the politician at large. The khadi-kurta, the regulation white (as if to say that I am whiter than them all), the benign listening façade and the “I am with you” charade at play puts one off the politician mostly. There is little trust and lots of political cynicism about the politician at large. When you however encounter an ‘un-politician politician’ like Mani, one changes track.

Mani Aiyar at the end of reading this book has just added one more fan to his following. I have never ever read his columns. This is my first, thanks to this compilation. I will now continue to read him and look forward to him as a thinker whose time has come.

“Nothing can stop an idea whose time has come”.  Mani Shankar Aiyar is one such idea himself. Sadly stopped. More often than not.  

And that’s the loss I will bemoan for now.

Harish Bijoor is a Brand strategy specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.

Twitter.com/harishbijoor

Book Review: Leadership @ Infosys by MATT BARNEY

Leadership is What leadership Does

By Harish Bijoor

Are leaders born? Or are they made? Are they crafted by the environment they live within and shaped by the experiences they face through their careers in particular and life at large? Or is leadership just genetic? A trait passed on from Mr. Hitler to Master Hitler? Or for that matter, from Mr. Hitler to Ms.Hitler?

The answer to this one big question is really floating in the wind. Floating in the wind as the very definition of leadership is undergoing change. As one grapples with systemic definitions that tell you what leadership really is, the single best definition of leadership I will arrive at is a take-off from the definition of money itself. Let me morph it to leadership: Leadership is what leadership does.

If leadership is what leadership does, the guys at Infosys must be great, if not good leaders for sure. Look at what it has done for a start. The company is today a USD 4 Billion plus enterprise, enjoys a market capitalization 8 times that multiple, employs 1,30,000 plus people (and threatens to grow continuously on this count), manages mass recruitment of a scale unheard of in other categories, manages mass sets of final settlements as well, faces attrition from every entity around waiting to poach its ready-made leaders, and manages one of the world’s most exciting leadership and training facility as well.

In such an environment of scale, multiple layers of fulfillment, a global work-force that covers literally every nationality there is to embrace, and a completely dynamic set of expectations forever on the morph in the tapestry of the work environment at large in the space of end to end services delivery in the IT sector, leadership is most certainly a buzz-word that delivers just more than the buzz.

Leadership @ Infosys, edited by Matt Barney with a foreword by NR Narayana Murthy and S Gopalakrishnan and an epilogue by TV Mohandas Pai, is an academic,  nice and solid effort at documenting the leadership style that has made Infosys what it is today. Powered by intellect, and driven by values. For sure.

This 226-page book is surely powered by intellect. While the introduction by Matt Barney, PhD, the Vice-President and Director of the Infosys Leadership Institute adds the academic focus in documenting the leadership ethos, as it has emerged at Infosys, a host of leader biographies contributed by names you and I don’t know, but names that mean a lot within the Infosys context of internal employees, vendors and clients give it a back-bone and context.

These leader biographies come from different realms. And not necessarily from the verticals that manage human resources. And that indeed is the joy of this book. There are rich nuggets that emerge as solutions in the realm of leadership from people who work in the realm of Product innovation consulting, Quality and productivity, Client solutions and in verticals that face retail, consumer and packaged goods, Life Sciences, media and entertainment and more.

This tome on leadership is therefore much more than a book that explores theory and routes to leadership. Instead it is a book that explores life from a practitioner’s narrow gully as well.

The book is for sure peppered with the academic rigour that such books, and more importantly academic papers that HR scientists present at seminars and forward to publications that respect the oblique word and phrase that makes it that much more academic. Porter’s Generic value chain is not only explained but illustrated as well copiously, just as names such as Hugo Munsterberg will explain theories that many will find it a bit tedious to explore.

Infosys emerges out of this book as a scientific laboratory that believes leadership to be something that is a science of sorts. A science that can be studied, distilled, watched empirically in the behaviour of people, and isolated for its individual elements which can contribute to re-create behaviour and ultimately leadership. Leadership that is consistent in its policy, its ethics and more importantly in what results it achieves.

Companies of the type and size and ethos of Infosys do surely believe that leadership cannot lay centric in the hands of a few. In a very inclusive manner of speaking, leadership lies at every level. The more you notice it, the more you show-case it, and the more you democratize its use, the more it benefits a company.

In many ways the mantle of leadership that has seamlessly passed on from founding leader to leader, be it from NR Narayana Murthy to Nandan Nilekini and now to Kris Gopalakrishnan, defines the ethos of the founding leaders of this company. This leadership mantle is right at the top. One now waits with bated breath as this leadership mantle, hitherto in the hands of the founders,  gets readied to move beyond the founding fathers. Seamlessly again.

In many ways Infosys recognizes through this book the fact that leadership lies all over. Lies at every level. And in many ways the leadership that lies at the level of delivery is that much more precious to organization than leadership that resides only at the top.

If I worked for Infosys at the bottom or middle-rung, I would feel very good about this book and the ethos it represents. If I worked in a competing company, I would ask questions of my own company’s style of leadership. If I were an academic, I would look at the signs of the times, as painted by Infosys as the signs to embrace and move ahead with. If I were the type who believed that leadership was a trait one was born with or without, I wouldn’t read this book at all!

The book, to that extent is a nice piece to have in place in the process of documenting the modern practice of leadership, in a company that wants to see itself to be as modern as it gets, as contemporary as it can afford to be, and indeed as inclusive in its leadership style as it must be, to face the future as it unravels.

Harish Bijoor is a brand-strategy specialist & CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc. with a presence in the markets of Hong Kong, UK, Dubai and the Indian sub-continent.

Twitter.com/harishbijoor