Steve Jobs Essay

Submitted By colon008
Words: 2464
Pages: 10

Introduction
The book I choose for this Leadership Book Analysis paper was the biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. This books starts from way back in Steve’s childhood and then tells us everything about Steve’s legacy and how he changed the way we see the world today. Steve Jobs was adopted, but he was aware of this at a very early stage of his life. Sometimes, he would cry because he felt he was abandoned, however his parents would tell him they loved him very much and they would strongly emphasis that they choose him specifically, which made Steve feel special. However, some of Steve’s closest friends think that the adoption left some scars because of the fact that he knew he was abandoned at birth. However, Steve said he never felt abandoned thanks to his parents Paul and Clara Jobs. “It made him independent. He followed the beat of a different drummer, and that came from being in a different world than he was born into,” (p. 5). Steve Jobs was different, he was special, and he was also intellectually special at a very early age.
Steve Jobs was a genius. When he was almost done with the fourth grade, he scored at the high school sophomore level! His school wanted him to skip two grade levels, but his parents decided for him to only skip one grade. Growing up, Jobs hanged out with the smartest kids. At school, if he was not being challenged or if he was not engaged in the classroom he would do his own thing. One teacher mentioned, “He was usually off in a corner doing something on his own and really didn’t want to have much of anything to do with either me or the rest of the class,” (p. 19). When he graduated from high school he didn’t really know what he wanted to do and he wasn’t really interested in college; however his parents insisted for him to attend. When he did, he didn’t like the required classes that he was supposed to take, he wanted to do things his way and he was not going to take classes that did not interest him. Steve said, “I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out okay,” (p. 40). The rest of the book goes on about how he met Woz and how thanks to that relationship, they started the company called Apple. The rest is about all the six different industries that Steve transformed thanks to his leadership ways which we will discuss in the following pages.
Leadership Traits
In chapter 7 of our textbook we learn about personality traits and leadership. The chapter starts out by giving two different definitions for personality which are “the impression a person makes on others” and the “unseen structures and processes inside a person that explain why we behave the way we do,” (p. 205). Steve’s personality was relatively similar across different situations, he was definitely different and he did things a different way, which is one reason why he was very successful in his life. Traits are the different qualities or characteristics that a person may have which explain the way they behave due to the powerful traits they hold. Some of Steve’s traits were his imagination, innovation, and his passion for perfection.
From the Five Factor Dimensions discussed in this chapter, Jobs definitely lands in the surgency dimension which refers to ambition. Jobs wanted to always be in control, so in the times were he wasn’t in control, he felt abandoned. Because of his urge to control his environment, it reflected back to the product in which many people felt it was like an extension of himself, where “the Macintosh remained a controlled environment that met [Jobs] standards,” (p. 139). Ever since the beginning he was ambitions. He always figured out a way to make Woz’s inventions into user friendly products to sell and make some money from.
Woz also mentions some of Steve’s dark traits. “Job is a