35. When Steve founded a second company (NeXT), the products it introduced to the market, while innovative, were not entirely profitable. Jobs's place in business might have been scuttled. He was just inches from spending the rest of his life as a nobody. But this period of failure in Steve Jobs's life counted for something. "The best thing ever to happen to Steve is when we fired him, told him to get lost," an Apple board member said.

46. How do we accomplish the task but do so with integrity? File that away for a future staff retreat. Or thoughtful conversation.

45. It's not difficult to see this pattern in a larger-than-life man like Steve Jobs and to harshly criticize it. What is more challenging is seeing that this same tendency lies latent in the hearts of most leaders - Christians included. A great goal, a strong passion, a consuming need: they are the stuff of self-justification when a leader comes to believe that something must be achieved for the noblest of reasons. It is the temptation of the preacher who, in seeking to persuade, enhances or diminishes the truth to make his point. It is the temptation of any organizational leader when additional money must be raised to keep the cause afloat.

44. In the Steve Jobs world, the casualty rate in such a Darwinian atmosphere was great. But —and here is the conundrum - the work usually got done, the objectives were achieved, the products shipped. More often than not, people delivered the impossible that Jobs demanded. Call it a task-driven leadership. But it wasn't a place where people with values ascended. Only the toughest survived.

43. "At the root of the reality distortion was Jobs's belief that the rules didn't apply to him, " Isaacson writes. " Rebelliousness and willfulness were ingrained in his character. He had the sense that he was special, a chosen one, an enlightened one. "

42. In a few words, Hertzfeld was saying that Steve Jobs often tried to talk things into existence. Plainly put: Jobs could lie, make unkeepable promises, and reframe facts. He knew few limits in trying to get people to see things his way. He not only convinced others but also himself. You could say that the man often drank his own Kool-Aid.

41. Those who worked around Steve Jobs spoke, and sometimes joked, about his reality distortion field, a term borrowed from the Star Trek TV series. Isaacson quotes long-term Jobs co-worker, Andy Hertzfeld, " (Jobs's) reality distortion field was a confounding melange of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand (italics mine)."

40. Did Steve Jobs have such a defining moment? Was he ever truly humbled? The jury, Isaacson might say, is hung on that one.

39. One thinks of Joseph's days as a slave, Moses's years in the desert, Peter's hours
weeping in a dark valley. Defining moments, those.

38. When appropriate, I like to ask leaders if there was ever a time when they felt truly broken, stripped of self-confidence, and finally willing to seriously listen to someone other than themselves? Often, they nod their heads. Yes, there was such a time, most say. And yes, they finally learned to listen.

37. Sometime later the board of Apple, also facing great stress, invited Jobs back into the company. It's a convoluted, rather strange story, but the reinstatement turned out to be a new day for him and for Apple.