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.

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.

36. Isaacson comments: "The theory, shared by many, is that the tough love made him wiser and more mature. But it's not that simple. At the company he founded after being ousted from Apple, Jobs was able to indulge all of his instincts, both good and bad. He was unbounded. The result was a series of spectacular products that were dazzling market flops. This was the true learning experience."

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.

34. "The one question I'd truly love Steve to answer is 'Why are you sometimes so mean? '" one colleague told Isaacson. When Isaacson posed the question to Jobs, he said," This is who I am, and you can't expect me to be someone I'm not. " That was it. Case closed.

33. Those had to be moments of massive humiliation and self-searching. Was anything to be learned? While Jobs may have been able to identify his failures in executive leadership, I doubt if he ever looked inside himself to seek the root of the many faults and flaws that often made working with him an intolerable experience.

32. But one day the board of Apple reached a point of intolerable frustration with Jobs. At the age of 30, Steve Jobs found himself out of a job. He once again experienced the echoes of rejection, abandonment - but this time at the age of 30. The man who'd often abandoned others was himself abandoned.

31. As often happens, the people at Apple mostly adjusted to Steve Jobs's way because ,
in spite of his volatile personality, he caused highly talented and motivated people to
achieve things beyond their own wildest expectations. If one was tough enough to
accept the abuse involved in working for and with Steve Jobs, the success in terms
of wealth, fame, and professional satisfaction was enormous.

30. Years later Steve Jobs hit a kind of bottom. To simplify a very complex story: Jobs was a man with limited people skills. In his haste to fulfill his visions, he could be
intimidating, obnoxious, intolerant, impatient, profane, and offensive.

29. The Wozniak-Jobs partnership will be the subject of more than one dissertation or book in years to come. It could make for a rich conversation today: how do partnerships begin, and how are they nurtured? And what's the nature of a relationship with God?

28. Isaacson writes: "Wozniak would be the gentle wizard coming up with a neat invention that he would have been happy to just give away, and Jobs would figure out how to make it user-friendly, put it together in a package, market it, and makea few bucks."