Like All CEOs, Steve Jobs Made Mistakes Too

[caption id="attachment_4556" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Walter Isaacson's Biography On Steve Jobs"][/caption]

Many stories are emerging about Steve Jobs after his passing. With a new biography out written by Walter Isaacson, it is no surprise that new speculations on Jobs as a boss, father and friend are coming out. Eric Jackson of Forbes discusses further in his article Steve Jobs Had No Business Being Successful When He Returned to Apple:

I finished the Walter Isaacson biography last week on Steve Jobs.  What struck me the most were things like his cruel streak, the way he treated his kids, his odd relationship with food, and – perhaps the biggest surprise – how often he’d been wrong through his career.

We think of him now as a God who made everything turn to gold.  However, he made some whopper of dumb mistakes over his career including:

- Pushing to hire John Sculley

- Picking such a niche target market with his NeXT venture that it never really had a shot at being successful

- Pushing Pixar to focus on selling its animation hardware to studios like Disney (DIS) instead of making animated movies

There were also many great ideas that bubbled up from his team over the years which he initially blew off, only to come back to them later — often surprising people as if they were his own ideas.

Steve became legendary at a very young ago thanks to the success of Apple’s (AAPL) 1980 IPO.  At 25, he was financially set for life.  The success of the Mac, only further iconized him.

It’s very easy now to forget that, at the moment he came back to Apple in 1997, there were lots of good reasons to think he would fail — as both Bill Gates and Michael Dell thought he would:

- He was petulant

- NeXT was a bust and would have died if Jobs hadn’t charmed Ross Perot into investing.  And it had consistently failed – by most financial metrics – for 10 years.

Read more at Forbes