Steve Jobs

Isaacson wrote the authorised biography with Jobs' cooperation and roughly forty interviews with him, plus more than a hundred interviews with family, colleagues, competitors and adversaries. Jobs asked for no editorial control and did not read the manuscript. The book covers the adoption, the Reed College period, the founding of Apple with Wozniak, the Macintosh, the ouster in 1985, NeXT, Pixar, the 1997 return and the product sequence from iMac through iPad, ending with Jobs' illness and death.

The book's most substantial business material concerns the 1997 turnaround. Isaacson documents the product line cull, the Microsoft investment and patent settlement, the reorganisation around a simple four-quadrant product grid, and the retail and supply chain decisions. He also documents the reality distortion field, Jobs' capacity to force people to do what they believed impossible and equally to deny facts he found inconvenient.

Isaacson does not soften the portrait. Jobs is shown denying paternity of his daughter, taking credit for others' work, parking in disabled spaces, humiliating employees, and refusing conventional cancer treatment for nine months after diagnosis in favour of diet and alternative therapies, a decision Isaacson reports Jobs later regretted.

The book has been criticised, including by Apple insiders. Tim Cook and Jony Ive both said it failed to capture Jobs accurately. Becoming Steve Jobs by Schlender and Tetzeli argues that Isaacson overweighted the young, abusive Jobs and underweighted the growth of the later executive. The technical explanations are thin and the treatment of Apple's actual operations, particularly the supply chain that Cook built, is minimal. The cruelty is documented but rarely analysed as a management question.

American biographer and professor of history at Tulane University; formerly editor of Time and chief executive of CNN and the Aspen Institute.

The biographies are built on long direct access - years of interviews with Jobs, then with Musk - and reconstruct how each subject decided, hired and treated the people around them. The Innovators does the same for computing, presenting it as a chain of collaborations rather than a sequence of lone inventions.

Tulane University, Amanpour & Company, Aspen Institute, CNN, Time