BOOK REVIEW: The Steve Jobs Wayby Jay Elliot with William L Simon; Vanguard Press, $25.99

IT’S NOT surprising that Jay Elliot is a little in awe of Apple founder and chief executive Steve Jobs. A chance meeting with Jobs in the waiting area of a Californian restaurant resulted in Jay Elliot joining Apple as a senior executive just months before the computer maker’s initial public offering. Although he doesn’t say it, that chance meeting made Elliot a very rich man and changed his life for good.

Elliot had the title of senior vice-president, and was responsible for corporate activities such as human resources, facilities and information technology. But from day one he enjoyed a close relationship with Jobs, and not only played a central role in bringing the first Macintosh computers to market but used his prior experience in technology giants IBM and Intel to become a mentor to the then 20-something chairman of Apple. On practically his first day in the job, Elliot accompanied Jobs on a visit to Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC), where he saw a computer mouse and a graphical user interface (GUI) in development. Jobs saw the future and set about creating the Apple Macintosh – the PC which ultimately influenced the next 30 years of computing.

That close working relationship ended when Jobs was effectively ousted by chief executive John Sculley (the former Pepsi boss whom Jobs had himself recruited with the legendary line “Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life or change the world?”). Sculley removed Jobs as head of the Macintosh group and “promoted” him to a role with wider company responsibility. Obsessed with continuing to create ground-breaking computers, Jobs, in Elliot’s version of events, simply walked out the door and ceased to work as an Apple executive.

It’s one of several corrections to the widely accepted version of Apple history which Elliot here provides, but they are not played up as you might expect.

The Steve Jobs Wayinstead focuses on Jobs's management style and how it has allowed him create iconic products such as the iPod and iPhone while turning Apple around and making it the second most valuable company in the world.

Using his experience of working with Jobs, and observations of the chief executive on his return to Apple – following Elliot’s departure to found his own start-ups – he identifies a number of characteristics of “iLeadership” that readers can apply to their own companies.

The first and perhaps most obvious is passion for the product. Jobs very early on said he believed the Macintosh was going to change the world – and hired people who believed it too.

This is not just a designer’s passion – it is the passion of a consumer. At key stages, Jobs imagined what product he would want to buy and then encouraged and cajoled his teams into building them.

Convinced the mobile phones already on the market were too difficult to use he demanded his designers create the iPhone, with a single button, despite their protestations that it couldn’t be done.

Jobs is not some kind of superhuman. As Elliot points out, nearly every single major product since Jobs’s return to the company has missed its target launch date. Now Jobs simply doesn’t announce them until they are almost ready to ship.

Elliot also teases out how Jobs has nurtured and encouraged maverick talents – the “pirates”, as they were known in the early days of Apple. Jobs never wanted the original Mac team to grow to over 100 people, because he would not be able to manage it as closely as he wanted. Believing artists sign their work, Jobs allowed the members of the original engineering team to sign the inner case of the first Macs.

There’s plenty here about Jobs’s development into the person hailed as the top chief executive of the last decade. He had taken time to realise his focus should be on consumer products – after his first stint at Apple, he spent time in the doldrums developing high-end computers at Next which never took off.

If The Steve Jobs Wayhas a weakness, it is the author's closeness to his subject. While Elliot clearly has enough insight and insider information to paint what could be a fascinating picture of Jobs, the obvious awe in which he holds his former boss prevents him from doing so. Instead, he focuses on the unique and often obsessive way Jobs runs his company.

If you want the inside track on Jobs and his life, you'd be better off waiting for next year's official biography. If you are keen to learn what it is that makes this maverick CEO tick, and how you can apply some of that logic to your own company, The Steve Jobs Wayis surely worth a look.