Inside Steve's BrainInside Steve's Brain

Leander Kahney skips most of Steve Jobs's life story and focuses on how Jobs ran things, especially after he came back to Apple in 1997, when the company was close to going under.

Each chapter takes one habit. Focus comes first: on his return, Jobs cut a sprawling product line down to a handful of machines and said no to almost everything else. Then there's his perfectionism about details nobody would ever see, like the inside of a computer's case. There's his insistence on controlling the whole product, hardware and software together, so the experience could be designed end to end. And there's the way he hired, praised and tore into people, which the book doesn't pretend was always pleasant.

The book is careful not to worship him. It shows how the same obsession that made the products great made him very hard to work for.

It's on the shelf for the idea that taste can be a discipline. Sweating over details nobody asked for, and cutting good ideas to protect a great one, are both things I'd rather learn from a book than the hard way.