Steve Jobs might not have been such a bad guy, after all.
He was “kind, patient, and human,” says Tim Cook, who is trying to dispel the tainted image of his former boss as some kind of jerk.
“[Jobs] cared deeply about things,” said Cook, in the latest excerpt from “Becoming Steve Jobs,” an upcoming biography about the Apple founder. “Yes, he was very passionate about things, and he wanted things to be perfect. And that was what was great about him.”
“And a lot of people mistook that passion for arrogance,” said Cook. “He wasn’t a saint. I’m not saying that. None of us are. But it’s emphatically untrue that he wasn’t a great human being.”
Cook said that Walter Isaacson’s biography “Steve Jobs,” published in 2011, “did him a tremendous disservice. It was just a rehash of a bunch of stuff that had already been written, and focused on small parts of his personality. You get the feeling that [Steve’s] a greedy, selfish egomaniac.”
This is one of several excerpts published by FastCompany, from the book by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli that is coming out on March 24. The full title is “Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader.”
In a previous except, Cook explained how he tried to give Jobs a piece of his liver in 2009, but the gravely ill Jobs wouldn’t let him. Jobs eventually died of cancer in 2011.
Cook said that Jobs was always willing to help others who were seriously ill.
“There were different employees and spouses here that had health issues, and he would go out of his way to turn heaven and earth to make sure they had proper medical attention,” he said.
Cook also said that Jobs “had the courage to admit he was wrong, and to change, a quality which many people at that level, who have accomplished that much, lack. He wasn’t beholden to anything except a set of core values. Anything else he could walk away from.”