He is also an extraordinary writer. After reading page 136 of his book The Power Broker, I gasped and read it again, then again. This, I thought, is how it should be done.
.. His first book happened because, great reporter that he is, he asked the right question and saw a truth invisible to others. The question was: how do cities decide to build bridges, roads and so on?
.. “These two guys had written a textbook on highway and land planning, and they explained it by mathematical equations. I’m sitting there, taking assiduous notes, and all of a sudden it came to me — this is all bullshit. OK, I know why highways get built. They get built because Robert Moses wants them built. They’re writing this book about power and didn’t understand where power comes from, and neither did anybody else.”
.. “I started to think, how did this happen? He was never elected to anything, and you think, if you’re an American, you live in a democracy. Your concept is that power comes from the ballot box. But he had more power than anybody who was ever elected.”
.. Moses was a monster, and this dawned on the electorate when they saw his disdain for their questions and objections. “He would slam his palm down and say, ‘They expect me to build playgrounds for the scum floating up from Puerto Rico!’” He was, as a result, defeated by the widest margin there had ever been in a gubernatorial race.
.. He got a minimal advance for the book and told Ina he’d take her to Paris when it was finished in, say, two years. It took him seven. Ina sold their house to get them through — he seems to tear up when I mention her dogged support — and they lived in a miserable flat in the Bronx.
The Hidden Talent of Steve Jobs
On the one hand, “Steve was a genius with a flair for design,” whose powers of persuasion were such that he could convince people that the sun rose in the west and set in the east. On the other hand, he was also “a pompous jerk,” who humiliated employees and “disregarded everyone else in his single-minded pursuit of perfection.”
It is Schlender’s and Tetzeli’s contention that Jobs was a far more complex and interesting man than the half-genius/half-jerk stereotype, and a good part of their book is an attempt to craft a more rounded portrait. What makes their book important is that they also contend — persuasively, I believe — that, the stereotype notwithstanding, he was not the same man in his prime that he had been at the beginning of his career. The callow, impetuous, arrogant youth who co-founded Apple was very different from the mature and thoughtful man who returned to his struggling creation and turned it into a company that made breathtaking products while becoming the dominant technology company of our time. Had he not changed, they write, he would not have succeeded.
.. It took years before Pixar came out with its first full-length movie, “Toy Story.” During that time, he saw how Ed Catmull, Pixar’s president, managed the company’s creative talent. Catmull taught Jobs how to manage employees.
.. His charisma still drew people to him, but he no longer drove them away with his abrasive behavior and impossible demands. He had also learned that his ideas weren’t always the right ones, and he needed to listen to others.
Perhaps the most important example of this was the App Store. Jobs had initially opposed allowing outside developers to build apps for the iPhone, but he did a quick about-face once he realized he was wrong.
NYTimes Profiles All the 911 Victims
A decade after the Sept. 11 attacks, The New York Times revisited families to learn how they have coped, changed and carried on since that day. Here are their stories.
How did Mark Zuckerberg train himself to be a programming prodigy?
Just because Mark started Facebook doesn’t mean he is a programming prodigy. Mark’s major was Pyschology so he wasn’t at Harvard as a CompSci prodigy. Back in 2004 building a CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) application in PHP/MySQL was fairly easy. I would bet if you had more insight into what people that seem to be amazing are really capable of, you would see that they are normal people with normal skills.
Facebook’s success (like many startups) is largely due to timing, solid product/market fit and a bit of luck. Those same rules apply to successful startups today, any of which could potentially be as big as Facebook. Where Mark made the right decision was surrounding himself with smart and talented people.