He Got Kicked Out of the Company He Built. Then He Came Back and Made It Great.
I've read a lot of business books. Most of them follow the same shape. Person has idea. Person builds thing. Thing succeeds. The end.
This one goes somewhere different.
Alan Deutschman wrote The Second Coming of Steve Jobs in 2000. And the story he tells isn't a straight line up. It's a fall, a long crawl, and then a climb that nobody saw coming. That shape is what makes it worth reading.
Here's the setup. Jobs helped build Apple. It started in a garage. Apple grew into a company. That company changed people’s ideas about computers. He was young, bold, and impossible to work with. Brilliant and brutal in almost equal measure. And in 1985, the board pushed him out. The man who started it all was suddenly on the outside looking in.
Most people assumed that was the end of his story.
Not even close.
Jobs went away — but he didn't go quiet. He started NeXT. A new company with big ambitions and a product that was ahead of its time. It struggled. It never broke through the way he wanted. But he kept building. He kept pushing. He wasn't done.
And then there was Pixar. He bought a small animation studio from George Lucas for five million dollars. Most people in the industry laughed. A computer guy buying a cartoon shop? What was he thinking?
He was thinking Toy Story.
Pixar turned into one of the most successful animation studios in history. And that win — slow, grinding, not at all guaranteed — showed a different side of Jobs. He could wait. He could learn. He could take a loss and turn it into fuel. That patience wasn't in the young Jobs. He built it during those years away.
And then Apple called.
The company was in real trouble. Bleeding money. Losing ground fast to Microsoft. Leadership was weak and the products had lost their edge. Jobs came back in 1997. Not as a hero. More like the only option left.
What he did next is the heart of this book.
Deutschman shows how Jobs stripped Apple down. He cut the product lines that weren't working. He focused on a small number of things and demanded they be done right. He brought back the fire and the discipline. But he also brought something new — a clearer sense of what Apple should be and what it should make people feel.
Imagine this. You lose your job at a company. Later, you return to that company. You turn that company into the world's most valuable business. That's the arc this book is chasing.
Now here's my honest take. I gave this three stars on Goodreads. It's a solid book, not a great one. Deutschman writes well but the book was published in 2000, so it stops before the iMac really took off. It doesn't cover the iPod, the iPhone, or anything that most of us think of when we picture Jobs at his peak. So you get the buildup without the explosion.
But the buildup is worth reading. Look at Jobs's comeback. It includes the NeXT years, the Pixar bet, and his return to Apple. That comeback shows who Jobs truly was. His success does not show that as well. You see how he handled failure. How he grew. How he stayed hungry across fifteen years of setbacks.
A film called Steve Jobs covers much of this story. Danny Boyle directed the film. Aaron Sorkin wrote the script. Fast, sharp, and worth watching. But the book gives you details the film can't fit. The behind-the-scenes tension. The way people around Jobs felt the heat. The daily reality of working for someone who never thought good enough was good enough.
Three stars. This book suits people who love Apple's history. It also suits people who want to see real resilience in business. Jobs didn't just come back. He came back and built something that outlasted him.
That's the story this book tells. And it's a good one.
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