Benjamin franklin and albert einstein, this is the exclusive biography of steve jobs

Toy Story
. As was often the case, Jobs did not like to be forced to make 
a decision. He told Clow to ship both versions; this would give him until the morning to decide. 
When morning came, Jobs called and told them to use the Dreyfuss version. “If we use my voice, 
when people find out they will say it’s about me,” he told Clow. “It’s not. It’s about Apple.”
Ever since he left the apple commune, Jobs had defined himself, and by extension Apple, as a 
child of the counterculture. In ads such as “Think Different” and “1984,” he positioned the Apple 
brand so that it reaffirmed his own rebel streak, even after he became a billionaire, and it allowed 
other baby boomers and their kids to do the same. 
“From when I first met him as a young guy, he’s had the greatest intuition of the impact he 
wants his brand to have on people,” said Clow.
Very few other companies or corporate leaders—perhaps none—could have gotten away with 
the brilliant audacity of associating their brand with Gandhi, Einstein, Picasso, and the Dalai 
Lama. Jobs was able to encourage people to define themselves as anticorporate, creative, 
innovative rebels simply by the computer they used. “Steve created the only lifestyle brand in the 
tech industry,” Larry Ellison said. “There are cars people are proud to have—Porsche, Ferrari, 
Prius—because what I drive says something about me. People feel the same way about an Apple 
product.”
Starting with the “Think Different” campaign, and continuing through the rest of his years at 
Apple, Jobs held a freewheeling three-hour meeting every Wednesday afternoon with his top 
agency, marketing, and communications people to kick around messaging strategy. “There’s not a 
CEO on the planet who deals with marketing the way Steve does,” said Clow. “Every Wednesday 
he approves each new commercial, print ad, and billboard.” At the end of the meeting, he would 
often take Clow and his two agency colleagues, Duncan Milner and James Vincent, to Apple’s 
closely guarded design studio to see what products were in the works. “He gets very passionate 
and emotional when he shows us what’s in development,” said Vincent. By sharing with his 
marketing gurus his passion for the products as they were being created, he was able to ensure that 
almost every ad they produced was infused with his emotion.
iCEO

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As he was finishing work on the “Think Different” ad, Jobs did some different thinking of his 
own. He decided that he would officially take over running the company, at least on a temporary 
basis. He had been the de facto leader since Amelio’s ouster ten weeks earlier, but only as an 
advisor. Fred Anderson had the titular role of interim CEO. On September 16, 1997, Jobs 
announced that he would take over that title, which inevitably got abbreviated as iCEO. His 
commitment was tentative: He took no salary and signed no contract. But he was not tentative in 
his actions. He was in charge, and he did not rule by consensus.
That week he gathered his top managers and staff in the Apple auditorium for a rally, followed 
by a picnic featuring beer and vegan food, to celebrate his new role and the company’s new ads. 
He was wearing shorts, walking around the campus barefoot, and had a stubble of beard. “I’ve 
been back about ten weeks, working really hard,” he said, looking tired but deeply determined. 
“What we’re trying to do is not highfalutin. We’re trying to get back to the basics of great 
products, great marketing, and great distribution. Apple has drifted away from doing the basics 
really well.”
For a few more weeks Jobs and the board kept looking for a permanent CEO. Various names 
surfaced—George M. C. Fisher of Kodak, Sam Palmisano at IBM, Ed Zander at Sun 
Microsystems—but most of the candidates were understandably reluctant to consider becoming 
CEO if Jobs was going to remain an active board member. The