A recent biography of the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs has pithy lessons for business leaders.

A review of Walter Isaacson’s biography Steve Jobs is analogous to a review of the Karma Sutra – suffice to say that you’ll have to read the book yourself. So, instead of a book review, I am looking at what business scholars and those of us interested in entrepreneurship can learn from this book. Steve Jobs is a compelling read, in which the reader gets a front-row view of the Apple CEO, who died last year, sacrificing himself for Apple Inc. It charts the evolution of Apple from a computer company to the most valuable consumer goods company in the world, while its key architect fumbled his personal relationships and his health.

MBA students will read this and some will be appalled at what appears to be the subjugation of Apple’s original values for control over the how and the what that the user gets. Some will come away saddened at the personal price Jobs and those close to him paid for his version of success. Some will marvel at the combination of events and forces that created the phenomenon of Apple, and wonder how on earth these conditions could be replicated. The majority will realise that this is not a life that many can handle.

Coming from a service industry background (16 years in financial services and 10 years in business education), I can see a few lessons that are transmutable from the specific world of technology-based products to the broader world we do business in. They are:

Foresight trumps insight

Jobs forsook insight into current user requirements in favour of foresight into future requirements, gained through his own technical and artistic sensitivities. Job’s foresight drove the transcendent purpose of Apple.

T-shaped people are more innovative

Jobs was a classical T-shaped person. In this concept, great innovators develop a deep competence in a specific discipline – represented by the vertical line of the T – while simultaneously developing an artistic aesthetic that broadens what could become a narrow world view – the horizontal line of the T. Jobs had a strong technical competence and a remarkably wide world view, encompassing art, music, zen, meditation, LSD, food and design. It was at this intersection of technology and art that Jobs was most fecund.

Non-mean producing strategies require the suspension of reality

I found Jobs, as portrayed in this biography, to be so T-shaped that he often suspended reality in order to give voice to the tensions between what was technologically feasible and what was aesthetically required. He showed that innovations that yield returns in the far-right corner of the distribution curve cannot be grounded in current reality. Ideas grounded in the current generate mean-producing results. Jobs’s success rate in high-yield/high projects is unmatched. He always swung for a home run.

Time away is positive

Jobs hit more home runs after stepping away from Apple and then returning. He showed that you can go back and be successful.

Perfectionism demands time urgency

If you are a pedant or perfectionist, you must also be time urgent or drink an unhealthy amount of caffeine. Jobs clearly loved what he was doing. He sacrificed his relationships and his health for Apple. His energy and time urgency prevented the procrastination that sometimes comes with perfectionism.

Jobs’s charisma was such that extraordinary people were led to do miraculous things, often because Jobs believed they could. In my opinion, this is not sustainable after Jobs. Apple will need to use its considerable mental muscle and legacy DNA to develop a new rhythm to which it must regularly deliver innovation; what Peter Drucker called ‘disciplined innovation’ in the ‘Discipline of Innovation’ in the Harvard Business Review in 2002.

This is a big book about Steve Jobs and how he built the most valuable company in the world, but it is a mere pamphlet on how to be a human being.