Hours of interviews with former Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, some of which had never been played or transcribed, have been found in a garden shed.
Writing on Fast Company, journalist Brent Schlender describes how he came across the tapes, recorded over a period of 25 years in his shed.
‘Rummaging through the storage shed, I discovered some three dozen tapes holding recordings of extended interviews–some lasting as long as three hours–that I’d conducted with him periodically over the past 25 years. Many I had never replayed–a couple hadn’t even been transcribed before now. Some were interrupted by his kids bolting into the kitchen as we talked. During others, he would hit the pause button himself before saying something he feared might come back to bite him.’
Listening to the tapes again, said Schlender, made him realise that Jobs’ so-called ‘wilderness years’ – those between 1985 and 1996, when he left Apple, bought Pixar, and started NeXT, were the most important of his life.
‘Jobs matured as a manager and a boss; learned how to make the most of partnerships; found a way to turn his native stubbornness into a productive perseverance. He became a corporate architect, coming to appreciate the scaffolding of a business just as much as the skeletons of real buildings, which always fascinated him,’ wrote Schlender.
You can read excerpts of the tapes here.
Steve Jobs image courtesy of Big Stock Photo
