Biography as Bible: Managers imitate Apple’s Steve Jobs

Prasad Thammineni, the chief executive of a file-sharing start-up called OfficeDrop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was no fan of Steve Jobs after Apple Inc. took a long time adding one of the company’s apps to its iTunes Store.

But as he read the hefty biography Steve Jobs, the 42-year-old Thammineni found himself buying into many of the Apple co-founder’s management ideas. He even emailed screenshots of some of the book’s passages to his 20 employees with such messages as “We should all work to achieve this” and “Amazing! Applicable to any start-up.”

Thammineni isn’t the only executive who has read the biography as a how-to manual. Since Walter Isaacson’s portrait was published shortly after Jobs’s death last October at the age of 56, some executives have treated it as a sort of management bible, raiding it for nuggets of inspiration.

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