Keen On… Walter Isaacson: Sometimes It’s Nice To Be In The Hands Of A Control Freak (TCTV)

Love or hate him, there is no denying that Steve Jobs was a control freak. As Walter Isaacson’s magisterial biography of Jobs notes, Steve’s control freakery was so intense that he couldn’t stand sharing the stage while he was making one of his beloved whiteboard presentations. So what was the impact of this on Apple and how did it shape the company’s products and organization?

“Sometimes,” Walter Isaacson told me last week when he came into our San Francisco TechCrunch TV studio, “it’s nice to be in the hands of a control freak.” That’s because, he explained, “promiscuity leads to crappy products.” And it’s that obsessive end-to-end control of products – from chip manufacture to the retail experience – that most defined Steve’s remarkable tenure as Apple CEO.

This is the final part of my four part interview with Isaacson. Last week, he told me why Jobs wasn’t a tweaker, evaluated his historic significance and how he could sometimes be a tyrant.