At Apple, Jobs credited an exclusive team of what he termed A players with the successful creation and launch of the original Macintosh. But Apple, at the time, had too many B and C players, Jobs thought. Jobs told Isaacson: “At Pixar, it was a whole company of A players. When I got back to Apple, that’s what I decided to try to do. You need to have a collaborative hiring process. When we hire someone, even if they’re going to be in marketing, I will have them talk to the design folks and the engineers.”

Isaacson writes that “Pixar was a haven where Jobs could escape the intensity in Cupertino.” More importantly, “[i]t was at Pixar that he learned to let other creative people flourish and take the lead. Largely it was because he loved [Pixar’s chief creative officer] , a gentle artist who, like Ive, brought out the best in Jobs.”

Jobs told Isaacson that Tim Cook—now Apple’s CEO—came to the company “out of procurement, which is just the right background for what we needed. I realized that he and I saw things exactly the same way… Before long I trusted him to know exactly what to do.” Because of that trust, Jobs said, “I could just forget about a lot of things unless he came and pinged me.”

Said Cook, “Five minutes into my initial interview with Steve, I wanted to throw caution and logic to the wind and join Apple.” Isaacson describes Cook as “Jobs’s mirror image” in many ways, saying both were “unflappable.” Jobs told Isaacson: “I’m a good negotiator, but he’s probably better than me because he’s a cool customer… but Tim’s not a product person, per se.”