The unauthorised 2005 account that Jobs disliked enough to have Apple pull all Wiley titles from its retail stores. Author Jeffrey S. Young had already written a Jobs biography in 1987 (Steve Jobs: The Journey is the Reward), and this follow-up covers the ouster, NeXT, Pixar, and the post-return era through the iPod, framing Jobs's career as the greatest second act in business history.
iCon is the book Jobs tried to suppress — he pulled the entire Wiley catalogue from Apple Stores because of it — which makes it the biography most likely to preserve what the subject wanted buried. Young and Simon cover the full arc from genius to exile to return, with the iPod-era success framing what the 1985 failure and the NeXT years taught him. The book's argument is that Jobs's effectiveness as a leader was not innate but forged by humiliation and loss, and that the 1997–2001 turnaround was the payoff of lessons learned in the wilderness.
For founders, iCon represents the anti-hagiography. It is useful precisely because it is unauthorised and resisted: the tensions, the mistakes Jobs made at NeXT (the closed system, the pricing, the hardware focus that almost killed the company), and the personality traits that hurt him before they helped him are all on display without the filtering of the subject's approval. The 'second act' framing matters organisationally: failure does not have to be the end of a founder's story, but only if the founder actually learns what the failure was trying to teach.