Nolan Bushnell's "Finding the Next Steve Jobs " (Simon & Schuster) claims that, like inhabitable Earth-size planets, there are people like Steve Jobs all over the place just waiting to be discovered. What lends some credibility to Mr. Bushnell's idea is that he's built a career upon finding such people: A serial entrepreneur, he founded Atari, the seminal video game company; the Chuck E. Cheese chain of restaurants; and two dozen other companies.

Oh, and he employed Jobs, who came to work at Atari in 1974, left to travel in India and returned to help create the circuit board for the arcade video game "Breakout." Indeed, Jobs and Steve Wozniak made a home computer from parts borrowed from Atari. And when they wanted to start Apple, they offered Mr. Bushnell a third of the company for a $50,000 investment. He turned them down, proving he's not infallible.

Nolan Bushnell at the offices of publishing house Simon & Schuster. Kevin Hagen for The Wall Street Journal

Nolan Bushnell's new book Kevin Hagen for The Wall Street Journal

In other words, Mr. Bushnell knew Jobs well. "Finding the Next Steve Jobs," written with Gene Stone, is basically a business primer challenging corporate America to loosen up and find its inner child, or to hire people who haven't lost sight of theirs. Curiosity is the coin of the realm.

The volume opens on a cinematic note: It's 1980 and Mr. Bushnell, going through what he describes as a "grandiose" phase, has bought himself a six-story, 15,000-square-foot mansion with marble staircases on the Champ de Mars in Paris, a nice little neighborhood between the Eiffel Tower and the École Militaire.

He decides to throw a huge party, inviting all his Atari and Chuck E. Cheese employees. With the festivities in full swing, he notices Jobs, by now the successful co-founder of Apple, standing at the door.

"I smiled, and Steve rolled his eyes," Mr. Bushnell writes. "I think he was a little taken aback at the size of the place."

For the next several days, the two legendary entrepreneurs take long walks in Paris, admiring the scenery, sitting in cafes and conveniently laying out the premise for Mr. Bushnell's book. Jobs paints his utopian vision for a computer-assisted future while complaining about all the pressure he's under to come up with the next new thing.

He observes that to face the future successfully, Apple was going to have to find a lot more creative types below the rank of chairman. "What I realized then," Mr. Bushnell writes, "was that the original Steve Jobs believed he had to find his own next Steve Jobs."

I'll leave it to the reader to decide whether their exchanges track a little too closely with the book's theme. But one thing that rang true was the author's description of Jobs's fascination with the architecture of Paris. I spent only one afternoon with Jobs, in 1983, but I distinctly recall that he seemed as interested in art and culture as in microprocessors, going on at length about one of his favorite movies, the 1945 French masterpiece "Children of Paradise."

All I'm saying is that Jobs was an unusual fellow. And returning to planetary metaphors, it probably took almost as many twists and turns to make him as it did life on Earth. I'm not saying he was singular. Actually, I am. At the least, he was pretty damn rare.

Mr. Bushnell disagrees. "I maintain there are thousands of Steve Jobs working in companies all over the world," he stated. "It's the lack of corporate culture truly receptive to creative people."

"Finding the Next Steve Jobs" offers 52 lessons—or Pongs (why "Pongs," I'm not sure, except that it was the name of one of Atari's earliest video-game successes)—for hiring creative souls and letting them do their thing while you sit back, take the credit and reap the profits. Or something like that.

But first a word about Pong. For those youngsters unfamiliar with it, Pong was a rudimentary video game that seemed nothing short of miraculous when it first appeared in the mid-'70s. It consisted of two cursors meant to simulate players' table tennis rackets. An electronic ball (though my recollection is that it more closely resembled a puck) traveled between them, careening off in unexpected directions when struck. The challenge was to avoid letting the ball get by you.

I suspect more than a couple of my contemporaries at Middlebury College flunked out because they were playing Pong at the Alibi, the local hangout, rather than hitting the books.

Some of Mr. Bushnell's advice to bosses is to "hire the obnoxious"—in other words, people like Jobs, though the author said he never experienced the Apple founder's dark side. "Steve was a plain speaker," Mr. Bushnell said. "Everyone knew where he stood. It was offensive at times. But I said, 'Grow up! Was he right or wrong?'"

He added: "I really believe the job of a good manager is to mold that person and direct it towards the corporate goals and convince the individual their own happiness will be linked to that."

Other suggestions the entrepreneur offers include looking at a job candidate's hobbies, particularly those that "suggest a large appetite for intellectual challenge," and asking odd interview questions: "weird ones, random ones, ones that help you see how someone's mind works…"

He's also an advocate for anarchy and pranksterism, hence keg and pizza parties, and mild rule-breaking intended to decrease hierarchy and foster creativity.

We agreed about the importance of vacations. It came up in the context of employers who these days expect their workers to be accessible 24/7. "I insist people take their vacation time," Mr. Bushnell said. "I can document significant mistakes I made because I didn't take the time to get perspective. Often the most important things are the things you haven't thought about because you're so bogged down in minutiae."