How Steve Jobs set up Apple for a $1 trillion win
If you read this column regularly, I bet you are a lot like Steve Jobs, except that you never failed as massively as he did, nor did you learn lessons as well as he did, nor did you succeed wildly as he did. But then, neither did I, and neither did most of us.
One thing is certain: Jobs was an iconoclast from the start. College wasn’t really a fit, so he dropped out. After that, he bummed around for a while, hanging out everywhere from his mom’s garage to an ashram in India. Eventually the nascent computer industry of the ’70s called, so he settled in the Bay Area and teamed with his pals Steve Wozniak and Ron Wayne to start a little computer business in the aforementioned garage.
The first problem they encountered was that Wayne was a poor fit from the start. A mere 10 days after becoming a partner, he asked to be cashed out.
To say that Jobs had some ups and downs in his life as an entrepreneur generally, and as CEO of Apple specifically, would be putting it mildly. Take getting fired for instance. A mere nine years after launching Apple, Jobs was fired from his own company. Why?
A main reason was that he had bet big on the wrong product, a massive failure dubbed Lisa. This pre-Mac computer weighed 48 pounds and cost an even more massive $10,000. Corporations were massively uninterested in buying a super-expensive, jumbo computer. Only a couple thousand Lisa units were sold.
Desperate and teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, the company had little choice but to bring back its founder and visionary 11 years later.
But which Jobs would they get? The brash, harddriving CEO who had big dreams and a bigger ego, or a more grown-up leader who would be able to get them to the promised land?
A little of both, as it turns out – but more the latter than the former, given Apple’s valuation of $1 trillion.
Carmine Gallo has studied Jobs and Apple for years. He has written several books on the subject, including The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs. (I have also had Gallo on my podcast. You can hear the fascinating interview here.)
Gallo says that the secret to Apple’s incredible turnaround was not just Jobs’ charisma and smarts, but also his ability to get everyone motivated behind a vision bigger than either money or the business.
“In my keynotes about inspirational leadership, I often show a grainy video clip of Steve Jobs holding a small staff meeting in 1997. Jobs had returned to Apple about eight weeks earlier. The video shows Jobs delivering an intense and passionate message to a small group of employees. The passion he showed and the question he raised would inspire his team to dig their way out of the hole,” Gallo says.
Jobs tells the staff at the meeting that he has decided to eliminate 70 percent of Apple’s products. It was “too much stuff ” and confused consumers and employees alike. Instead, he decided, they needed to focus on the 30 percent of their products that were “gems.” But here’s the critical thing, and the reason why Apple eventually became the USA’s first trilliondollar company. Jobs says he slashed those 70 percent of products because they didn’t suit the question they all had to answer, individually and collectively:
Who is Apple, and where do we fit in the world? “Apple’s core value,” Jobs said, “is that we believe people with passion can change the world for the better. Those people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who actually do.”
Apple answered the question, changed direction and never looked back.
Steve Strauss, @Steve Strauss on Twitter, is a lawyer specializing in small business and entrepreneurship who has been writing for USATODAY.com for 20 years. Email: sstrauss@mrallbiz.com. The views and opinions expressed in this column are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of USA TODAY.