When turning around a company, an organization, a team, or even yourself — the first thing you need is to get everyone and everything on the same page. Everybody needs to have their noses pointed in the same direction, reaching for the same star. To achieve that, you need to make your ultimate goal crystal clear. And this is a question of values.
On his return to Apple in 1997, there was a multiplicity of things Steve Jobs needed to do for the company to survive. One of the first things Steve embarked upon was to very publicly clarify the company’s values. In the beginning, this was not an attempt to gain new customers, but to reinvigorate the faithful. It was to blow oxygen onto the fading embers that ignited people’s enthusiasm for the company and its products in the first place. He knew the value message couldn’t be complicated, it needed to be simple, yet powerful.
On the verge of bankruptcy, the strongest asset Apple still had was its brand. This was symbolized at that time by the six-color, Apple rainbow logo. In an interview several years later (Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, D: All Things Digital, 2010), Steve recalled that when he rejoined the company, he was surprised at how many good people he still found working there. When he asked these people, ‘Why are you still here?’ They responded that they bled in six colors.
I remember my own father telling me around that same time that the Apple logo was the subject of one of the questions on his favorite TV game show, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. The question was which side of the Apple logo was missing a bite. The producers of the show clearly thought Apple’s iconic logo was still instantly recognizable, even by people who had no idea about bits and bytes.
But there’s a gaping difference between a recognizable logo and a strong brand. Logos are like flags. To people outside of the flag’s country, they merely identify a particular nation. But for nationals, the flag represents the values of their nation. It is why people salute their flag, hoist it high on national day, and even carry it with them into battle. They identify with it. Despite agreements that no country can claim territory outside of our planet, each Apollo moon landing planted a US flag on the moon, not to claim the moon as US territory, but because of what landing on the moon said about American values.
The people watching Who Wants to Be a Millionaire saw the rainbow-colored Apple and knew it stood for Apple Computer. But for those stalwart Apple employees that Steve found still holding down the fort, the six-color logo symbolized something much deeper, it represented what Apple had originally stood for: innovation.
Twenty years earlier, when Apple was born in Jobs’s parents garage, the nascent personal computer industry was nothing but innovation. Moore’s Law, attributed to Intel’s co-founder, famously observed the boggling speed of the industry’s progress, with integrated circuit density—thus computing power—doubling every two years. But Apple’s raison d’être was not to create more power for large corporations and governments, but to put computing power into the hands of individuals, people who could change the existing order. That garage smelled of revolution.
The battle lines of the revolution couldn’t have been drawn sharper than on Super Bowl Sunday in 1984 when Apple with its attention-capturing 1984 TV commercial launched the Macintosh computer. People believed Orwell’s Big Brother in the ad was symbolic of IBM, the dominant force in corporate and governmental computing. The ad concludes with a woman athlete wearing the Macintosh logo on her shirt, hurling a hammer that explodes a screen projecting Big Brother, followed by the text: “On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh and you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984’.”
Where IBM and Microsoft were successfully proliferating personal computers in business and government, Apple’s Macintosh empowered individual innovation, particularly in the arts, publishing and education. For the next 13 years, a religious war raged between PC and Mac users; one the Italian intellectual Uberto Eco equated to the difference between Catholicism and Protestantism. Like all religious wars, the two sides were committed to competing values.
But by the mid 90s, the PC business had become commoditized, Windows-based PCs competing on price and replicable features had won, overwhelmingly dominating the market. Apple had become unable to keep up technically in a commercially-viable way. As key Mac software applications became available on Windows, even Apple’s core design and publishing customers were regretfully migrating to more powerful and cost-efficient Windows-based PCs.
Prior to Steve’s return to Apple, the company had lost its way. It had forgotten who it was. It was no longer holding to the values that defined it from other companies. Whether you’re a company, an organization, a team, a family or an individual—holding to a clear set of values is what defines you, separating you from or aligning you with others. In other words, values help create your identity. A conviction to your values, knowing who you are, is what drives people’s actions, give you the strength to struggle, to push yourself forward, to survive, to achieve, to prosper.
In 1996, before his return to the company was even imaginable, Jobs commented in a television interview (Wall $treet Week with Louis Rukeyser, PBS 1996) that for Apple to thrive again it needed to differentiate itself from the commodity PC market. This demanded it get back to its core value of innovation. To be different, Apple needed to act different. It needed to ‘Think different.’
Once back at Apple, Jobs immediately set out to return the company to its core values. He enlisted Chiat-Day, the ad team behind the ground-breaking Apple 1984 commercial that first launched the Macintosh computer. They locked-in on a concept that celebrated historical geniuses responsible for innovation in arts, sports, society, business and science. It showed black-and-white historical footage of real individuals who had changed things. It ironically referred to these people as “the crazy ones,” because they swam against current tides to create progress. The concept was executed boldly. Without showing a single computer or ever referring to Apple, except to say, “While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.” Each ad is signed with the tag line Think different, and simply the Apple logo. Enormous outdoor billboards and full page ads and posters followed the same concept of black and white historical images of innovators with an Apple logo and the tag line, “Think different”. The images, the text, and the tag line dramatically conveyed what the Apple logo stood for.
An essential nuance of the Think different message, and Apple’s core value, is not just celebrating innovation for innovation’s sense, but recognizing that individual initiatives drive human progress. Ken Segall, one of the creative team on the Think different campaign, noted that Steve himself wrote, in reference to the crazy geniuses, “They push the human race forward” (Insanely Simple, Portfolio/Penguin, 2012). The text of the original Think different print ad also included the line, “We make tools for these kinds of people.” In other words, Apple’s mission wasn’t just to make computers for businesses or organizations, it made tools that empowered individual contributions to humanity.
In a sense, these ads didn’t sell a single computer. Yet they were a huge success. Think different was the last brand advertising Apple would need to do for years to come. It communicated the company’s core value so effectively that they were used to start product launch events and major keynotes. They were used at retail locations and at trade shows. Once again, the Apple logo stood for something aspirational and revolutionary.
But critically, the Think different ads were also used internally throughout the company for events and meetings. Images, including enormous billboards, could be found on Apple’s corporate campus and regional offices. The ad text was even painted on the walls within the corporate headquarters. The point is that Think different wasn’t merely a branding campaign: It was religion. It zoomed in on the critical relationship between individual contributions and group progress: a relationship that would not only be Apple’s rallying cry in the marketplace, but also define how Apple organized itself internally.
Steve understood better than anyone Apple’s core value, because as the co-founder of the company, Apple’s values were his own values. We Apple employees could joke, ‘What’s the right thing to do? Whatever Steve says is the right thing.’ Steve was always Apple’s shrine, the Ark of the Covenant, embodying the values that drew people to the brand. But Apple could not grow by merely being a cult of personality. As an artist, Steve’s greatest creation was Apple itself (Walter Isaacson: Steve Jobs. Simon & Schuster, 2011). And great art stands on its own timelessly, independent of its creator. So Apple’s failure to continuously progress after his exile in 1985, showed Steve that Apple’s values needed to be codified into scripture and the company’s culture in such as a way as it could, and would, thrive without him.
This point could not have been clearer to me personally than on a remarkable day in Paris in September, 1999. It was my first year as a European marketing director at Apple and we had just opened the Apple Expo trade fair with a keynote presentation by Steve. At the end of an exhausting day of events with important customers, I was part of a group of European management invited to join Steve and the visiting Apple executive team for an after hours dinner amongst the galleries of the Louvre.
Why the Louvre? As part of the Think different campaign, the French Apple marketing team had convinced the mayor of Paris to allow Apple to literally cover part of the French national museum with two enormous Think different billboards: One of Gustave Eiffel and the other of Pablo Picasso. Actually, the billboards engulfed the scaffolding covering the renovation of the bridge-like les Guichets du Louvre. So, officially, the ads were not actually on the Louvre, but over it. But they were extraordinarily visible from both the river Seine and the Louvre’s interior courtyard (Place du Carrousel).
I had lent my seasoned French secretary Marie-Claude to help out the visiting Apple executive team during their sojourn in Paris. She told me later, that when walking across a bridge over the Seine (Pont du Caroussel) accompanied by a gaggle of Apple executives, Steve literally began hopping with excitement on seeing the enormous Gustave Eiffel Think different poster covering the Louvre entrance. His art, his logo, was literally hanging from the walls of the Louvre. It was his flag on the moon.
That evening was quite amazing. We mere mortals were escorted by security through the I.M. Pei pyramid entrance to the Louvre. The museum was already closed and cleared of the public. Once inside, we were free to tour the French painting galleries of the Louvre Denon wing, where docents stood by to answer questions regarding the art. I did. So did Jobs with a few of his California team. But most people headed to where we were having dinner, on the palatial landing of the Escalier Mollien, underneath Charles-Louis Müller’s painted ceiling, “Glory Distributing Palms and Crowns.” We were directed to have a glass of champagne on the terrace overlooking the the Cour Napoléon and glass pyramid. It was breathtaking. At the same time, you were surrounded by an overwhelmingly male group of computer sales execs, more interested in chit chatting about work than art or architecture.
After a few minutes, we were directed to go sit down at one of the round tables set-up inside. Arranged between columns, the tables overlooked the gallery. Just out of site, on the landing below us, there was a string quartet playing. And there was no assigned seating.
Exhausted, I didn’t want to decide who to sit next to. So I found the first empty table, pretty much in the center of the arrangement. And I pulled out the chair that had the best view and sat staring out into this incredible building. A moment later, a familiar voice asked if I would save the seat next to me for him. It was Steve. In one sense, I felt excited and puzzled that he chose to sit next to me. We had met a couple of times before, but I was doubtful he knew my name. Shortly afterwards, Doug, another American who had recently joined Apple Europe came up to me and pulled out that same chair to sit down. I turned to Doug and said, “I’m saving that seat for Steve.” He laughed and said, “Yeah, right.” Just then Steve tapped Doug on the shoulder and said, “I’m sitting there.” Doug turned three shades of pale and scuttled off. We’ve laughed about this several times since.
As soon as Steve sat down, we were joined at the table by other members of the Apple executive team from California. I remember thinking it’s a little strange that they don’t spread out more. But despite his public presence, Steve seemed most comfortable surrounded by familiar faces and free from the necessities of small talk. Steve got up at one point during the meal and spoke, seemingly ad lib, to the whole team. He called out Jean-Pierre Gianetti, the French marketing manager, who was individually responsible for getting permission to mount the Think different posters on the Louvre. Steve said, it ranked with some of the best marketing accomplishments in the company’s history. Jean-Pierre’s individual contribution was helping move Apple forward.
The grandeur of the setting, it’s relationship to the boldness of the Think different campaign, the connection to the world of great art, the tastefulness—it all fit together like a puzzle, where every piece carried forward the same brand message: No matter how small our market share was today, we were the crazy ones. Our role was to innovate in a way that pushed the market and thereby the human race forward.
There was a long way to go, but Apple had found its way.