Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [52]
The “Think Different” campaign was criticized for using noncommercial figures, people who patently didn’t believe in commercial culture. It even included committed nonmaterial ists like Gandhi and the Dalai Lama, who actively opposed commercialism. These figures would never endorse a product in a commercial—and here Apple was using them to endorse products. A lot of critics couldn’t believe Apple’s chutzpah and thought the company had stepped over the line.
In Apple’s defense, Clow told the New York Times that Apple intended to honor the subjects of the campaign, not exploit them. “We’re not trying to say these people use Apple, or that if they could’ve used a computer, they would’ve used Apple. Instead, we’re going for the emotional celebration of creativity, which should always be part of how we speak about the brand.”29
Allen Olivo, an Apple spokesperson at the time, said, “We would never associate these people with any product; it’s Apple celebrating them versus Apple using them. To say that Albert Einstein would have used a computer would cross the line. Why would he need one? But it’s different to say he looked at the world differently.”30
Berger, the ad critic, said he loved the “Think Different” campaign. “American culture is very commercial. This stuff gets jumbled up. Quentin Tarantino talks about Burger King. Apple makes a poster of Rosa Parks. That’s our culture. People are free to use anything from wherever they want.”
Effective advertising has always been of central importance to Jobs—as important as good design and easy-to-use technology—and he’s gotten it by partnering with Madison Avenue’s best and brightest.
Lessons from Steve
• Partner only with A players and fire bozos. Talented staff are a competitive advantage that puts you ahead of your rivals.
• Seek out the highest quality—in people, products, and advertising.
• Invest in people. When Jobs axed products after returning to Apple, he “steved” a lot of projects, but he kept the best people.
• Work in small teams. Jobs doesn’t like teams of more than one hundred members, lest they become unfocused and unmanageable.
• Don’t listen to “yes” men. Argument and debate foster creative thinking. Jobs wants partners who challenge his ideas.
• Engage in intellectual combat. Jobs makes decisions by fighting about ideas. It’s hard and demanding, but rigorous and effective.
• Let your partners be free. Jobs gives his creative partners a lot of rope.
Chapter 5
Passion: Putting a Ding in the Universe
“I want to put a ding in the universe.”
—Steve Jobs
By the spring of 2000, Jobs had introduced a string of hit products and had stabilized the company. He had overseen the successful overhaul of Apple’s operating system with OS X and was a few months into the launch of a fledgling chain of retail stores. Apple was surviving, but it wasn’t yet thriving. That would change with the introduction of the iPod, in October 2001.
The iPod is a lot of things. It’s a cool MP3 player. It’s a great blend of hardware, software, and online services. It’s the product that drove Apple’s comeback. But for Jobs, it’s primarily about enriching people’s lives with music. As he told Rolling Stone in 2003: “We were very lucky—we grew up in a generation where music was an incredibly intimate part of that generation. More intimate than it had been, and maybe more intimate than it is today, because today there’s a lot of other alternatives. We didn’t have video games to play. We didn’t have personal computers. There’s so many other things competing for kids’ time now. But, nonetheless, music is really being reinvented in this digital age, and that is bringing it back into people’s lives. It’s a wonderful thing. And in our own small way, that’s how we’re working to make the world a better place.”1
Get that last part: “that’s how we’re working to make the world a better place.” In everything Jobs does, there’s a sense of mission.
At every turn of his career, Steve Jobs