The most successful company in the world also happens to have the most valuable brand. How did Apple do it? More importantly: how have they been able to do it for so long? When Steve Jobs was CEO, the company had a sort of magic about it: not only the products they designed but they way they marketed the products. Simon Sinek, a terribly smart man, writes in Start With Why that Apple communicates and creates in a way that always answers that fundamental question.
(Simon Sinek possibly holding a magic bean in his fingertips)
Sinek sums Apple’s answer to “Why?” like this:
Everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo. We believe in thinking differently.
The way we challenge the status quo is by making our products beautifully designed, simple to use and user-friendly.
And we happen to make great computers. Wanna buy one?1
I first heard the phrase “status quo” in grade nine. My teacher had put a simple line up on an overhead projector. It was a classic story arc.
(this is a much fancier version of my grade nine story arc)
It began with a straight line, exposition or the status quo. Then the line turned up, abruptly. This was the inciting incident. That line, going up, was rising action. Halfway up the page, the line came back down, went up again, down, up, down, up in peaks and valleys. These were successes and failures for our heroes, in their battles against their antagonists — physical or psychological. When I am telling my daughters a story, each of these plot points inspire them to ask, “And then what happened?” Toward the upper right quadrant of the page, the line reached its highest point, the climax. This was the most difficult moment of all, in the story. This is where our heroes either win or lose, in the ultimate battle for… for what? For what they desperately wanted or needed back in the beginning, when the status quo — normal life — was ruptured by an inciting incident.
That is, when the story began.
After the climax the line moved calmly down and to the right. This is the dénouement. In a comedy, a story that ends well, this is where the lovers walk off into the sunset together, possibly smooching.
There are multiple ways to use the phrase “status quo.” It’s normal life, the way things are today. In a novel or a film, it’s the unsatisfying world before the story begins. The unfulfilled lovers have not yet met. They do not yet know their lives are about to be transformed.
The trouble with Sinek’s summing-up of “Why Apple?” is that every company and every product, every entrepreneur who takes a risk, is challenging the status quo. Or they ought to be. Challenging the status quo for the sake of it certainly accounts for the tone and voice in Apple’s early marketing efforts, the hint of revolution and the “different” part of Think Different, but it doesn’t account for the otherworldly loyalty they have commanded —especially since 1997.
(We know Apple’s story so well that the U2 giveaway felt mysteriously off-brand)
In 2014, Apple gave everyone with an iTunes account a new album by U2, possibly the most mainstream, most status quo band in modern rock music. There’s nothing wrong with U2. But there are thousands of stylish upstarts trying to revolutionize rock music for the 21st Century. Apple didn’t give 500 million of those albums away for free.
“Apple’s clarity, discipline and consistency — their ability to build a megaphone, not a company, that is clear and loud —is what has given them the ability to command such loyalty,”2 Sinek writes.
He’s absolutely right about that. But I don’t think “we challenge the status quo in everything we do” can account for this clarity, discipline, and consistency. It might even lead you to give away free U2 albums. If the genius founder is not in the room, and we the employees want to make an Apple sort of decision, I don’t think “challenge the status quo” is nearly enough.
A status quo in business, and in a story, is simply a problem state.
When Steve Jobs was still operating out of his parents’ garage, a marketer named Mike Markkula came to see him. Neither of them was motivated by money. Markkula was already rich and if Jobs wanted to make a pile he might have continued working at Atari. They wanted to build something meaningful. So what was it? Already, Jobs knew he wanted to challenge the status quo. But how?
(Steve Jobs and Mike Markkula)
What was the status quo, the problem only he could solve? What was the inciting incident in the Apple story?
The generation that had lived through the Second World War had a complex relationship with machines. They adored the convenience of gadgets but they tended to distrust scientific advancement. The early sixties came with the haunting Cuban Missile Crisis; few Americans saw the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as moments of triumph, yet more and more countries went nuclear. The Vietnam War and the counter-cultural movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s inspired a low-grade technophobia and a new appreciation of the natural world. Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring had made its way through the western culture. The highest-grossing film of 1968 was Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and intelligent machines didn’t fare well through the rest of the decade. Earth Day was born in 1970, Greenpeace a year later. The oil crisis of 1973 had inspired a back-to-nature movement and scientists and legislators began talking about acid rain. Star Wars was fun as long as it remained a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Industrial design, in the late 1970s, was a chaotic mess. Furniture was odd, cars were hideous, and after years of polyester people were longing for natural fabrics: you could almost smell the reactionary conservatism of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Ralph Lauren.
Computers, in 1977, were ugly and clunky things. The nerds who designed them were not concerned with design and the nerds who purchased them didn’t care. Why would anyone care? Look at those cars! Those clothes! That carpet! Besides, there were computer people and there was everyone else. Computer people didn't need beauty and elegance in their lives.
(Computers in the 1970s were… inelegant)
It was more than ugliness. Computers were cold and intimidating, even hostile, a dull package of numbers and specifications. They belonged in the basement, along with the ham radio and the workshop and the kids who did not like talking to other kids.
There was a business problem as well. People distrusted machines. There wasn’t necessarily a huge market for computers, out there in middle America, so in order to be profitable early computer makers diversified. You couldn’t become Hewlett-Packard by only selling computers. The computer entrepreneurs in the late 1970s wanted to get rich. They responded to research, and gave people what they thought they wanted. Markkula was far more experienced than Jobs in business and he had seen this in every industry: people chasing fads and imaginary pots of money that took them away from why they had launched their company in the first place. Most of them didn’t even know why — apart from “Because cash flow.” He knew the desire to be Hewlett-Packard, the sequel, would destroy almost everyone in every garage in the valley.
Markkula worked with Jobs night after night to come up with the Apple inciting incident, to respond to the status quo in computers. Not in fashion, in greeting cards, in household appliances, in exercise equipment, in rock music: in computers.
This was the status quo: technophobia and ugliness and a hunt for profit instead of a desire to create something new, to change something. There was nothing out there for the people with liberal arts degrees and good jobs who might pay a little extra for something elegant and beautiful. Why couldn’t computers be elegant and beautiful? There was no computer for people who were afraid of computers. Why couldn’t they be more human? Why couldn’t a computer company simply be a computer company that changes the way we think about, and use, machines?
They came up with three principles and wrote them on a single page. Everything Apple made and everything Apple said would go back to these principles..
The first was empathy, an intimate connection with the feelings of the customer: “We will truly understand their needs better than any other company.” The second was focus: “In order to do a good job of the those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities.” The third and equally important principle, awkwardly named, was impute. It emphasized that people form an opinion about a company or product based on the signals that it conveys. “People DO judge a book by its cover…”3
The status quo in the computer industry was ugly, unfeeling, chaotic. The status quo for the people they identified as Apple people? Technophobia. Their lives were complicated enough without adding a machine to their home — a clunky machine that ruined the look of the room and, frankly, made them feel stupid.
This was the clear problem Steve Jobs and Apple computer could solve. This is why they launched the company, so we might bring computers upstairs.
(Sorry about the 1970s gender roles here but this ad is saying: the Apple II is so tidy and attractive you will allow it in the kitchen.)
Apple will not design anything without remembering what it feels like to be a human being. The “marriage of science and the humanities” at the foundation of Apple meant a designer could think like an artist. Apple products will be elegant and beautiful. They will be intuitive. They will run with the rhythms of human thoughts and emotions. Not only that, we will imbue them with human qualities. Our machines will smile and breathe. This will be Apple at its best. People who care about these things are our people. We will not chase money for the sake of chasing money. We will not make printers simply because our competitors are profiting massively from printers. Printers cannot be beautiful. They cannot feel human.
Our people will pay more for a machine that seems to understand how they think. They are literate and passionate, a bit romantic. The computer age is coming whether they like it or not, and we can do something for them — improve their lives.
This is how we will design. This is how we will market our products. This is how we will attract the best people to Apple Computers. There is an Apple sort of decision, an Apple sort of employee, an Apple sort of consumer, an Apple sort of advertisement. Now that we know this, we can grow with confidence. We will retain control over our operating systems because, frankly, we don’t want them polluted by people who don’t understand the problem we are here to solve.
Without a clear problem to solve, a status quo, there can be no story. And there were plenty of computer start-ups in the valley at the end of the 1970s. Markkula helped Jobs answer why he, of all these people, should be in this business.
Apple isn’t for everyone. Neither is U2. But they have similar ideas about the world, similar stories. These two massive icons of the late 20th Century fit together because they’re obsessed with change, with style, with what it feels like to be a human being. You can understand why everyone thought the free album was a good idea.
The company under Steve Jobs had ups and downs, like all journeys, and we followed along whether we bought the computers — or iPods, or iPhones — or not. The failures are just as meaningful, just as Apple, as the successes. Nearly every failure went back to one issue: they did not remain true to their story, the problem they were born to solve. Jobs repeated that sense of rupture from the beginning, that inciting incident, over and over again. Underneath the Apple “Master Story” were multiple anecdotes that proved it, powerful instances of “Apple for example,” whether they were products or choices Apple made. Most of us can repeat those stories of rupture, Apple for example. There was a world before the iMac and a world after it. The same goes for the iPod and the iPhone. Jobs’s famous presentations followed the arc of a story, that same arc I saw on an overhead transparency in grade nine. But they weren’t stories for the sake of storytelling.
Each one, always, reinforced the Apple master story.
When they messed up, it was because they deviated from their master story. Steve Jobs was a passionate and difficult man. Following a master story with “clarity, discipline, and consistency,” is not easy. You can seem a mad person suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder, especially if you lack tact and even temper. “Is this solving the problem we were born to solve?” But I sympathize with the keeper of the story: if a product, a word in an advertisement, a new hire, an acquisition, a decision about interior design or the staff Christmas party contradicts the master story it is not just an error. It threatens everything.
When Jobs was sent away for being impossible, Apple nearly went bankrupt building multiple computers with silly names and printers and speakers and CD players and cameras and other things to sell in order to make money. They forgot the problem only Apple could solve. They dismissed the founding principles of empathy, focus, and imputation. Suddenly, Apple products were everywhere. They were cheap! Apple no longer worried, as artists worry, about what it’s like to be alone. They no longer said never to opportunities that might be profitable but simply aren’t us. There was no longer any such thing as an Apple decision, an Apple employee, an Apple consumer.
And they started building ugly, forgettable computers.
(This is what happens when you ignore or dismiss your story)
Jobs came back, threw almost all of it in the garbage, and went back to the Apple master story. Twenty years later, the problem was the same. Machines were ugly and unintuitive. There was nothing out there for those romantics who valued that marriage of science and humanities. They had begun buying PCs and they were frustrated with their inelegance, their lack of humanity, the sense of confusion about them.
The company re-launched with something so beautiful, so Apple, it was almost unbelievable. We saw the colourful iMac in the summer of 1998 and asked: that’s a computer?
(I had a blue one)
It wasn’t easy. Clarity, discipline, and consistency were back, and Jobs never allowed another deviation from the master story. His work in the latter years of his career was so focused and so powerful that it has lived on, with brilliant results, years after his death.
Sinek, Simon. “Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action.” Penguin, 2009. New York.
Sinek.
Isaacson, Walter. “Steve Jobs.” Simon & Schuster, 2011. New York.