Apple

Steve Jobs

Came back to a company selling 350 products and left it selling four.

The 1997 product cull is the cleanest focus decision in business history, and I think about that grid constantly.

1. Cutting is the strategy.

   In 1997 Apple was losing money across 350 products. He drew a two-by-two grid, consumer and pro against desktop and portable, and cancelled everything outside it. Profitable inside a year.

2. Saying no is the scarce skill.

   Almost every leader can list priorities. Very few will kill a product that has a team, a roadmap and revenue attached to it.

3. Taste is a business input.

   He treated the feel of a thing as a commercial variable, not decoration. Competitors who thought that was vanity kept losing to it.

4. Own the whole stack when the experience depends on it.

   Hardware, software and later the store. Vertical integration is expensive and it is the only way to control what the user feels.

5. Simplify past the point of comfort.

   One button where rivals had six. Removing things is harder than adding them and it is what people remember.

6. The demo is the argument.

   He would rather show a working thing than describe a roadmap. Anyone can describe a roadmap.

7. Small teams of very good people.

   He preferred a handful of excellent people to a large adequate group, and organised the company to make that possible.

8. Being fired was the useful part.

   The NeXT and Pixar years are where he learned to run a company. The return worked because of the exile, not despite it.

9. Sell the change, not the specification.

   The pitch was rarely about capacity or clock speed. It was about what became possible, which is what people buy.

10. Difficult is not the lesson.

    He was frequently unkind, and it is the most-imitated and least-useful part of the record. The focus is the transferable bit.