they did. He also held meetings with different groups of employees
where he grilled them about the products they were working on. It
was up to each employee to convince Jobs that their product had
value. On a few occasions, his blunt manner and probing questions
reduced employees to tears.
Through these exchanges, Steve identified those people with
innovative ideas, and those he considered dead weight, firing the
latter. “Steve tests you, challenges you, frightens you,” explains
Todd Rulon-Miller who worked for Apple. “He uses this tactic to
get to the truth . . . It’s his way of asking: ’Do you believe in what
you’re saying?’ If you wither or blather, you’re lost.” 53
Once Jobs was satisfied with Apple’s staff, he worked directly
with the hundreds of employees who were not fired. Nothing was
done without his knowledge. Not even a paper clip was purchased
without his okay. Jobs had taken over.
Think Different
The next change he made involved advertising. Apple had lost its
image as a hip, renegade, cutting-edge company. That image, which
was in many ways a reflection of Jobs, helped distinguish Apple
from other more traditional computer companies. Many Apple
customers thought of themselves as rebels. When the company’s
outsider image faded, so did this customer base.
Jobs hired an advertising company to resurrect Apple’s image.
With Jobs’s input the company came up with the slogan “Think
Different,” which was scrawled atop pictures of innovative thinkers
like Albert Einstein, John Lennon, and Mahatma Gandhi, to name
a few. It was created not only to improve Apple’s sales, but also to
remind Apple employees what the company had been, and what it
could be again. “When I got back here, Apple had forgotten who
we were,” Jobs explains.
Remember that “Think Different,” ad campaign we ran? It
was certainly for customers to some degree, but it was even
more for Apple itself. You can tell a lot about a person by
who his or her heroes are. That ad was to remind us of who
Into the Future
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