[in its marketing]. They honor great athletes and athletics. Customers want to know who Apple is, what do we stand for, and where do we fit in this world. Apple is not about making boxes, though we do that well, but at its core value, we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better.”
He launched the “think different” campaign to rekindle Apple’s spark and announce its values to the world, describing it as a message that “touches the soul of this company.”
How many twentieth-century companies talk about their soul when they talk about their culture? How many nimble, focused, and feisty companies would even blink at such a notion?
It’s hard to believe, but Apple is an old company now. And with its founder gone, and its success unprecedented, it would be incredibly easy for Apple to rest on its laurels and see its culture of innovation, adaptation, design, and its drive for category-maker leadership go stale. But Tim Cook, as CEO, has done an extraordinary job keeping Apple Apple. He talks eloquently about Jobs’ attention to culture and how that keeps him focused on the same concerns.
“Steve’s greatest contribution and gift is the company and its culture,” Cook said. “He cared deeply about that.” Elaborating, Cook described how Jobs did so. “It was his selection of people that helped propel the culture. You hear these stories of him walking down a hallway and going crazy over something he sees, and yeah, those things happened. But extending that story to imagine that he did everything at Apple is selling him way short. What he did more than anything was build a culture and pick a great team, that would then pick another great team, that would then pick another team, and so on.”
Instead of letting that culture go stale, Apple continues to nurture it, and it does so intimately but also at scale. That approach went into the design of the new Apple campus. According to Cook, “Steve wanted people to love Apple, not just work for Apple, but really love Apple, and really understand at a deep level what Apple was about, about the values of the company. He didn’t write them on the walls and make posters out of them anymore, but he wanted people to understand them. He wanted people to work for a greater cause.”
And to keep that culture alive for generations of employees to come, Jobs initiated the development of Apple University. According to Cook, “[Jobs] wanted to use it to grow the next generation of leaders at Apple, and to make sure the lessons of the past weren’t forgotten.”
On the curriculum: how to communicate, examining past decisions to find flaws and better answers, and culture.
If Apple, one of the largest companies in the world, can become nimble, focused, and feisty, so can any business at any stage.
IN SPRING 2004, a few months before the company’s IPO, Google released an 80,000-word prospectus to its current and potential investors. The document opened with a letter from co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
“Google is not a conventional company,” they began. “We do not intend to become one. Throughout Google’s evolution as a privately held company, we have managed Google differently. We have also emphasized an atmosphere of creativity and challenge.”
And so began a long and carefully constructed statement as to exactly what kind of publicly traded company Google intended to be.
Though the letter was inspired by Warren Buffett’s own approach to talking to his investors, Wall Street had never seen anything quite like it before. Buffett is a legend, and investors hang onto his words like groupies. In contrast, here was a young startup—albeit a very promising one with an exciting IPO in the offing—dictating to investors in no uncertain terms how differently it would think and behave as a shareholder-owned entity.
Bold and refreshing to some, the Google founders’ letter to others was an expression of arrogant immaturity. The phrase “Don’t be evil” struck many in particular as a simplistic take on the way conventional companies generate capital and shareholder value. Yet the “founder’s letter” has become a rite of passage in Silicon Valley in the years since, imitated by other startup CEOs, such as Groupon’s Andrew Mason and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, before their own ceremonial IPO. This is despite sniffs of disdain and outright pushback from the establishment. One commentator in 2012, for example, noted that Zuckerberg in his letter used the word “people” forty-one times in eighty-three sentences and the word “business” only seven times, then proclaimed that reality would soon overcome such idealism. “Whether thrust defiantly into the faces of would-be shareholders or proffered delicately as a corporate heirloom of inestimable value, such epistles are doomed to enter into a slow, painful strangulation as market forces have their way.”1
Why would a company’s founders—on the verge of becoming incredibly rich through the good faith of the investment community—bother to articulate and share thoughts and beliefs that go well beyond—or even contradict—the traditional concerns of business?
For the most part, a prospectus is a dry and technical document, heavy on whatever numbers and calculations support a firm’s approach to a particular way of doing business. The prospectus is written in this way because that is what investors look for when they are trying to assess the firm’s capacity to generate profit, gain market share, execute strategy, and earn shareholder returns. The founders of Google, Groupon, and Facebook, on the other hand, feel that something else—something beyond the numbers—has made them successful to this point and will help them continue to be great destinations for investment capital long into the future.
Note that those founders are not describing their vision or culture but something even deeper and more intrinsic to their purpose. I call this nebulous thing their mindset.
PART CANNON SHOT, PART WEDDING VOW
What is a mindset? The simplest explanation is that a mindset guides the way an organization acts and operates, but that’s almost a throwaway description that does not fully capture the power of the concept. In my view, an organizational mindset is the most intangible and yet critical belief to define because it is intrinsic to the organization’s culture, vision, purpose, values, strategy, and way of acting in the world.
Typically, you can see mindset most clearly in action. Yet, in many organizations mindset can be very confusing because it is not concretely articulated. Indeed, mindset can be particularly difficult to divine in organizations run by traditional CEOs who are not very open about what they actually think and feel. Holding a mindset “close to the vest” may protect a CEO from getting “caught out” whenever the realities of the market trump an ideal or view. If the company is forced to act in a way that’s contradictory to its mindset in a particular circumstance, then no one can call it out on that hypocrisy if the mindset is not clear. Yet, this ambiguity also forces the people in the organization to make guesses about the mindset, which leads to inconsistencies in decision-making and approach. On one day, in one division, the organization may be innovative and willing to bend over backwards for the customer. On another day, and under the purview of a different manager, the organization might be risk-averse or inclined to do as little for the customer as possible to avoid hurting the bottom line. What does the organization really think? Who honestly knows? But chances are you’d better be right when you make a decision or choose a path, or you will be in trouble, even though what is right can be different depending on the situation.
Fortunately for employees, customers, and investors alike, this kind of emotional hostage-taking is becoming less common. Founders like Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Andrew Mason, and Mark Zuckerberg
