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The one thing Steve Jobs did that turned around Apple

July 26, 2019 by LaunchTomorrow 2 Comments

After a nasty battle with Apple shareholders, Steve Jobs, then the original founding CEO, was ousted. He went on to create NeXt computers (later acquired by Disney). In the meantime, Apple drifted as a company. It proliferated product lines. Lost focus. And the share price entered a death spiral phase. A few years later in 1997, he was recruited back to save the company from very poor public share price performance.

“Saint Steve” at Macworld 1998

When we got to the company a year ago, there were a lot of products. There were 15 product platforms and a zillion variants of each one. I couldn’t even figure this out myself. After about three weeks. I said, “how are we gonna explain this to others, when we don’t even know which products to recommend to our friends?”

In this keynote at 1998 Macworld, he announced early successes, such as a 3rd consecutive profitable quarter. In my opinion, one of the most powerful parts of his talk was the following grid:

Filed Under: priorities, stories, velocity Tagged With: faster time to market

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  1. How to determine if systemic factors slow down your teams' velocity says:
    August 2, 2019 at 9:02 am

    […] week, I pulled out the critical thing that Steve Jobs did, upon returning to an Apple computer with a sagging stock price. He went after a major systemic […]

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  2. CEOs Effects Bottom Line, SOMETIMES Stock Price! Here’s Why says:
    September 17, 2020 at 9:10 pm

    […] The One Thing Steve Jobs Did That Turned Around Apple  (Launch Tomorrow) […]

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