The Year Apple Fit on a Napkin

In 1997, standing in front of his own developers, Steve Jobs told them the company had been going off in eighteen different directions at once, and then said the sentence every business school has quoted since, usually without the part before it. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you focus on, he said. Focusing is about saying no. He said it as a man who had just signed the death of most of the catalogue, which took any poetry out of it.

How close it was, he only admitted much later. In 2010, on a conference stage where he could afford to smile about it, he said that Apple in 1997 had been ninety days from going bankrupt. Nobody was smiling in 1997. He had come back to the company he founded, twelve years after being pushed out of it, and before any marketing budget or new product, the first thing he asked for was the complete list of what the company sold.

It was a long list, and every line on it had a defender inside the building, a manager who had built it, a team that lived off it, customers who bought it. He cut roughly seven lines in ten, printers, variants, entire families with their customers attached, and left behind a grid of four boxes, a desktop and a portable, each in a version for professionals and a version for everyone else. Four products, at a company that until then had not managed to say no to a single one.

Look at the shape the refusal took, because the shape matters. What came out of the cutting was a grid anyone could draw on a napkin and any customer could read in a glance, professional or not, desk or bag, done, you know what to buy. A company that fits on a napkin has a brand. A company that needs a catalogue to explain itself has a catalogue, and nobody remembers a catalogue, however thick.

What usually gets lost in the retelling is that this had less to do with taste than with triage, the kind a field surgeon does, choosing who can still be saved, and it is brutal precisely because it is right. Every product cut freed people, money and attention for the four that remained, and the company's money, which had been spraying in eighteen directions, began to settle in one place, layer on layer. Apple was not dying because it made bad things. It was dying because it said yes to everything it knew how to make, and a company that can do many things and refuses none of them ends up, with clockwork precision, known for nothing.

Set the financial rescue aside and the story says something uncomfortable about any brand. A brand does not get clearer through what it adds. It gets clearer through what it lets die, customers included, and those customers are exactly why most owners never cut. Every extra product comes with a real client who asks for it, who pays, who has a name, so cutting looks like cruelty when it is in fact the only form of respect available for the clients you intend to keep. A yes to everything looks like generosity from the outside and is, more often than not, fear dressed up as a full offer, and the market can tell, because a company that does everything leaves the buyer one criterion to choose by, the price.

The file shows one more thing, and few people read it. The cutting came before the products that made Apple what it is today. Nobody knew in 1997 what was coming. All anyone knew was that eighteen directions add up to no road. The refusal was the condition under which something good became possible, and that reverses the order most people think in, where you first earn the right to grow and only then the right to refuse.

Your company is not ninety days from bankruptcy, I hope. But its list of services has almost certainly grown the way Apple's did, one reasonable yes at a time, each with its client and its reason, until nobody inside can say, without opening the website, what the company does best. And if nobody inside can, the market certainly cannot.

Jobs's exercise works just as well in a company of five, over a single afternoon. If you had to keep four things tomorrow, four and no more, could you name them without looking at your price list? And who in your company would dare to cut the fifth, if you were not in the room? I will ask you for one thing. Put the four things your company is on paper today, while nobody is forcing you to, because it took a dying company for Jobs to put down his.