Editor’s note: This article was first published in July 2015. Apple is called the most valuable company on the planet with a market capitalisation of 726 billion dollars, a figure from July 2015.
Many companies get stuck with their first products, watching their sales wither or seeing competitors overtake them for lack of improvements. Today we live in a fast-changing landscape where, if you are not constantly on the move, you fall behind in the market.
One of Steve Jobs’s maxims was that if you are not constantly being born as a company, you are quickly dying.
According to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, once a year Jobs took his most valuable employees, whom he called “the Top 100”, on a retreat. They were chosen by a very simple criterion: they were the people you would take with you if you could only keep 100 employees in a lifeboat for your next company.
That lifeboat would hold the most creative people in the company: those with ideas for its future, for getting ahead of the competition and even, in Apple’s case, for getting ahead of consumers themselves.
At those retreats all kinds of ideas were debated, and at the end Jobs would stand in front of a whiteboard and ask: what are the next 10 things we should be doing?
Jobs wrote them down on the whiteboard and then crossed out the ones he thought were dumb, or crap, as he liked to put it.
After plenty of arguments and debate, the group would end up with a list of 10 ideas. Then Steve Jobs would cross out the bottom seven and announce that they would get to work on the top three.
Thanks to these retreats, Apple stopped being just a personal computer company and was able to move early into other industries that needed a shake-up. Music is one example: Jobs had the vision to give record labels an alternative to piracy by creating iTunes. Apple went from being a computer company to bringing new products to market such as the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad, with the iPod being the product that reinvented Apple.
Tim Cook, Jobs’s successor, has kept holding these retreats with the most creative employees, and Apple has remained a company that has never stopped innovating. This way of thinking, giving power to the smartest employees, is what makes Apple the most valuable company on the planet right now, with a stock market capitalisation of 726 billion dollars.
It is, without doubt, a simple procedure from a great company that any small business can easily copy.
Further reading
- 6 very strange things highly successful people do to get ideas and be more creative
- Richard Branson: relax this summer, but stay open to big ideas
Featured image: Carol M. Highsmith, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
