Start With Why

PCs. He saw the PC as the great equalizer. Microsoft’s most successful software, Windows, allowed anyone to have access to powerful technology. Tools like Word, Excel and PowerPoint gave everyone the power to realize the promise of the new technology—to become more efficient and productive. Small businesses, for example, could look and act like big businesses. Microsoft’s software helped Gates advance his cause to empower the “everyman.”
    Make no mistake, Microsoft has done more to change the world than Apple. Though we are drawn to Apple’s well-deserved reputation for innovation and challenging the business models of more than one industry, it is Microsoft that was responsible for the advancement of the personal computer. Gates put a PC on every desk and in doing so he changed the world. As the physical embodiment of the company’s WHY, the “everyman” who fulfilled an amazing potential, what happens now that he’s gone?
    Gates himself has always held that he receives a “disproportionate” amount of attention for his role at Microsoft, much of it, of course, due to his exceptional wealth. Like all inspired leaders, he recognizes that his role is to lead the cause, but it is others who will be physically responsible for bringing that cause to life. Martin Luther King Jr. could not have changed America walking across a bridge in Selma, Alabama, with five prominent civil rights leaders. It took the thousands of people marching behind them to spur change. Gates recognizes the need for people to produce real change, but he neglected to remember that any effective movement, social or business, needs a leader to march in the front, preaching the vision and reminding people WHY they showed up in the first place. Though King needed to cross the bridge from Selma on his march to Montgomery, it was what it meant to cross the bridge that mattered. Likewise in business, though profit and shareholder value are valid and essential destinations, they do not inspire people to come to work.
    Although Microsoft went through the split years ago, changing from a company that intended to change the world into a company that makes software, having Gates hanging around helped Microsoft maintain at least a loose sense of WHY they existed. With Gates gone, Microsoft does not have sufficient systems to measure and preach their WHY anymore. This is an issue that will have an exponential impact as time passes.
    Such a departure as Gates’s is not without precedent among companies with equally visionary leaders. Steve Jobs, the physical embodiment of the rabble-rousing revolutionary, a man who also personifies his company’s WHY, left Apple in 1985 after a legendary power struggle with Apple’s president, John Sculley, and the Apple board of directors. The impact on Apple was profound.
    Originally hired by Jobs in 1983, Sculley was a perfectly capable executive with a proven track record. He know WHAT to do and HOW to do things. He was considered one of the most talented marketing executives around, having risen quickly through the ranks of PepsiCo. At Pepsi, he created the wildly successful Pepsi Challenge taste test advertising campaign, leading Pepsi to overtake Coca-Cola for the first time. But the problem was, Sculley was a bad fit at Apple. He ran the company as a business and was not there to lead the cause.
    It is worth considering how such a bad fit as Sculley even got the job at Apple in the first place. Simple—he was manipulated. Sculley did not approach Jobs and ask to be a part of Apple’s cause. The way the real story unfolded made the fallout almost predictable. Jobs knew he needed help. He knew he needed a HOW guy to help him scale his vision. He approached Sculley, a man with a solid résumé, and said, “Do you want to sell sugar water your whole life or do you want to change the world?” Playing off Sculley’s ego, aspirations and fears, Jobs completed a perfectly executed manipulation. And with it, Jobs was ousted from his own company a few years later.
    Apple thrived on Steve Jobs’s fumes for a few years as businesses started buying up Macintoshes and software developers continued to create new software. But it wouldn’t be long until the company would begin to falter. Apple just wasn’t what it used to be. It had gone through the split and ignored it. The WHY was getting fuzzier and fuzzier with each passing year. The inspiration was gone. Literally.
    With a capable executive like Sculley