Start With Why

to restore the luster and the clarity of Wal-Mart’s WHY.
    And to do it, he started by paying himself an annual salary of $5.43 million.

PART 6
    DISCOVER WHY

13
    THE ORIGINS OF A WHY
    It started in Vietnam War–era Northern California, where antigovernment ideals and distain for large centers of power ran rampant. Two young men saw the power of government and corporations as the enemy, not because they were big, per se, but because they squashed the spirit of the individual. They imagined a world in which an individual had a voice. They imagined a time when an individual could successfully stand up to incumbent power, old assumptions and status-quo thoughts and successfully challenge them. Even redirect them. They hung out with hippie types who shared their beliefs, but they saw a different way to change the world that didn’t require protesting or engaging in anything illegal.
    Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs came of age in this time. Not only was the revolutionary spirit running high in Northern California, but it was also the time and place of the computer revolution. And in this technology they saw the opportunity to start their own revolution. “The Apple gave an individual the power to do the same things as any company,” Wozniak recounts. “For the first time ever, one person could take on a corporation simply because they had the ability to use the technology.” Wozniak engineered the Apple I and later the Apple II to be simple enough for people to harness the power of the technology. Jobs knew how to sell it. Thus was born Apple Computer. A company with a purpose—to give the individual to power to stand up to established power. To empower the dreamers and the idealists to challenge the status quo and succeed. But their cause, their WHY, started long before Apple was born.
    In 1971, working out of Wozniak’s dorm room at UC Berkeley, the two Steves made something they called the Blue Box. Their little device hacked the phone system to give people the ability to avoid paying long-distance rates on their phone bills. Apple computers didn’t exist yet, but Jobs and Woz were already challenging a Big Brother–type power, in this case Ma Bell, American Telephone and Telegraph, the monopoly phone company. Technically, what the Blue Box did was illegal, and with no desire to challenge power by breaking the law, Jobs and Woz never actually used the device themselves. But they liked the idea of giving other individuals the ability to avoid having to play by the rules of monopolistic forces, a theme that would repeat many more times in Apple’s future.
    On April 1, 1976, they repeated their pattern again. They took on the giants of the computer industry, most notably Big Blue, IBM. Before the Apple, computing still meant using a punch card to give instructions to a huge mainframe squirreled away in a computer center somewhere. IBM targeted their technology to corporations and not, as Apple intended, as a tool for individuals to target corporations. With clarity of purpose and amazing discipline, Apple Computer’s success seemed to follow the Law of Diffusion almost by design. In its first year in business, the company sold $1 million worth of computers to those who believed what they believed. By year two, they had sold $10 million worth. By their third year in business they were a $100 million company, and they attained billion-dollar status within only six years.
    Already a household name, in 1984 Apple launched the Macintosh with their famed “1984” commercial that aired during the Super Bowl. Directed by Ridley Scott, famed director of cult classics like Blade Runner , the commercial also changed the course of the advertising industry. The first “Super Bowl commercial,” it ushered in the annual tradition of big-budget, cinematic Super Bowl advertising. With the Macintosh, Apple once again changed the tradition of how things were done. They challenged the standard of Microsoft’s DOS, the standard operating system used by most personal computers at the time. The Macintosh was the first mass-market computer to use a graphical user interface and a mouse, allowing people to simply “point and click” rather than input code. Ironically, it was Microsoft that took Apple’s concept to the masses with Windows, Gates’s version of the graphical user interface. Apple’s ability to ignite revolutions and Microsoft’s ability to take ideas to the mass market perfectly illustrate the WHY of each