CHAPTER   2

Business Leadership Through an Unorthodox Channel: Creativity

D ID YOU KNOW that Steve Jobs once was ousted from Apple by a board whose members thought that they could run the company better than he could?¹ It’s true, and as a result, there was a time when the company was failing miserably. Steve kept trying to get back in, but he had little luck. The new leadership at Apple led with an analytical mindset. The quest for innovation had dried up, and the search turned to maximizing margins and other analytical goals. Their products that had potential were left alone to founder.² Without any product updates, attention, or changes, the new leadership was stuck in “If it ain’t broke, why fix it?” mode. They were ignoring one of the most fundamental tenets of The Creator Mindset: change is one of the only things you can count on.

Competitors started to make better products. People looked to Apple to change and grow, to innovate and create, but instead they released same old model after same old model. This was very similar to what Detroit’s Big Three were doing in the early and middle 1980s while the Japanese were in better touch with what the automotive consumer was looking to buy.³ Apple wasn’t adopting The Creator Mindset, which looks at stagnation the same way it views death. If you’re not continuously looking to foster an environment that breeds creativity, you will be relegated to the pages of history.

Board meeting after board meeting at Apple yielded no results, and soon enough bankruptcy was nearing and a decision had been made: Apple was going to do a massive layoff.⁴

This shouldn’t be surprising because the analytical mindset always looks to numbers for answers. And what better number to look at than payroll? We need to cut staff to stay profitable, right? It’s an analytical strategy as old as time. It was imperative in yesterday’s economy, which operated strictly on quantification.

In the end, cutting payroll failed, so they needed the next big things: “cost cutting” and “restructuring” were the new way to save the company. Spoiler alert: These options are hardly innovative management techniques. In fact, they’re tools that you’re probably already familiar with. Sure, there may be parts of these techniques that help (temporarily), but any gain without creativity is short-lived. That is why massive layoffs almost never work. That is why restructuring has never really kept up with change. I’m sure you can come up with some of your own analytical tools that appear to work briefly but stop working at some point. That is the case because thinking with only analytics and ignoring the creative most often leads to failure. What you’re really doing is treating the symptoms instead of looking for a cure.

After those attempts failed, the board at Apple decided on the last of the analytical trump cards: suing someone. In this case, that was Microsoft. This was the big move, the big shake-up. They thought, This is sure to work! You see, at that time Microsoft was employing a user interface in Windows that looked a lot like the user interface in Apple’s system. It had similar icons, a similar look and feel, and a similar user experience with a mouse and a keyboard to control things that were happening on the screen. Because we are all so computer-literate these days, those things seem commonplace, but at that time they were not.

Finally, as a last resort, Steve Jobs was allowed to rejoin the company he had started. With Apple facing bankruptcy by the end of the year, most thought that there was nothing that could be done. But that was because the mindset at Apple was stuck in the analytical. And just as you need more than one tool to build a house, you need more than one tool to solve problems in your business. Steve Jobs knew this intuitively. He knew that the analytical was nothing without the creative, and so he had a revolutionary creative idea: he was going to go to Bill Gates at Microsoft and ask him to bail out Apple.⁵

In case you don’t know the backstory, Apple and Microsoft were enemies at that time, and the relationship between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs was complicated at best. Sure, they had been friends briefly in the 1970s, but their friendship had been strained by their competition. They both created very similar products under very different brands.

You can only imagine the jeers, sarcasm, and anger this idea generated at Apple. The lawyers were outraged. The board was aghast. Most people at Apple thought that Steve Jobs had lost his mind. But what Jobs did was combine the analytical and the creative to come up with an idea. The analytical side showed him that his company was about to go bankrupt, and the creative side showed him that the solution just might come from the most unlikely of sources.

He met with Bill Gates, but the details of the meeting are not well recorded. It was a conversation between two bitter rivals, two former friends. Yet the result of the meeting changed the history of the technology sector forever. Bill Gates did indeed make a $150 million investment in Apple at a time when it was needed most, with the one condition being that Apple drop the lawsuit. Steve Jobs agreed.⁶

The reverberations of this bailout have been felt ever since. Steve Jobs didn’t just win here; Bill Gates did too. He also made a creative decision by believing that having major competition—a fierce rival—was actually good for business.

I remember early in my career battling competition and trying to stay in business. And a mentor of mine told me that he loved competition and that I should learn to love it too. I thought this was silly because I wanted to crush my competition and be on top, but I eventually learned that he was right. Competition makes your offerings better. It forces you to stay adept and in touch with your consumers. Plus, it’s good for consumers to have a choice.

It turned out that both Apple and Microsoft did very well after a leap of faith taken on creativity. This is not an idea that any analytical mindset would have produced. Too often the credit goes only to Steve Jobs in this story, but Bill Gates also took on a Creator Mindset in that he recognized that the thinking of yesterday will not be the same as the thinking of tomorrow.

THE REASON I TELL this story is simple. It’s my hope that if we are armed with The Creator Mindset, these stories of creative triumphs in business will become more and more commonplace. We need these stories because they appeal to us on a human level. They are full of compassion, empathy, connectivity, and drive, and they are just plain awesome. They make us feel warm and fuzzy because they tap into a human element that is central to the DNA of who we are: the creative. No one gets warm and fuzzy over the analytical, the spreadsheet logic, the rigidity of reason. But when you tap into an emotional nerve, that gets us going. It moves us in a way that only creativity can. It turns out that this DNA actually kept us from being eaten by creatures far more analytically complex than us in our prehistoric past, but that’s a story for later in the book.

Looking at the case study of Apple, we see that there was a lot of risk taken on thinking creatively that’s uncomfortable for most people to engage in. But this is not wanton risk taking or reckless abandon; this is the calculated risk that creativity can bring. It is a welcome departure from the tried-and-true responsesto crisis that have been executed in business forever with dubious results: responses such as downsizing and restructuring. All of that was tried in this story, but none of it worked.

I wish that stories like this one were commonplace, but in fact they’re not. That’s one of the reasons I wrote this book. Most people are in awe of Steve Jobs and what he was able to do at Apple, and they called him creative. It is a rightful honor, but imagine unlocking the secrets that Steve Jobs used at Apple so that they are readily available for you to use as well. It can be done through the lens of creativity no matter what it is that you do. In your business, in your industry, and in your life, The Creator Mindset codifies what has been unable or unwilling to be codified until now. It’s the creativity option in your business that you are now learning how to activate.

GOOD LEADERSHIP RELIES ON sound business acumen. But what if that acumen has forever been changed? What if the practices of yesterday are not relevant to the practices of tomorrow? The Creator Mindset is forcing old theories of economics, management, and “best practices” to be rapidly replaced with a new way of thinking. This way of thinking introduces possibilities that were never there before. They introduce a new creative idea economy that relies on the activation of a long-ignored part of the mind that you are learning to activate now.