Apple changed, so did its primary competitor: IBM, Microsoft,
Samsung, in that order. Jobs’s influence will mark the world
forever, and his thinking will inspire hundreds of innovative
business models.
In 1993, a book was published about ChiatDay, the leading
Californian agency that later became part of the TBWA network.
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It was entitled Inventing Desire. 3 That’s what Steve Jobs did. He
invented tomorrow’s desires.
all in One
When the iPod (and later the iPhone) came out, it was a real sur-
prise not to find any instructions inside the package. Steve Jobs
believed that users of his products should be able to use them
instinctively. This might seem easy, but determining the most
intuitive path requires a colossal amount of work. Jobs intro-
duced what would be later called a “seamless user experience,”
known today as a “frictionless customer experience.” Fluidity is
the new norm.
At the launch of the Mac in 1984, Apple created an ad that
referred to George Orwell’s novel 1984. Using the line “you’ll
see why 1984 won’t be like 1984 . . .”4 Apple introduced the con-
cept that machines should adapt to humans, not the other way
around. Today, the algorithm should adapt to the user. Tech-
nology should not be constraining, ergonomics must permit flu-
idity of interactions. This prefigures a future when we will be
truly augmented, where our intimacy with a machine will be total.
The result: a world without friction between man and machine.
From stores to products, from iPods to Macs, from iTunes
downloads to iPad apps, Apple masters better than anyone what
physicists call the science of reciprocal actions. Apple was the first to create an ecosystem where devices interact automatically with
one another, where products work together “naturally.” As we
probably all remember, it started with the iPod. The iPod’s
initial pitch was very simple: “1,000 songs in your pocket,” to
quote the slogan on the billboards TBWAChiatDay created
for Apple. The offer was the combination of iTunes, the iTunes
Steve Jobs
5
Store, and the iPod. Photos, games, and apps came later, as users
progressively adopted the platform.
Many companies around the world are now looking to create
their own proprietary ecosystems, business models with elabo-
rate architectures. Those in China are no exception. For exam-
ple, hundreds of millions of Chinese have WeChat and Alipay.
They use these all-in-one apps constantly to contact friends, pay
bills, order taxis, reserve hotels and plane tickets, catch up on the
news, or schedule appointments. In a Fast Company article about
multifaceted “super apps,” Albert Liu, EVP of Corporate Devel-
opment at Veriphone declared, “The advantage of super lifestyle
apps like Alipay or WeChat is they’ve connected incrementally
more data than an app that’s just focused on a single area. . . .
There is no comparison with anything in the U.S.”5 WeChat
is used on average more than 10 times a day for other things
than chatting. It’s been described as the “one app to rule them
all.” This all-in-one thinking is not so far from the mindset we
inherited from Steve Jobs. And this approach is now driving the
smartphone explosion in China.
Back in 1983, at the International Design Conference in
Aspen, Colorado, Steve Jobs had already identified the huge
potential of applications. A grand visionary, he predicted a future
when each user would have “an incredibly great computer in a
book that you can carry around with you and learn how to use in
20 minutes.”6 In 2007, the launch of the iPhone made all previ-
ous applications permanently outdated. Apps were presented for
the first time as simple icons, accessible through a user-friendly
tactile interface. In doing so, Steve Jobs created applications
that were attractive and easy to use. Before then, no one could
have thought that millions of apps would see the light of day in
the next decade. Without the flair of Steve Jobs, and his drive
to impose his vision of the future at all costs, Uber and Airbnb
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would probably never have existed. At least, they wouldn’t exist
in their current forms.
It was also in the early eighties that Steve Jobs pursued an
idea that a number of his competitors disputed. As he put it,
“More and more, software is getting integrated into the hard-
ware. . . . Yesterday’s software is today’s hardware. Those two
things are merging. And the line between hardware and soft-
ware is going to get finer and finer and finer.”7 I remember
some observers at the time castigating Steve Jobs for his desire
to make Apple a company that integrated both hardware and
software. In his critics’ view, this would condemn the brand to a
niche market. For a while, the naysayers’ arguments were rein-
forced by the success of the seemingly absolute compatibility
of Microsoft Windows. It’s true that, at the beginning, Apple
was the brand for a small core of believers, often from creative
industries. These passionate brand advocates allowed Apple to
carry on until the tipping point of 2001, which was when the
iPod launched. That year Steve Jobs changed the world, open-
ing up a new era for design.
Apple was an early adopter of what was already known as
“design thinking,” a both analytical and intuitive approach that
leads to a deeper understanding of the user experience. Apple
accelerated its emergence.
Today, all tech companies follow in the footsteps of Steve
Jobs. Programmers are interested in not only what machines can
do, but more importantly, how they are used. Fulfilling Jobs’s
predictions, the interaction between software and hardware has
become the distinctive sign of business.
In the Financial Times, John Gapper commented on Google’s
project to make an entire platform—software and hardware—for
driverless cars. He said, “Without the iPhone revolution, it is
hard to imagine a technology company entering the transport
Steve Jobs
7
industry, or designing a device that can steer cars around while
receiving and transmitting streams of data.”8 The iPhone has
provided tech companies with a new and unlimited world of
opportunities. It was a pioneering product, helping people find
ways to develop seamless hardware and software solutions that
drive innovation into new spaces.
Only when hardware and software work perfectly together,
can the user experience be optimized. And what is a strategy
today if not to constantly seek to improve the user experience?
That’s why, little by little, as underlined by the Harvard Business
Review, “Firms started treating corporate strategy as an exercise
in design.”9 This approach facilitates the resolution of mo
re and
more complicated issues, addressing large-scale problems with
multistep processes. Design helps cut through complexity.
For Steve Jobs, design was not so much a physical process as
a way of thinking. This was the single-minded vision that drove
his company. As a result, Apple took an end-to-end responsibil-
ity for the user experience years before the phrase “design think-
ing” became popular—and decades before the concept imposed
itself on the business world as a whole.
the art of reduction
I would like now to talk not so much about design thinking, but
of design in the usual meaning of the word. Jonathan Ive, who
has for years been Apple’s head of design, always adopted a min-
imalist approach. In our agency, we call this quest for simplicity
“the art of reduction.”
One of the key elements of minimalism resides in the
dualism of simplicity and richness, the fact that clean forms
allow the essential to be revealed. In search of immediate
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readability, minimalist art advocates no distance between the
object and its purpose. Apple is a paragon of this philosophy.
Any superfluous ornament or element is removed. Apple aims
to show the object as an idea. This approach is the foundation
of minimalist art.
Steve Jobs turned computers into objects of desire, making
design matter. He educated billions of peoples’ eyes. He made
machines friendly and beautiful, brightening offices. By bring-
ing beauty to a field where it was scarcely expected, Apple has
raised our aesthetic expectations—forever, no matter the prod-
uct category.
People talk about strong design like they talk about great art.
Also like art, design leaves a lasting impression. Apple devices are
art. Steve Jobs often said that he wanted Apple to be at the inter-
section of humanity and science. In almost every keynote presen-
tation he made for the launch of a new product, he ended with
a slide that showed two road signs at the intersection of Liberal
Arts Street and Technology Street. It was his way of underlining
how much he wanted to balance the humanities with science,
creativity with technology, art with engineering.
Life Lessons
Steve Jobs’s legacy is immense. First, he shaped what was to
become the New Economy by rendering possible thousands of
business models. Second, he helped make design an art in itself.
There are, of course, many other things Steve Jobs accomplished,
but I wish to close this chapter by remembering some of his
observations, memorable thoughts on issues close to his heart.
Steve Jobs
9
On the subject of innovation, he confessed, “I’m actually as
proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done.
Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”10 On simplicity, he stat-
ed, “Simple can be harder than complex: you have to work hard
to get your thinking clean to make it simple.”11
Steve Jobs did not leave us observations only of business,
but also some timeless lessons from his own life and from life
in general. He said that, for a free spirit like his, being fired by
Apple was the best thing that could have happened. The liberty
of becoming a beginner again replaced the burden of success. As
he put it, “It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods
of my life.”
He loved to mix experiences, conjugate different disciplines.
On this subject, he often said that it’s impossible to connect the
dots in advance. You can’t predict how things are going to turn
out. It’s only with hindsight that you can make sense of things.
“So, you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in
your future,” he added.
In the famous commencement address he gave at Stanford,
he told the graduating class that when he was 17, he learned to
live each day as if it were his last. After all, one day it certainly
would be. Jobs explained that since realizing this, each morning
he looked at himself in the mirror and thought about whether he
would be happy with what he was planning to do during the day,
assuming that day would be his last. If the answer several days
running was no, then he knew it was time to change something
important.
In the same speech, he explained to the students, “Your time is
limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”12 He pushed
them to always aim higher, to stay hungry, to stay foolish. When
I first saw the video of this speech, I was reminded of the script
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our agency created for the commercial “Think Different.” In
that we imagined Jobs saying:
Here’s to the crazy ones. The ones who see things differently. . . .
They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status
quo. . . . They push the human race forward. . . . And while some
may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because people who
are crazy enough to think that they can change the world are the
ones who do.
This closely reflected Jobs’s way of thinking. Perhaps the best
way to sum up his passion to encourage each of us to “put a
dent in the universe”13 is with the famous question he asked John
Sculley, whom Jobs was recruiting to be the president of Apple.
It was 1985 and Sculley was the president of Pepsi when Jobs
made him that offer. To make it impossible for Sculley to refuse,
Jobs asked, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your
life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?”14
Chapter 2
Jeff Bezos
ON EXPERIMENTATION AND PLATFORMS
There are certain overused expressions that I am fed up with.
For example, every company should be “client centric.” This
is hardly a new point of view; it has been around for decades. Back
in the eighties, I remember the CEO of Auchan, one of Europe’s
leading retail chains, claiming to “put the client at the center”
of all the strategies he developed for his group. Another worn-
out management cliché is “the right to make mistakes.” How
many articles or books condescendingly exhort the importance
of having courage and taking risks? As if businesspeople don’t
already know! These two platitudes in particular were staples of
management books and articles, but when the Internet arrived,
they were suddenly given new life.
In the digital revolution, everything starts with consumers;
the Internet has truly put them at the center. Additionally, like it
or not, companies are condemned to be resolutely open to risk.
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The Internet is the catalyst for turbulence, leaving companies
with no other choice than to constantly question themselves, to
continually experiment, and to innovate at an accelerated pace.
Otherwise, they run the risk of being left behind by co
mpetitors—
and eventually disappearing.
Jeff Bezos is the person who best represents the resurgence
of these two concepts, client centricity and risk-taking, in today’s
world. He has brought them to a new level of significance, which
can be seen in Amazon. Bezos is driven to always get closer to his
customers and he is constantly taking risks.
As a result, in 2017, Amazon was ranked number one in the
American Customer Satisfaction Index1 as well as in LinkedIn’s
ranking. Bezos has created the biggest and, above all, best
service company in history; he calls Amazon “the earth’s most
consumer-centric company.”2
experimentation as a Strategy
The foundation to Jeff Bezos’s thinking is that customers are
never satisfied. They’re always looking for a better way, but with-
out a clear idea of what that may look like. This is why Jeff Bezos
has always been dubious about customer research. He once de-
clared that “a remarkable customer experience starts with heart,
intuition, curiosity, play, guts, taste. You won’t find any of it in a
survey.”3 Jeff Bezos shares with Steve Jobs the belief that there’s
no point in asking consumers what they want. This goes against
many business approaches. For example, the head of Xiaomi
mobile phones constantly looks to improve his products based
on feedback that is gathered daily from his user community. By
contrast, Apple’s and Amazon’s visionaries believe that listening
to consumers leads you nowhere. Bezos’s goal is to give people
what they don’t know they need.
Jeff Bezos
13
To invent, you obviously have to explore, experiment—take
a leap into the unknown. Success comes out of conducting hun-
dreds of unsuccessful experiments. There is always serendipity
involved in discovery. Failure must be welcomed; it has to be
embraced. In Silicon Valley this seems natural. Innovators there
have even coined a word for it. They call failure pivoting.
“I’ve made billions of dollars of failure at Amazon,”4 states
Jeff Bezos. Recall the Fire Phone, the auction site Amazon Auc-
tion, and the hotel-booking site Amazon Destination. Dozens
of ideas didn’t work, but they were compensated by a few big
successes. As he has said, Amazon’s success depends on the num-
ber of experiments the company does per year, per month, per