In the summer of 1997, Apple Computer was running out of time. The company had lost more than a billion dollars in its fiscal year, its share of the market was sliding, and a customer walking into a store faced a confusing wall of Macintosh models identified by numbers instead of names. Steve Jobs would later say the company had been about ninety days from insolvency. The firm that had put friendly computers on millions of desks looked like it might not see the end of the decade.
Jobs had co-founded Apple in 1976 and had been pushed out in 1985. His way back in was almost a side door. In December 1996, Apple agreed to buy his company, NeXT, for $429 million plus stock, mostly to get its operating system software. In July 1997 the board removed chief executive Gil Amelio, and by late summer Jobs was running the company as interim CEO. He inherited a business trying to do everything at once: desktops, laptops, printers, the Newton handheld, and a program that licensed the Mac operating system to other companies so they could sell cheaper clone machines.
Apple's problem was not a shortage of good ideas. It had too many, and every one of them had a team, a budget, and people who sincerely believed in it. The company was producing about a dozen versions of the Macintosh alone. When Jobs pressed his managers to explain which of them an ordinary customer should buy, he could not get a clear answer. If the people inside the company could not tell its products apart, the people outside had no chance.
His answer was a picture simple enough for anyone to remember. He laid out a grid of four boxes. Across the top went two kinds of customers, consumer and professional. Down the side went two kinds of machines, desktop and portable. Apple would make one excellent product for each box and nothing else. Any project that did not fit in one of those four squares was now in question.
The cuts were deep and fast. Apple's product line shrank by roughly 70 percent. Jobs found a way to end the clone licensing program, which had been letting other manufacturers sell Macs that pulled sales away from Apple's own. In February 1998 the company discontinued the Newton, a product with loyal fans and years of engineering behind it. Speaking to software developers in 1997, Jobs put the whole strategy into five words: "Focusing is about saying no." Saying no to bad ideas is easy. He meant saying no to good ones that would drain attention from the few that mattered most.
He also made peace where peace was needed. In August 1997, at the Macworld show in Boston, Jobs announced that Microsoft would invest $150 million in nonvoting Apple stock and keep developing its Office software for the Mac. In return, Apple would make Microsoft's Internet Explorer the default browser on new Macs, and the two companies signed a broad patent cross-license. When Bill Gates appeared on a giant video screen above the stage, part of the crowd booed. Jobs went ahead anyway. The deal brought cash, credibility, and the one piece of business software many Mac customers could not do without.
Then the boxes began to fill. Jobs unveiled the iMac in May 1998, and it went on sale that August: a translucent, blue-green all-in-one computer priced at $1,299. It dropped the floppy drive, bet on the new USB standard, and was designed to get ordinary people onto the internet with as little fuss as possible. About 278,000 sold in the first six weeks and roughly 800,000 within twenty weeks. Apple, which had lost more than a billion dollars the year before, reported a profit of $309 million for fiscal 1998. The professional desktop, the professional laptop, and later the consumer iBook filled out the other three squares.
None of this made Jobs an easy boss, and the turnaround had real costs. Teams lost projects they had poured years into. Clone makers lost a business they had built on Apple's word. Newton owners lost a product they loved. Focus is never free. It means telling capable people that their work, however good, is not what the organization will do next. Jobs accepted that cost because the alternative was a company too scattered to survive.
Most managers will never face a ninety-day runway. But nearly every team suffers from the condition Apple had in 1997: too many priorities, each defended by someone who means well. When everything is important, people quietly decide for themselves what matters most, and they rarely decide the same thing. The result looks like hard work from the outside and feels like drift from the inside.
You can draw your own grid on Monday. Write down everything your team is working on right now, all of it. Then ask the question Jobs asked: if someone outside this group read this list, could they tell what we are for? Circle the few things that truly move your mission, the ones you would choose if you were starting from scratch, and post them where everyone can see them. Then go through the rest of the list and decide, out loud, what you will stop.
That last step is the one most leaders skip. They add new priorities without retiring old ones and call it ambition. Stopping something takes a conversation, sometimes a hard one, with the people who own it. Have it anyway, and explain your reasons plainly. Your people can handle a clear no. What wears them down is a hundred half-yeses.
Apple did not survive 1997 by finding more things to do. It survived because one leader drew four boxes and had the nerve to say that whatever fell outside them would not get done. Your team has its own four boxes waiting to be drawn. The most valuable decision you make this quarter may be choosing what goes outside them.