I spent a substantial part of my life with a goal of having business be better for society. I had good financial backing. An elevator pitch noted that multinational corporations can subvert governments and distort markets, developing countries usually become engaged in a damaging way and technologies are being applied by powerful corporate interests in ways that negate the best elements of the great American experiment.
Said differently, our goal was to allow contributions by individuals and small groups to be well recognized and fairly rewarded for the value they add to their customers’ lives, individually and as societies. Some of the things we did enabled Apple’s remarkable supply chain. But other results were adopted in ways that gave new life to what I believe are obsolete behemoths.
I regret this.
The fact is that companies do what is in their best interest. Often, very often, they flub even that because the people in control have only the fuzziest of visions about what they do, what they can do and what would be loved. Because of this, the usually profound control they might exert is misdirected or ineffectual. When they can do what they want, it is often harmful in subtle ways.
That is to say, when companies work, they don’t mind doing harm. They don’t know what harm is or can be. And companies usually don’t work in any case; they only stay alive because their competition is equally broken. So if we help large companies work, a primary result is we increase their ability to do harm.
Apple as the Counterexample
It is unlikely I will be welcomed into another such role, which is why I root for Apple as the leader in disrupting the basic model of how business is done. Yes, they disrupted the PeeCee business, the music distribution business and the phone business. Less appreciated is how they developed a unique mix of centralized and decentralized control over an agile supply chain to iterate at scale faster than competitors. This is a more profound disruption.
But an even more profound dimension, leaps larger by whatever scale you might use, is their functioning approach to what business is.
The obvious: Apple is based on making delightful products. Internally, return on investment is never used in this quest. There is an obsessive fear of being ordinary, of presuming that old conventions are best. They’ll get to an advanced design phase on ten projects for each one they commit to. When they believe that have an answer, they commit with all their heart. The primary focus is on delight and a secondary focus on profit. All this is common knowledge and notunique.
In our world of business metrics, this is all rolled up in the concept of design. Detractors then demean the value of this single characteristic, and customers that appreciate it.
Apple is already a (or the) leader in alternative energy, construction techniques, (civil rights in a corporate environment) and general public health. From an outside observer’s perspective, their growing role as positive citizen seems unrelated to their mission. Some attribute it somehow to weakness in Tim Cook, or a corporate public relations gimmick. For some folks it is even the devil’s conspiracy.
None of this is captured in the metrics the stock market uses. Strangely low stock price is good for Apple because the biggest purchaser of Apple stock is Apple itself. At current rate, they can own themselves in less than two decades. (For perspective, that is about the length of time of Jobs’ second tenure at Apple.) Perhaps the best thing for us all is for the company to be private, even more secretive.
If we were going to measure the effect Apple has on us, and the effect that makes them attractive, we’d have to model something beyond these notions of delight, design and dedication.
Branding as the Vehicle
I think we can get there by thinking of this dimension as a reinvention of branding.
Common examples of brand management are Harley Davidson, Coca Cola and Tylenol. Each of those companies sell relatively ordinary items in the sense that anyone could make the same thing. Each is a marketing powerhouse, not because their products are superior, but because they sell something in addition to the physical product: life style association, the illusion of common joy and safety respectively.
More resources are spent on these than on the physical product. Accounting standards allow for companies to value their brand and the good will it carries. Apple plays this game as well, and pays close attention to the cache of its products. They carefully nurture this notion of brand and customer engagement.
But there is something else, beyond…
