Singularity, the ultimate resource in the face of adversity

In times of turmoil and pervasive uncertainty, our instinct is to play it safe. We often retreat, conform to successful norms, and dampen our uniqueness to avoid risks. However, a compelling chapter from Apple’s 1997 turnaround tells a different story: embracing and asserting our distinctiveness might just be the secret to thriving amidst adversity.

When Steve Jobs took over in 1996 at Apple, the company he co-founded twenty years earlier and was unceremoniously fired from in 1985, the company was bled dry. Its market share had become negligible, and it had no money or development plans. The company that had launched the personal computer revolution in 1977 and had grown at a dazzling rate was now a footnote in the global technological landscape. Jobs’ turnaround, which restored Apple to the ranks of the great technology leaders, is now an anthology of corporate history.

One episode illustrates how Jobs used Apple’s uniqueness in his turnaround strategy, which I mentioned in an earlier article. Shortly after his arrival, he learned that the communications agency BBDO had proposed a brand campaign for Apple with the slogan “We’re back. Apple’s management was in favor of it, but Jobs was against it, even though he was still officially “Advisor to the Chairman. To him, the slogan was stupid because Apple… wasn’t back yet, far from it. To think that Apple is back is to delude yourself, because the reality at this point is that Apple is struggling to survive. No one will believe that. To say that is to lie and lose credibility. It means continuing to live in a bubble, which is what Apple has been doing for years. By resisting, Jobs imposes a principle of reality that cannot be cheated.

Each portrait is accompanied by a simple slogan: “Think different” (the grammatical error is intentional). Think different? At first glance, this seems ridiculous for a company that has only a few percent of the market, whose products are outdated and that hasn’t done anything innovative or different in a long time. The author of these lines, despite being a big fan of the brand, remembers how uncomfortable he felt when he saw those big posters back then. Different in what way? How arrogant! How smug! And above all, how blind!

And yet it works. The campaign is getting a lot of attention, and it’s helping to re-energize the brand’s fans, the “last square,” because it touches directly on one of Apple’s defining characteristics: being both pioneering and different, blazing its own trail. It’s a trait of strong brands that they stand the test of time and speak to us through the ups and downs of life and the hard times they go through.

Reconnecting with your identity

The intelligence of this campaign is to reconnect with the identity of the organization and to start from the reality that, for an admittedly small core of people, Apple stands for difference. Apple was built in the ’70s and especially in the ’80s against IBM, which symbolized the grayness of computers that were complicated to use. When IBM declined, Apple replaced IBM with Microsoft as its new adversary. Apple was cool, IBM and Microsoft were old-fashioned. Granted, Apple stopped being “cool” a long time ago, but the identity trait remains, and it still “speaks” to people.

With this campaign, Apple is reinvigorating its faithful, this time not by opposing the rest of the world, by finding a new “enemy” as it did before Jobs arrived, but by starting again from who the company is, from its inner flame, even if it is now only a tiny, fragile flame. It doesn’t matter if the rest of the world laughs, and they have plenty of reasons to do so; these are external fires that Jobs ignores; the goal of rekindling the inner flame is achieved.

In times of adversity, when the company is on the brink of collapse, Jobs does not downplay Apple’s uniqueness; on the contrary, he affirms it as the foundation, the anchor, for recovery. He appealed to the company’s deeply rooted identity, which was probably one of the last resources it had left, but it was the most important one. At the time, every “expert” had an opinion on what Apple should do to survive. Jobs ignored them all.

It’s counterintuitive to assert your uniqueness when you’re in a very weak position. But it is because Apple is in a weak position that identity intransigence is fundamental. Because when identity gives way, there’s nothing left. This is reminiscent of a famous episode from World War II: Churchill, concerned about the very poor relationship between Roosevelt and de Gaulle, criticized the latter for his rigidity. He advised him to be more flexible, to make more concessions, to reach out to Vichy defectors in particular. “I can’t, de Gaulle replied, I’m too weak”.

Asserting your uniqueness is not reserved for the strong – far from it! On the contrary, it is the ultimate weapon of the weak in the face of adversity. It’s often all that’s left, but it’s also the ultimate resource and, if defended and asserted, the key to recovery.

🇫🇷 A version in French of this article is available here.

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