Greg McKeown:
Welcome everyone. I’m your host, Greg McKeown, and I am here with you on this journey to learn to see if we can’t figure out how to make the highest contribution with our lives.
Have you ever met someone who made a disproportionate impression upon you? You didn’t have conventional conversations with them. Instead, it was something more meaningful, even life-changing.
Well, in today’s episode, part one of a two-part interview with Ron Johnson, Ron describes specific moments and conversations that he had with Steve Jobs. Ron Johnson was formerly the senior Vice President at Apple. He was responsible for the creation of the retail Apple stores, as well as the Genius Bar. If you’ve ever been to an Apple store, if you’ve ever been to the Genius Bar, Ron Johnson has impacted your life. But in this episode, we learn about how Steve Jobs impacted his life.
By the end of this episode, you’ll have insights into that key relationship, but also insights into how to make conversations memorable and build relationships that matter at work or at home. Let’s get to it. Subscribe to this podcast so that you can make it effortless to receive new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday.
Jeremy Utley:
Alright, good morning, everybody. Great to see you all. Welcome to another fine episode of The Paint & Pipette Podcast. This one is an incredibly special episode because it’s jointly hosted by my great friend Greg McKeown, the two-time New York Times bestselling author who is also a former teaching instructor with me at the Stanford D School. Greg and I are thrilled to get to invite to the stage today, Ron Johnson. And Ron is an accomplished executive with innumerable qualifications.
Today we wanted to invite Ron to focus on his relationship and some key moments with Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs is a leader whom both Greg and I admire deeply, and Ron is one of the very special individuals who’s had the chance to work with Steve over many years. So we are really looking forward to this conversation. Fellow Steve Jobs junkies. Welcome. We’re glad to be with you. And Ron, thank you for joining us today.
Ron Johnson:
It’s my pleasure, Jeremy and Greg. It’ll be a fun conversation, I’m sure.
Jeremy Utley:
Absolutely, absolutely.
Greg McKeown:
Well, let’s go right to the beginning. I mean, Ron, you have been one of the very key members of the Apple Mafia in building this tremendous company. And I think it either could not have been done without you or would look very different if it had not been for your involvement. And I just wonder if you could go back to your beginning with Steve and your onboarding or how he managed to get you to come and join Apple in the first place at a time when Apple wasn’t what it is when people think of the company today.
Ron Johnson:
Yeah. Well, Apple would be a great company without me. Don’t have any question about that, but hopefully, I left a little mark when I was there for a dozen years.
Greg McKeown:
Oh, certainly.
Ron Johnson:
Well, I was about turning 40, and I had made a decision to be a retail guy. I was working at a company in Minneapolis called Target, as we all know. And Target was flourishing. The stock had gone up a dozen times in the last eight years or something like that. And I was one of the merchandising leaders who had really put design on the map for Target reinforcing Target’s targe, this really cool place.
And Steve had concluded, unbeknownst to me, that if Apple had any chance to win, it had to control the customer experience. Now he had come back to Apple in 97 and launched iMac. That’s what I noticed. I mean that iMac was a beautiful product when that came out. Huge impact on the world of merchandising, everything. But three years later, the market share was still really small. And so Steve wanted to open stores, and someone reached out to me.
Greg McKeown:
Which, by the way, that’s not obvious that he would’ve wanted to do that. It wasn’t like there were lots of other tech stores at the time that were working and thriving. You had some pretty big fails, in fact, that you see out there.
Ron Johnson:
Yeah, it was completely counterintuitive because, remember, 2000 was the peak of the.com boom. Everything’s going to the internet, and in peak
Greg McKeown:
In the bricks and mortar.
Ron Johnson:
And Apple had less than 5% market share. People owned PCs back then, and it was Dell. Dell was winning with their online model. And there was one retailer you might remember called Gateway. Exactly. Lots of stories about Gateway. But they had 300 stores, but they couldn’t make their stores work serving the 95%.
Greg McKeown:
Yes.
Ron Johnson:
And people said, well, how is Apple, who really serves a creative pro with super expensive products going to make retail work? Why would they do that when the world’s going online? Mark Andrews, about that year, announced stores are dead in the future. We won’t go to stores.
Greg McKeown:
And so he reaches out to you? And he calls you he emails?
Ron Johnson:
No, he hired a recruiter.
Greg McKeown:
Okay. So a recruiter comes to you.
Ron Johnson:
To identify who could do this job. And from my understanding, there were about four or five people they were talking to. I was young.
Greg McKeown:
Do you know who the other people were?
Ron Johnson:
No, I don’t know them. Yeah, I think I heard their names at some point, but I didn’t.
Greg McKeown:
Sure. Okay.
Ron Johnson:
Most of them were like senior, they were like CEOs of companies. I was this guy who was identified because of work I’d done at Target. And they just thought…
Greg McKeown:
And your work at Target was distinct. I mean, that design showed that you could differentiate a company by the design and experience that they have when they go into the shop, even when it isn’t like a, let’s say, a high-end brand that’s all about designer. It’s still designed, but it’s designed for everyone, let’s say, or something like that.
Ron Johnson:
Yeah, exactly. Well, Target was always trying to be different. They had to be preferred. Which was different and better. Now you can have different merchandise, but that doesn’t make you better. You’re just not competing with Walmart. That was our big competitor. And the way to be different and better was to do something original. And so we partnered with an architect named Michael Graves, who had done beautiful buildings and products for an Italian company called Luie. And we did this amazing line of home products, and we launched with 140 items, and we launched at the Whitney Museum in New York. And Target didn’t even have stores in New York or the Northeast yet. And it was one of these moments in the industry that captured people’s attention. And so Mickey Drexler was on Apple’s board at the time. I think he probably had input into it, you should find out who’s doing that work at Target. There were a lot of people at Target doing great work. But the work I did kind of stood out, I think.
Greg McKeown:
What was your reaction when they get that first call?
Ron Johnson:
Well, I was kind of like, why would I do this? Target’s this great company, Apple’s losing money.
Jeremy Utley:
Yeah. I mean, how did you answer that question? I mean, that’s a great question. How’d you answer it?
Ron Johnson:
No, but the thing about Target, like many companies, they saw me as being this very good merchant, and I was just doing merchandising over and over again. But I went into retail because I wanted to do the whole retail thing. And so this was a chance to start from scratch a retail chain for a great brand. And I had this confidence because if I could make Michael Graves, who no one’s heard of, really help transform Target, imagine having a brand like Apple with their products, how a well-designed retail experience could change that company. And so I was inspired to
Greg McKeown:
By the opportunity. You can build it from the ground up.
Ron Johnson:
So I said, why not go out? So they invited me at like one Monday in November to go meet Steve. That was the first time I met him. I flew out to San Francisco and had a meeting at five o’clock. I remember arriving quarter to, sitting in a chair outside his conference room on the tables where all these business magazines with him on the cover. So I’m peeking at these, and I, five o’clock comes, and Steve’s not there yet. I said that’s alright. And then I’m looking at, all of a sudden, at about 10 minutes later, I looked to my left, and I see this knee. Now I’m coming from Target, where people dress up, and it’s a torn pair of Levi’s jeans. And I look up, and there’s this black T-shirt, and I guess that’s Steve. And we met, and we spent, I bet we spent two and a half hours together in a little conference room outside his office. And it never, it was just like this unbelievable conversation. I loved talking to him. I was inspired by him. I didn’t know much about him, but he was absolutely the smartest person I’ve met. And at Target, whenever I wanted to innovate, I had to push really hard. Because it was way beyond what Target was comfortable with. It was the opposite with Steve; whatever you were, I thought
Greg McKeown:
You were pushing an open door.
Ron Johnson:
And he’s taking whatever I’m thinking about to the next level. And I was very inspired. And so we, we chatted for a long time, and then he said, “Ron, I really like you. Why don’t we do this? Why don’t you come back in a couple of weeks after Thanksgiving, we’ll meet again. But if you could do one assignment for me, I’d like you to write up for me, if I gave you this job, what you would do, how would you approach it?”
I said, “I can do that.”
And he just said, “Send me an email.”
“I don’t have an email.”
Jeremy Utley:
No way. That’s great.
Ron Johnson:
This is 2000. Now Target didn’t have an email.
Jeremy Utley:
That’s amazing.
Ron Johnson
No one did.
Greg McKeown:
He didn’t have an email when talking to Steve Jobs about the job at Apple. That’s a great moment.
Ron Johnson:
I didn’t have a computer. No one did.
Greg McKeown:
That is a bit unthinkable, though. It’s still a bit unthinkable what you just said.
Ron Johnson:
And so Steve said, he goes like, I’ll send you a computer. He goes, you should get a Mac anyway. So they sent me a computer. I just set it up. I typed up something on whatever it was at the time. It wasn’t pages; whatever Apple was using, you would probably know Jeremy. And then, so I sent it to him. Then I went back two weeks later on a Monday night, and Steve had set up for me to meet other members of the executive team. And so I met, well, Mickey Drexler, I saw him in his office. I met Phil Schiller and Tim Cook, and a lot of people we know today.
And then, at five o’clock, I met Steve again, and I said, “So what’d you think of my little writeup?”
He goes, “Oh, not very much, but I’m going to offer you the job anyway, so lemme tell you about it.”
Jeremy Utley:
No way.
Ron Johnson:
And so literally, he offered me the job the second, third hour I ever met him. And it was a really generous offer. And I was going to join the executive team at Apple. And so I said, gimme a month, I’ll think about it and make a decision. And that was kind of it. But it was really, you remember, you always remember the first time you meet somebody.
Greg McKeown:
Well, that’s what I want to go back to. So you have that very first moment, but then you have this two-and-a-half-hour meeting, and you said you loved that conversation, but if we were fly on the wall for that conversation, what was discussed? What do you remember from it? Any specifics?
Ron Johnson:
It was just wide-ranging. But I remember at one point saying to Steve, we were talking about store size. And I said, “Well, how big do you think the store should be?”
He goes, “I don’t know.”
I said, “Well, I’ve always felt the size of the brand correlates with the size of the store. A lot of these computer stores are really tiny because the products are small, you don’t have many, but that makes you think it’s a small idea.”
And I said, “You’re on the board of The Gap. The Gap feels like the right-size store.”
He goes, “I like that.
I said, “So how many products do we have?” I didn’t know Apple’s product lineup.
He said, “We’ve got four.” And he goes, “I’ll show them to you.”
So he walked me down to the boardroom, and on this little table were two pro computers. A desktop and portable, and two consumer at desktop and portable. And that was it. And I said, “Well, we’ve got 32 square feet needed to merchandise our products. That leaves us 4,968 square feet of space to create a great experience.”
Jeremy Utley:
And did you think that immediately?
Ron Johnson:
Right away. Because that’s, as a merchant, you’re always thinking through presentation of a product and then what’s around it. But he loved that he wasn’t intimidated by the fact that he had very few products. And we reached, we talked about things. I said, “Well what if we devoted half the store to service? Our goal is to reach out to new customers, and expand market share.”
He had this great phrase, five down, 95 to go. We have five, five market share. We’re building stores to get the next 95.
That was Steve’s idea. And so we’re going to reach out to 95. Well, if you’re going to get someone to switch to Apple, which is expensive and unusual, and that’s a big move for somebody, you got to stand behind the product. And I said to Steve, “The best stores are intuitive. You just understand them from the moment you walk in.”
And he would immediately embrace that being a purist in design. And I said, “Let’s devote half the space to owners and half to new customers.” And that kind of set up the whole, but we talked, we just talked effortlessly about store design, location, movies, people, life. I mean, it was just a fun conversation.
Greg McKeown:
What did you talk about with life? Do you remember?
Ron Johnson:
Not that conversation, but I, let me move to the next one. Another idea. So, so now I decide to join Apple, and I started in February, like a couple of months later. And I came out for my first day at work. And I go to check in at the lobby at building one Infinite Loop. I’m also early, I’m an early guy. And I go, I’m here. I’m the new employee Ron Johnson.
And the guy looks down and says, “There’s no Ron Johnson starting today. We have five people starting. You’re not starting.”
“Well, I think I have an ET meeting because I have an ET meeting. I’m on the executive team.”
“But you’re not on here.” He goes, “I’ve got A, B, C.” He goes, “I’ve got a John Brucester.”
And I go to myself, wait, my name’s Ronald Bruce Johnson.
He goes, “Oh, Steve sometimes makes code names for people.”
On my first day, I got a code name. Now I’m a pretty well-known retail guy, and he’s trying to hide me because he doesn’t want people to know he’s going to open stores.
But, so I went out, had our ET meeting, and then ET was done. I was very quiet. I was just listening. It’s like a three-hour meeting.
Jeremy Utley:
Did you introduce yourself as John Bruce, by the way?
Ron Johnson:
I should have. I don’t think I did
Greg McKeown:
So this is your first executive meeting. You’ve met them individually, but now you are seeing them.
Ron Johnson:
I met most of them. Yeah. I sat there, and I was kind of a bump on the log because I sure it was, I mean, it was like a new language to me. The whole everything. They’re talking about operating systems and OS 10 and chips and a level of detail that I wouldn’t have been aware of. Not being an Apple guy, tech guy. I was just…
Greg McKeown:
Not your background.
Ron Johnson:
Not my background.
Jeremy Utley:
Not having an email account.
Ron Johnson:
No. So then, but, so then at the end of the meeting, I go back to my office, I’m by myself. What do I do the rest of my life at Apple, I get this call from Steve’s assistant, Andrea. Can you come down? Steve would like to see you.
And his office was, I’d walked by Tim Cook and then Steve. I think that was kind of the sequence. So I went to see Steve, and he goes, “Ron,” he goes, “Are you excited to be here?”
I said, “Yeah, I’m real excited.”
And he said, “Great.” He said, “What time do your kids go to bed?”
I said, “Eight o’clock.”
He said, “Good, can I call you?”
I said, “Sure.”
He said, “Every day?”
I said, “Okay, sure. I said, “Five days a week or seven.”
He said, “Seven.”
I said, “Okay.”
But he said, “The reason I want to call you,” he said, “I have a handful of people I am very close to at Apple that I work with, and I want them to know how I think about everything. And so when we chat, we’re going to talk about our personal lives, our work lives, movies.” He goes, “I’m not into sports, but we’ll talk about all that stuff.” And he said, “But then within a year you’ll be free as a butterfly to do whatever you want at Apple. And the only time you have to come to me is if you don’t know how I think about something.”
And it was interesting. So he committed all this…
Greg McKeown:
Serious empowerment. That’s what he’s really going for here.
Ron Johnson:
And he, he was the best delegator. It’s so counterintuitive. You hear Steve was he, and he was involved with it. He loved the big picture and all the details. But he was by far the best delegator I’ve ever seen.
Jeremy Utley:
Did he call you after bedtime?
Ron Johnson:
He called after. Well, I got no, after eight o’clock every day. The phone had rang every night at eight o’clock. I mean, I’m sure there are nights that were missed, but I’d say the majority of the nights for the next year, Steve would call. And a lot of times, it’d be just, hi, I felt like an eighth-grade girlfriend. It was bringing me back to when I was getting on the phone and doing that. And, but we would just talk.
Greg McKeown:
And so he wouldn’t have an agenda. He wouldn’t be saying, Hey, here are the three things I wanted to talk about.
Ron Johnson:
No, we’d talk about, he’d talked to me on Apple things. He says, let me tell you some things I think about at Apple or things we talked about at the ET meeting, and blah, blah blah. So we, I bet half was Apple, half was personal. Most of the conversations lasted 30 minutes, they weren’t super long, but it wasn’t five minutes. It was an investment. I was just so impressed with all that he had going on that he committed that time to get to know me. But it was how he created leverage because where he wanted to spend his time was on the products, the marketing. That’s where Steve’s true passion was. He delegated other things. Now, he loved the stores. He loved helping design some of the stores had a great passion for it, but he didn’t want to get involved with the details. He just didn’t have time. So I was one of the lucky ones. Probably like Tim Cook and a few others who got to work with Steve without a lot of Steve oversight. That was given a lot of personal freedom with my team to do what we believe was right. And it got to a point in my last years, I mean every six months, I’d see Steve every week at the executive team. And I talk to him all the time. But I’d say, “Steve, can you come over? I want to show you some of the stores were going to build. And we’d set up a room with models of 20 stores around the world or 15 stores. And he just loved to look at them and get into the details. But he truly was a great delegator.
Greg McKeown:
So I want to riff on this for a second. So the book that people most cite when they’re thinking of Steve is the Isaacson biography. But there’s another biography called Becoming Steve Jobs. And let me just ask, were you involved in either of those projects? Were you interviewed by either?
Ron Johnson:
I was interviewed by Walter for his book I don’t believe I was. No, I don’t believe so.
Greg McKeown:
Well, the reason I ask is that, in the second book, you get a sense of the journey that Steve went on while he’s gone at Next, this 10-year journey, longer than many people imagine. And the change between this sort of, let’s say, he’s a visionary startup at first, but some of the criticism that’s in the press about how he handles people and how harsh he is on everything. And this idea that he actually transforms, he becomes a different leader. Not that he’s a perfect leader afterward, but that he is materially different. And it’s been always my position that the media never caught up on the change. And so they’re still imagining him as just a like, Hey, he’s kind of a jerk. That’s it. That’s the story. But when in all the work I’ve done at Apple and all the executives I’ve worked with personally, like that’s not the story. It’s not that he couldn’t be harsh or couldn’t be; he was certainly seeking clarity. But this idea of like, yeah, you don’t do the best work of your life for just someone who’s a tyrant. Like that’s not the reality behind it.
Ron Johnson:
Steve was not a tyrant at all. He had such passion for people and products. He loved his family. He loved the people he was close to. He had a relatively small number of people he was close to. And there were people he was a lot closer to than me. Like Jony and Bill Campbell, I was one of the ones, we were very close, I think. But I wasn’t in that super tight. I don’t pretend to be. But we had a great relationship. But what Steve had was the highest standards of anybody you’d ever meet. And he wanted you to be your best. And he actually got most people to be better than they would be on their own.
Greg McKeown:
You. And a tyrant doesn’t achieve that.
Ron Johnson:
No, a tyrant doesn’t achieve that. And we were inspired. We were all inspired to try to meet or exceed Steve’s high standards.
Jeremy Utley:
I wanted to ask about the standard piece, Ron. I don’t know if one of your memories involves a Steve’s standard, but I’d love to hear a practical example of when you say he had higher standards than we had for ourselves. Is there a time when you remember him raising the bar for you?
Ron Johnson:
Every meeting with him? Every meeting. So when we launched the store, so we had leased this warehouse about two miles from campus. And we built out a prototype of a store at that time. I’d meet every Tuesday morning with Steve at nine o’clock till noon. And he would want me, because he didn’t have a cell phone. I would go to his office, he would drive over in his car, and we’d talk all the way over. And then we’d have our little retail walkthrough. And every week, we would change the store, and we would have things. We looked at window displays, graphic panels, lighting, store design fixtures. And every little detail you looked at, he would get into the details, and he would try.
So every time it’s like, how do we make this so good that Steve just looks at it and says, that’s great, but you could never do it. He always had a way to make it better. And the input was exceptional. It wasn’t like just a different opinion. It was a better opinion. For example, every little thing, you look at a window display, and you know what that’s going to communicate? iPhotos and he stares at, and he quickly reads, he goes, “What if you did this?”
And you go, “Ah, it would be better if we did that.”
And then we’d do that for the next week. So he just had an uncanny intuition about design or creativity or marketing that he saw the world differently. And I got to learn from that, which was a wonderful thing. But there was a lot of interest. So I’ll tell you another story that kind of relates to what you’re asking about.
About nine months after I started, we were building out apps. A guy named Sina Tamaddon was on the ET, a great leader. And he had done the first app, which was iMovie. It was really the first app Apple did. And then iTunes, which was our music app, which kind of connected with the iPod. And then, we were creating a photo application. And Steve was super excited about these. And they were going to be announced, I think, one of them at the next Mac World in January. And I was just sitting there listening. I called one of our eight o’clock calls, like on a Friday night. I said to Steve, I’ve been thinking about this. The Mac is kind of like the computer’s at the center of your digital universe. And I explained this thing that, you know, like the computer’s here, but we connect our camera with an app, and there’s this, and you connect this and that.
And he goes, “Can you send me an email with that?”
I said, “Sure.” And I wrote him a little note with what we talked about. And the next week, we get into the ET meeting, he goes, he stands up, and he walks in late, and he goes to the chalkboard or whiteboard, and he says, “Let me tell you, I’ve got the future of the Mac. And I’m going to announce it at Macworld.” And he goes, “It’s called a digital hub.”
You remember that. The digital hub, the Mac, of course, the hub. I call it a universe or whatever it is. But it was this hub. And so he went through that, and I was, it was great. The team loved it. The whole ET did. We kind of all bought into it. So the next morning, though, was my retail day. So I stopped by his office in the morning, and I said, “Steve, I’ve been thinking if you really like this digital hub, which I think is great, we’ve got to change the store design because our store’s going to open in January when you announce the digital hub and our store’s built around products, it’s got to be built around what you do. Photos and movies and music. You got to change this.”
He looked at me, and he was so upset. He said, “Ron, do you know I’ve spent, now that was that time. It was probably nine months with you every Tuesday helping design this first store. And it’s being built as we speak. But this is like starting over. Do you know what a big deal this is?” He goes, “I don’t know if I have the energy to do this.”
It was one of those moments. And I looked at him, and I said, “Okay, so let’s get over there.”
And he says, “But don’t say a word about this to anybody because I don’t know if it’s the right thing to do.”
I say, “Okay.” So we get in his car, and not a word said for this 10-minute ride over.
Greg McKeown:
Oh, this is a very awkward, this is a very awkward drive.
Ron Johnson:
It was a quiet drive.
Jeremy Utley:
In the eighth-grade kind of dating relationship, Sometimes there are awkward drives. It fits perfectly.
Ron Johnson:
It’s that silence that you want to break. But you know, you probably shouldn’t. So we get there, we get out of the car, it’s still silent. We walk in, and all these probably 25 people are sitting there, and the store is set up looking really ready to go. It’s perfect. And Steve comes, walks in, he goes, “Well, Ron came to me today and told me our store’s all wrong. And he’s right. So I’m going to leave now, and he’s going to tell you how you’re going to redesign the store.”
And he walked out, and that was it. So he went from, what the heck are you talking about to processing this. And I’m standing all alone, and my team’s looking there going, what just happened?
But then that night when he called me at eight o’clock, he said, “I realized on the car ride over, as much as I didn’t want to redo the store, every great movie we’ve done at Pixar, we get down to the end, and we’re three months from release we realize there’s a better ending and you have to have the courage to give up what’s very good to do what’s great.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah. That’s a great story.
Ron Johnson:
But that was kind of the story there. And he said, “It doesn’t matter if we open our store in January, February, March, we’re going to open it once. We got to open it right. So thank you for bringing that up.”
And so that was Steve. So obviously, what that shows, though, he wants you to be direct. He wants you to share ideas. He might react pretty harshly at first for a variety of reasons. But he processes quickly.
I had that when I called him up about the Genius Bar. I remember calling up a, I called him one day, and I wanted to make service the feature of the stores. And I said, “We’re going to create a place, Steve, imagine this. Everyone else that has you, other companies that do service, they hide it. They don’t want you to ever think when you’re buying a product that it might not work. And would put it in a separate room. Maybe another building.” And I said, “Let’s put ours in the center of the store. Let’s make it a big deal. And imagine if getting help at a bar; let’s make a bar. And when you think of a bar, you think of a bartender, and they can make any drink on the planet. And they remember you by name. And they’re friendly. You’re just really comfortable at the bar. Support for your computer that felt like you’re at the nicest bar with a bartender. And we’re going to call it the Genius Bar. And we’re going to put the smartest Apple people in every city behind that bar.
And he looked at me, he goes, “You had me until you, you don’t realize, Ron, you don’t know technology. There’s nobody who knows computers, who can talk to people. They’re all geeks.” And he said, “They really are.” And he said, “If you want to call it the Geek Bar, maybe that makes sense.”
And I go, I said, “Hey Steve, I think you’re wrong. Retailers are young people. Young people that grew up, they know computers. You know all the geeks because you’re older. We’re older.”
And five minutes, literally 30 minutes later, Nancy Hein, the general counselor at the time calls me up and says, “Ron, can you tell me about Genius Bar? Steve wants me to trademark this name, Genius Bar. You know, literally in five minutes, from a bad idea to a great idea. And that’s just Steve.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, but there’s, I mean, Tim Cook’s talked about that, about how that’s sort of a genius thing that he can do. That he would come fighting, arguing for one idea, day one, day two, he’s arguing the exact opposite as if he never held the previous opinion. And he thinks, describes that as a gift.
Here’s what it seems to me is that it’s about clarity, right? That at any given moment, you know what he’s thinking. No, this is a problem. This is how it feels. No, you are right. I’m wrong. Let’s move forward. That there isn’t this endless ambiguity that makes up for so much of the communication, especially in corporations where everyone’s sort of trying to, they’ll use jargon and try to sort of, don’t play your cards too early because you might be wrong and then you look stupid. It’s like he removed that in one sense from these communications that he’s having with you. What am I getting wrong?
Ron Johnson:
No, you’re exactly right. No, Steve loved to play both sides of it, argue both sides of any problem he had. Then he’d, and every conversation. And it was really interesting that we’d spend an hour debating, what do we do here? And then he’d end with, he’d say, “Now let’s walk through the logic tree one more time.”
Whatever we agreed to, he’d say, “Here’s the problem; here’s the solution.”
And it all would make sense. So he loved to debate things, and he would go until he was done. There was never a clock on a Steve meeting. It’d go as long as it needs to. It was done when it was done.
Greg McKeown:
What is one thing that stood out to you in this conversation with Ron Johnson? What is one thing that you can do differently immediately right now because of the conversation? And who is someone that you can share this episode with so that the conversation continues now that this episode is over? Thank you for listening, really. I’ll see you next time.
