10 Leading with NLP
managed so consistently to lose its way. In the late 1980s,
Apple was a market leader in the computer industry with
nearly 20 per cent of the world market in computer sales. In
1997, with debts of over one and a half billion dollars, it was
a company struggling to survive. It was crushed under the
Microsoft juggernaut, but poor leadership put it under the
iron wheels in the first place. In 1998, it began a sales cam-
paign with the slogan of ‘Think different’ and everyone
hoped that it would take its own advice.
A journey starts when you see a difference between where
you are and where you want to be, or to put it another way,
when you no longer want to be where you are. The worse the
current situation, the more difficult the journey, but you
can’t stay put either. This was the situation that faced both
Sears and Apple, and many other companies face such a
dilemma every year.
Unless you have a clear destination, you may walk in a cir-
cle and come back to where you started from, only this time
it will be worse. To avoid these circular tours, you need to
move towards something better andyou need to change the
thinking that brought you into that problem situation in the
first place – you need to ‘think different’ in Apple’s engag-
ing but ungrammatical phrase. For example, Sears thought
of themselves primarily as a men’s shopping store, but mar-
ket surveys were showing that a significant number of
decisions to buy Sears merchandise were made by women.
So they changed the marketing approach and started new
lines in clothes and cosmetics. The Sears catalogue was a
national institution, it had been published for over 100
years, surely it was worth keeping? No. It was losing 10
million dollars a year, so it was scrapped. And Apple? They
were justifiably proud of their ‘insanely great’ technology,
and consistently refused to license it to the rest of the com-
puter industry. They also targeted the educational system as
one of their primary markets, even though the results of this
policy were regularly disappointing. They believed in a
closed system and in keeping control of their technology,
not realizing that influence and success in the new economy