Leadership lessons from Apple's legendary second act

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Thirty years ago at Apple $AAPL, the vibe was in shambles.

The company began 1996 by posting a $69 million loss, announcing 1,300 layoffs, and replacing the CEO in the first fiscal quarter.

Things seemed worse in 1997. An unexpected $120 million loss in the first quarter. There were 2,700 more workers laid off in March 1997. Another CEO was forced out in the summer.

In the middle of all of that, Apple announced plans to acquire Next Software for $400 million, Steve Jobs’ company, reuniting Apple with its co-founder.

The board named Jobs interim CEO in September 1997, then they let the man cook.

The pivot was fast and intense. Under Jobs’ leadership, Apple cancelled 70% of its products with a less-is-more strategy, secured a long-term partnership with Microsoft $MSFT to ensure Office products for Mac would continue to develop, introduced the iconic iMac in 1998, and launched the famous “Think Different” marketing campaign which forever shifted the Apple brand story away from technical specs and toward one about lifestyle and creative innovation.  

The company changed the world with its iPhone in 2007. Today, about 60% of mobile users in the U.S. own an iPhone, and about 30% of users worldwide do. Despite having less than a third of the global smartphone market, Apple generates $85 billion in revenue from its App Store, which is 67% of app spending globally.

Apple is currently the second-most-valuable company in the world with a market capitalization of $3.7 trillion, as of late March 2026.

So, it’s fair to say the company turned things around. What can we learn from Apple's incredible run over the second half of the company’s history?

Most companies scale by adding. Apple scaled by removing

“Subtraction scales better than addition,” said Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey, a leadership strategist, executive coach, and author. “Apple’s story offers some of the most powerful lessons about how subtraction, not addition, creates competitive advantage.”

Apple proved that removing options creates clarity for both teams and customers, Dewey said. 

“When you stop doing 10 mediocre things so you can do three exceptionally, you pull away from the pack,” she said. “Crucially for business leaders today, this approach is fractal: It works at all levels, whether you’re responsible for the product mix, meeting cadence, or consumer analytics.”

“Apple's willingness to leave money on the table initially (no cheap phones, no enterprise focus, no feature bloat) created scarcity that drove desire,” she said. “The strategy worked. Apple went from losing $1.05 billion in 1997 to earning $309 million profit in 1998: a stunning $1.35 billion swing in one year.”

Ken Herron, co-founder of VCONify, a tech company with a focus on converting voice, video, and text into virtualized conversation containers to improve AI performance and customer experience, shares Apple’s and Dewey’s enthusiasm for subtraction as a strategy.

“Apple’s most misunderstood leadership lesson is not innovation. It’s subtraction,” Herron said. “Ruthless reduction. Fewer decisions. Fewer bets. A much higher bar for what makes it into the portfolio. That kind of discipline doesn’t just simplify the product. It simplifies the organization.”

“Leaders tend to not say ‘no’ early enough or often enough,” Herron said.

Saying “no” is a growth strategy, Dewey added. 

The broader leadership principle, Dewey said, is: “In our always-more culture, Apple built a trillion-dollar company by consistently asking ‘What can we stop doing?’ instead of ‘What else can we add?’”

Taste as governance

“And then there’s taste,” Herron said. “In most companies, taste is seen as subjective. At Apple, it operates more like governance. It sets boundaries, reduces noise, and creates consistency across decisions that would otherwise fragment at scale.”

“Simplicity requires systematic subtraction,” Dewey said. “Apple's simple elegance came from ruthlessly removing complexity: physical keyboards, most buttons, ports, even the headphone jack. By creating a product ecosystem, they also help consumers subtract complexity from their personal tech stack. This takes more discipline, not less, but creates products that feel sleek and magical rather than complicated.”

Narrative can be more than marketing

Most companies tell stories about their products. Apple builds products that become the story.

“There’s a structural lesson in how Apple treats narrative,” Herron said. “Narrative isn’t marketing layered on at the end. It’s a forcing function for clarity inside the company. When leaders can’t explain something simply, it usually means the product or strategy isn’t coherent yet.”

This is the lesson most organizations get wrong, said Nick Tirrell, CTO of MediaViz AI.

“Apple understood early that narrative is product,” Tirrell said. “Not in the sense that marketing covers for engineering, but in the sense that how a product is understood shapes how it's experienced.”

Many businesses treat story as something the communications team applies after the engineers finish, he said.

“Apple never operated that way,” he said. “The keynote isn’t a press event — it’s a design deliverable. The unboxing isn’t packaging — it’s the first interaction with the product. The restraint in the interface isn’t minimalism for its own sake — it’s a narrative choice about what the user is supposed to feel, which means it’s an engineering constraint that shapes every technical decision upstream.”

When you internalize this, it changes what "product quality" even means, Tirrell said. 

“A product isn't good because it works and then gets explained well,” he said. “A product is good when the explanation is unnecessary, when the experience itself communicates intent. Not product that needs narratives. Product that is narrative.”

Not just products, but ecosystems

“The biggest and most profound lesson is how Apple and [Steve Jobs] looked at the world,” said Fredric Marshall, CEO of Quantum Learning which provides training to biotech, pharmaceutical, and IT companies, and author of the upcoming book THRIVE.

“While other companies focused on building products, Apple designed and built entire ecosystems of developers, supply chains, apps, hardware, everything,” Marshall said. “[Jobs’] mission was to build a unified customer experience, achieve end-to-end control, and make sure everything worked together. The ecosystem both delivered the best customer experience [and] also the ultimate competitive moat.”

The greatest business leaders in the world, Marshall said — naming Jensen Huang, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Larry Page as examples — are ecosystem builders.

“Jensen Huang is building the world’s largest AI ecosystem, literally tiling the earth with data centers,” Marshall said. “Elon Musk is building a robotics ecosystem, an autonomous car ecosystem, a rocket-satellite ecosystem.

“Apple's greatest contribution to the business world was the intentional design of ecosystems where everyone and everything inside those ecosystems thrives. From the developer community to customers, from supply chains to assembly, Apple has always been a builder of thriving ecosystems. That's the model for the future.”

Understanding the job

Apple didn’t ask, What should we build?, Apple considered what problems were worth solving with beauty and elegant simplicity.

“Apple [...] was terrific at understanding why people buy things and what frustrates them about the things they have today, based upon the job they were hiring that particular product or service to do for them,” said Bill Flynn, founder and leadership coach at Catalyst Growth Advisors, adding that he met Jobs during his Next Software years prior to Jobs rejoining Apple.

“I often tell a story which I am sure I made up about Steve walking up to someone and asking them not how they can make a better Walkman at Apple, but why that person has the Walkman,” Flynn said.

What purpose does it serve for them? How does it make their life better? Where does it disappoint them?, Flynn said.

“He then went to Jony Ive (Apple’s chief design officer from 1992-2019) and said make me an mp3 player that has 1,000 songs on it and fits in someone's pocket,” Flynn said. “He didn't tell them all the features it needed or create a product management spec because he knew what the customer was looking for, and he would recognize it when it was finished.” 

And that, kids, is how baby iPods are made.

Apple is a difficult business to replicate, not because of talent or capital, but because of discipline. 

Organizations that fail don’t do so for a lack of ideas or good people, necessarily, but because they lack the discipline to choose fewer, better ideas.

Apple’s incredible legacy through the second act of its 50-year run is not creativity. It’s restraint.