Due to a lawsuit with Samsung, a confidential email from Jobs became public

At the end of 2010, Steve Jobs sent an email to Apple’s Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Phil Schiller. The subject line simply read: “Top 100 — A”, which was the codename for the yearly Top 100 executives meetings at Apple. The next one was set to take place in 2011.

Other than how many people attend, everything about this meeting is top secret. The location is undisclosed, attendees should not put the meeting on their calendar, and they’re not even allowed to drive to the meeting on their own. Instead, they get picked up by buses that take them to the 2 to 3 day retreat.

Due to a lawsuit with Samsung, an email outlining the agenda of this specific Top 100 meeting became public in 2014. This was not any Top 100 meeting, it was a pivotal moment in Apple’s history. The 2000s were over, and Apple was facing multiple challenges to stay a leading innovator in the field of technology. For the first time, Apple was making more money with non-PC products than with what used to be its best-selling line of products: the Macintosh. And perhaps most importantly, this was the last Top 100 meeting Steve Jobs would attend before passing, and he had a lot of strong messages he wanted to make sure lived on before he handed his company over to Tim Cook.

In this article, we’ll go over key lessons from the way Jobs laid out the agenda for this meeting. These pointers are relevant for 2 types of entrepreneurs:

1. Those who run a company with a team and need to make sure everyone is following the same objectives, relying on the same values, and is motivated by the same future.
2. Those who run a one-man operation, freelancers who need strong self-discipline and hard targets to keep innovating in their field and stick to their own growth agenda.

I’ve included here the actual email where Steve Jobs outlines what he has in mind for the yearly meeting agenda. It’s a comprehensive overview of the company’s shape and direction divided into 11 key parts (click on images to enlarge).

One of the most important components to understand as a business leader is the metrics around your company. Especially in the first bullet point of his suggested agenda, Jobs either mentions the key stats he already knows or requests that people put together slides that show the numbers he’s asking for. Those key stats can be divided into 2 categories:

Growth & strategy metrics

• “Post PC products now 66% of our revenues”: as we will see, this was a very important metric for Apple, because it meant they were entering the “Post PC era”, and they had to drastically shift their strategy in order to stay ahead of the curve.
• “iPad outsold Mac within 6 months”: this is also about the Post PC era. Jobs believed the iPad was going to be the next big thing, and as we will see bullet number 4 on the iPad is one of the most comprehensive ones of the agenda.
• “Geo analysis”: Jobs puts the emphasis on China here, where the company experiences a slower start than expected. A year after this meeting, China was leading Apple’s sales growth with 16% of revenue.

People & culture metrics

• “Headcount, average age”: the most important component of a company’s success is the people it is made of. That’s true whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or a 5-person startup. Jobs knew this, and that’s why his suggested agenda starts with underlining people stats.
• “Percent new membership at this meeting”: along with the “senior promotions in last year” requested metric, it’s important to show that if the company is growing, the people that make it a success have to grow too.

Steve Jobs was notorious for aggressively going after his competition, either during interviews or in the way he was putting together strategies and roadmaps. In this specific agenda, he mentions competitors on 18 occasions, including:

• Google 7 times
• Android 3 times
• Samsung 2 times

Jobs’ email containing the agenda was actually sent 6 days after Apple’s Q4 earnings call of the same year (2010). On that call, Jobs made a surprise appearance specifically to trash Google and Android. Here are a few highlights from his 5-minute intervention:

• “Google has admitted current Android versions are not tablet-optimized”
• “The upcoming Android tablets will be DOA (Dead On Arrival)”
• “The Apple App Store has 300,000 apps, Google only 90,000.”
• “Android is very, very fragmented and becoming more fragmented by the day.”
• “iPad has over 35,000 apps on the App Store. The new crop of tablets (that entered the market in 2011) will have near zero.”

All these points are valid, and Jobs’ intent in trashing the competition on that call was simply to reassure investors about the wave of new tablets that was poised to arrive on the market. But as much as Jobs trashed Google, Samsung, or Microsoft, he also acknowledged when they were doing a better job, and he was excellent at identifying his competitors’ advantages and putting together plans to catch up with them.

• Bullet 1 of his agenda, Jobs doesn’t hesitate to mention: “Google and Microsoft are further along on the technology, but haven’t quite figured it out yet — tie all of our products together, so we further lock customers into our ecosystem.”
• Bullet 5 of the agenda opens with a clear strategy: “Catch up to Android where we are behind (notifications, tethering, speech, …) and leapfrog them (Siri,…).” It’s worth noting that Siri never really caught up to expectations and mostly disappointed users.
• Bullet 6 about MobileMe, Jobs acknowledges that Google is “way ahead of Apple in cloud services for contacts, calendars, mail.”

Steve Jobs was one of the most forward-thinking entrepreneurs of our modern times. When he was busy working on the first Macintosh in the 1980s, he knew personal computers were the future of technology.

Yet 30 years later, at his infamous D8 conference interview in 2010, Jobs had no problem admitting that the Post-PC era was upon us:

When host Walt Mossberg asked Jobs: “Is the tablet going to eventually replace the laptop?”, this is what Jobs had to answer:

“You know, when we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm. As vehicles started to be used in the urban centers and America started to move into those urban and suburban centers, cars got more popular and innovations like automatic transmission and things that you didn’t care about in a truck as much started to become paramount in cars. And now, maybe 1 out of every 25 vehicles is a truck, where it used to be 100%. PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around, still going to have a lot of value, but they’re going to be used by one out of X people.”

Imagine how forward-thinking that was in 2010, especially when you were the guy who had come up with the Macintosh. You had to be willing to admit that things were changing, that what you had worked on for so long was over, and that it was time to start from scratch and work on the next big thing.

In his 2010 outline for the agenda, the “Post PC era” is priority number 8 in the first part called “2011 Strategy”. Jobs also underlines that “Apple is the first company to get here” and that “Post PC products make up 66% of our revenues”. He also mentions that the “iPad outsold Mac within 6 months” and that “Post PC era = more mobile (smaller, thinner, lighter)”. This is in 2010, when Samsung had barely released its first tablet, and Apple was already working on the iPad 3 (as mentioned in bullet 4).

In his agenda, Jobs writes that “Apple is in danger of hanging on to old paradigm too long”. In his book The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen explains that large companies often choose to overlook disruptive technologies until they become more attractive profit-wise. This is exactly what happened with Samsung and their Galaxy tab, which never caught up to Apple because it came out too late.

Today, Apple is facing the same kind of dilemma with the iPhone, which has been the company’s cash cow for over a decade. It doesn’t sell as much anymore, not simply because consumers are not showing as much excitement for new iPhone releases, but also because technology is evolving, and maybe smartphones need to change or be replaced with something else.

One of the biggest barriers to innovation for large companies is often their established customer base, to which they must be accountable. Clayton Christensen explains that oftentimes, loyal customers from established brands expect better versions of current products they love, rather than something completely different and technologies they haven’t seen before.

That’s where the genius of Apple marketing is. Customers trust the brand so much, are so used to its ecosystem, and Apple products integrate so well together. So much so that Apple can afford to be a disrupter by coming out with something that nobody has ever done before, something the largest company in the world should technically be afraid to invest in, something it shouldn’t be the first to try out. Apple can both test the waters and then create a massive new wave of innovation, something very few companies can afford to do.

In March 2011, Jobs made one of his last public appearances at an Apple special event. During his speech, he reminded us all what the brand Apple is about:

“It’s in Apple’s DNA, that technology alone is not enough. That it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities that yields us the results that make our hearts sink. And nowhere is that more true that in these Post-PC devices. “

More than a decade later, Apple has managed to not only remain one of the most innovative and trail-blazing companies in the Post-PC world (industry-disrupting products like Airpods or the Apple Watch all came out after that 2011 strategy meeting), but it has also reinvented how we use our laptops, with its M1-powered line of laptops offering unprecedented performance.

A decade after Job’s passing, Apple continues to innovate and remains the biggest company in the world, and it’s undeniable its previous CEO played a major role in this expansion. Jobs was a visionary entrepreneur who knew how to instill success in his managers, and if you can do even 1% of what he did, maybe you’ll be 1% as successful.

That wouldn’t be too bad.