Apple: Jobs Returns and the Power of Focus

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, the company was weeks from bankruptcy and drowning in product, printers, handhelds, and a confusing grid of barely distinguishable Macs. He came back through Apple's acquisition of his company NeXT, became interim CEO, and started asking the question nobody wanted to answer: which of these do we actually need? His answer was brutal. The lineup collapsed to four products, hundreds of engineers were let go, and the iMac arrived in 1998 to drag Apple back to profit.

Every product, feature, and initiative competes with every other one for engineering time, sales attention, and customer clarity. Most leaders solve that by adding; cutting is harder and rarer. This case puts operators in front of their own sprawling roadmap and forces the same uncomfortable triage Jobs ran. It sharpens the discipline of saying no, without spelling out the framework he used to decide what survived.