Steve Jobs announcing changes to management, product lines, and release of the Think Different Campaign, only 8 weeks after his return as iCEO, September 23, 1997.

When Jobs became interim CEO in September 1997 after being ousted, he was handed back a company that had just lost $1.04 billion in a single year. After he reshaped the company, Apple made $309 million in profits for the full fiscal year of 1998. It took risky moves: laying off over 3,000 people, empowering design’s role in the company, and cutting entire product lines to free up good engineers to work on what had real potential: mobile devices. Jobs’ actions sound like haphazard magic—but his choices were by design.

Three pivotal actions contributed to this success:

1. Adopting a 'less, but better' approach to product management,
2. The emotionally resonant 'Think Different' campaign that strengthened Apple’s brand identity, and
3. Empowering Jony Ive and his design team with significant operational authority.

Rewiring Apple: How Jobs Restored Purpose, Simplicity, and Creativity in 1997

Jobs rewired a company intoxicated with management pushing engineers to churn out multiple versions of each product just to “satisfy the whims of retailers.”—”It was insanity,” Schiller recalled. “Tons of products, most of them crap, done by deluded teams.”

Jobs came in to say,

“Which one do I tell my friends to buy?”

During product meetings, PowerPoints were slashed.

“I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking,” Jobs later recalled. “People would confront a problem by creating a presentation. I wanted them to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides. People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.”

That might’ve explained the 3,000+ layoffs—less is more, right?