Steve Jobs Transformed Apple by Exploiting Ritual Practices | Big Think

Steve Jobs Transformed Apple by Exploiting Ritual Practices

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Steve Jobs is known for his effective speeches and presentations in narrative form, but twice in his career he leveraged the ceremony as a unique communication tool to get his point across. According to Nancy Duarte, communication expert and CEO of Duarte, Inc., the ceremony is so deeply embedded in our culture that we often forget it's actually a unique medium of communication. Utilizing ceremony to communicate isn't only effective, it's fun and often provides a deeper cultural connection than a speech.

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NANCY DUARTE:

Nancy Duarte is a communication expert who has been featured in Fortune, Forbes, Fast Company, Wired, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, LA Times and on CNN. Her firm, Duarte, Inc., has created more than a quarter of a million presentations for the world’s most influential businesses, institutions, causes, and authors. As a persuasion specialist Nancy developed a unique methodology, which applies storytelling and visual thinking principles to business communications that shift audience beliefs and behaviors.

Presentations have quite literally changed Nancy Duarte’s life. Her passion for creating compelling, persuasive communication has inspired her mission to help others tell stories that spark meaningful action. Her journey from failing a college course in public speaking to leading an agency that is re-imagining the medium of presentations has taught her many lessons on the power of communication to change the world.

Duarte, Inc. is the largest design firm in Silicon Valley, as well as the fifth largest female employer in the area. Nancy has won several prestigious awards for communications and entrepreneurship. She has been a speaker at a number of Fortune 500 companies and top business schools, and teaches classes at Stanford University several times a year. Nancy has 20 years of experience working with global companies and thought leaders, and her firm has influenced how the world perceives some of the most important brands, including Apple, Cisco, Facebook, GE, Google, HP, TED, Twitter, and the World Bank.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Nancy Duarte: Ceremonies are a lesser known and lesser utilized communication device in organizations today. So back as far as you can study human behavior, there has been ceremonies in some way. And what we did was we looked at the rights of passage. Even religions have some sort of rite of passage ceremony. What happens is you could be single one moment. You go through a ten minute marriage ceremony and suddenly you’re married. So this moment, this ceremony, transforms you. I am no longer this, I am now that. And when you graduate you go through a graduation ceremony, you know. And there’s these moments – a bar mitzvah or a quinceanera where it’s like, "I was once a young person and now I’m an adult." The only difference is like this small ceremony happened to show transformation. But what that ceremony does is says I am no longer this and I am now that. Especially when an organization is leading really big change they need these moments where they pause and say we’re not that anymore and now we are now this.

One of the great examples from the book that I love is we covered when Steve Jobs was leading the transition from Mac OS9 to Mac OS10. He had just come back to Apple and that was what they needed. That’s why the bought NeXT, his company, was to have the NeXT operating system in place. And the developers were so skeptical. He even did a talk called Apples Hierarchy of Skepticism because everyone was so skeptical that they could actually do it. He had so much skepticism. Then he started to get momentum and there was this moment where he had this new dream where he really wanted everybody connected to a digital hub and he was getting frustrated with the last stragglers. All these stragglers hadn’t made the decision to come on. So there was an opening scene at WWDC, the big developers conference, where he actually had a coffin under the stage. This coffin rises up from the stage, smoke billows out, stained glass slide up there. He walks out with an oversized box of Mac OS9 and a red rose. He puts the box in the coffin, shuts the lid, puts a rose on top and he eulogized the death of Mac OS9. It’s not a speech. It’s not a story. It’s a ceremony.

He never talked about the transition from Mac OS9 to Mac OS10 ever again. He was telling the developers it’s done, move on. Or it’s just done. ........

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