Simon Sinek explains existential flexibility: a company's willingness to make a 180-degree strategic shift for its core cause. Steve Jobs saw Xerox PARC's graphical interface, abandoned Apple's prior direction, and committed to the Macintosh despite short-term losses. That choice reshaped personal computing.
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Existential flexibility is not like the normal flexibility, the day to day that you need to do work. It is a business's ability to make profound 180 degree strategic shift in order to advance that just cause. I think one of the single best examples of what an existential flex looks like happened back in the late 70s, early 80s. So I mentioned Apple and Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs had this vision of empowering individuals to stand up to Big Brother. He saw the personal computer as the perfect technology to do that.
And Jobs and Apple had, was already a big company ready, fast growing company, one of the first unicorns. They'd already had success from the Apple one, the Apple ii. Jobs was already famous and as is the practice of a lot of executives, they went and visited other companies and Jobs and a few of his senior guys went on a tour of Xerox park out in Menlo Park. And Xerox showed them a new technology that they had invented called the graphic user interface, which allowed people to use a computer by clicking on a mouse and moving a cursor across a desktop. And Jobs looked at this new technology that they didn't invent and said, this is profound because right now if you want to use a computer, you have to learn how to, you know, you have to learn a basic code, right? Which means a very small percentage of the population can actually use it. And if my ambition is to empower as many individuals as possible, then this graphic user interface is something I have no choice to advance my cause. It's obvious that we have to invest in it. And so he said to his senior executives who were with him, we're going to invest in this graphic user interface thing. And one of them, call him the voice of reason.
Said Steve, we can't, we cannot invest in this. We've already invested millions of dollars and countless man hours in a completely different strategic direction. If we take that money away and reinvest it in this graphic user interface thing, we're going to blow up our own business. To which Jobs actually said, better we should blow it up than someone else. And that decision led to the Macintosh. The Macintosh so profoundly changed the course of computing that the entire software of Windows is designed to act like a Macintosh. And the reason a computer is now a household appliance.
Is because of that decision.
And they did take a short term loss and they did take a hit.
Because that's what happens necessarily when you reinvest. But that's an existential flex, profound strategic shift in order to advance your cause.
