Steve Jobs (23 page)

think about all that goes on. If we scale up the population to

730 million, we come to Europe at about the right size. Now

take Europe and shrink it until it all fits in the same land mass

as Ithaca.
”5

Number Smiths

Every industry has numbers, and nearly every presenter in every

industry fails to make numbers interesting and meaningful. For

the rest of this scene, let’s examine several examples of individ-

uals and companies who have accomplished what Jobs does in

every presentation—make numbers meaningful.

DEFINING ONE THOUSAND TRILLION

On June 9, 2008, IBM issued a press release touting a superfast

supercomputer. As its name suggests, Roadrunner is one really

quick system. It operates at one petaflop per second. What’s a

petaflop? Glad you asked. It’s one thousand trillion calculations

per second. IBM realized that the number would be meaning-

less to the vast majority of readers, so it added the following description:

How fast is a petaflop? Lots of laptops. That’s roughly equiva-

lent to the combined computing power of 100,000 of today’s

fastest laptop computers. You would need a stack of laptops

1.5 miles high to equal Roadrunner’s performance.

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DELIVER THE EXPERIENCE

It would take the entire population of the earth
—
about

six billion—each of us working a handheld calculator at the

rate of one second per calculation, more than 46 years to do

what Roadrunner can do in one day.

If it were possible for cars to improve their gas mileage

over the past decade at the same rate that supercomputers

have improved their cost and efficiency, we’d be getting

200,000 miles to the gallon today
.6

The comparisons were compelling and caught the attention of

the media. Conduct a Google search for “IBM + Roadrunner +

1.5 miles” and the search returns nearly twenty thousand links

to articles that use IBM’s comparison word for word from the

press release. The analogy works.

$700 BILLION BAILOUT

The bigger the number, the more important it is to place the

number into a context that makes sense to your audience. For

example, in October 2008, the U.S. government bailed out banks

and financial institutions to the tune of $700 billion. That’s the

numeral 7 followed by eleven zeros, a number so large that few

of us can get our minds around it.
San Jose Mercury News
reporter Scott Harris put the number into a context his Silicon Valley

readers could understand: $700 billion is twenty-five times the

combined wealth of the Google guys. It is the equivalent of 350

billion venti lattes at Starbucks or 3.5 billion iPhones. The gov-

ernment could write checks for $2,300 to every man, woman,

and child in America or provide free education for twenty-three

million college students. Few people can grasp the concept of

700 billion, but they know lattes and college tuitions. Those

numbers are specific and relevant
.7

CHIPPING DOWN $13 TRILLION

Environmental groups go to great lengths to make numbers

more meaningful. They must if they hope to persuade individ-

uals to break deeply ingrained habits and routines that might

contribute to damaging climate change. The numbers are sim-

ply too big (and seemingly irrelevant) without connecting the

DRESS UP YOUR NUMBERS
111

dots. For example, try telling someone that in 2006 alone, the

United States produced thirteen trillion pounds of carbon diox-

ide (CO ). It sounds like a humongous number, but what does

2

it mean? There is no context. Thirteen trillion could be small

or large in comparison with other countries. And frankly, what

would it mean to the average person? The number itself won’t

persuade people to change their habits.

Al Gore’s website, ClimateCrisis.org, breaks the number down

further, claiming the average American is responsible for 44,000

pounds of CO emissions per year, while the world average is

2

9,600 pounds per individual
.8
That’s specific and contextual.

The site then makes the number even more relevant by tell-

ing its readers what might happen if that number doesn’t come

down: heat waves will be more frequent and intense, droughts

and wildfires will occur more often, and more than a million

species could be driven to extinction in the next fifty years.

Scientists at NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric

Administration) are also catching on. Senior scientist Susan

Solomon once told the
New York Times
that if the burning of fos-sil fuels continues at its present rate, carbon dioxide emissions

could reach 450 parts per million. What does that figure mean?

According to Solomon, at 450 parts per million, rising seas will

threaten coastal areas around the world, and western Australia

could expect 10 percent less rainfall. “Ten percent may not seem

like a high number,” said Solomon, “but it is the kind of number

that has been seen in major droughts in the past, like the Dust

Bowl.
”9

Whether or not you believe in global warming, climate

change experts such as Al Gore and Susan Solomon are mas-

ters at making large numbers meaningful, and by doing so,

they hope to persuade governments and individuals to take the

action they deem necessary to solve the problem.

CHANGE YOUR DIET OR PAY THE ULTIMATE PRICE

What if you knew nothing about blood pressure and a doctor

told you your blood pressure was 220 over 140? Would you be

motivated to change your diet and exercise habits? Perhaps not

until those numbers are put into context that makes sense to

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DELIVER THE EXPERIENCE

you. One doctor I know once told a patient, “Your blood pres-

sure is 220 over 140. We consider 120 over 80 to be normal.

Your blood pressure is severely high. That means you have a

much higher risk of having a heart attack, kidney disease, and

stroke. In fact, with numbers this high, you could drop dead at

any minute by blowing your gourd. The arteries in your brain

will literally burst.” By being specific, relevant, and contextual,

the doctor made his point and motivated his patient to make

changes right away!

Regardless of what industry you’re in, the numbers you throw

around will have little impact on your audience unless and until

you make them meaningful. Numbers out of context are sim-

ply unimpressive. Whether you’re presenting the data behind a

new technology or a particular medical condition, comparing

the number to something your listeners can relate to will make

your message far more interesting, impactful, and ultimately

persuasive.

D IR EC TO R ’ S N OT E S

 Use data to support the key theme of your presentation.

As you do, consider carefully the figures you want to

present. Don’t overwhelm your audience with too many

numbers.

 Make your data specific, relevant, and contextual. In

other words, put the numbers into a context that is

relevant to the lives of your listeners.

 Use rhetorical devices such as analogies to dress up your

numbers.

SCE

SCENNEE 1

100

Use “Amazingly

Zippy” Words

Plug it in. Wirrrrrr. Done.

STEVE JOBS, DESCRIBING THE SONG TRANSFER FEATURE

OF THE FIRST IPOD, FORTUNE, NOVEMBER 2001

Steve Jobs introduced an upgrade to the iPhone at Apple’s

Worldwide Developers Conference on June 9, 2008.

The iPhone 3G was twice as fast as the original model,

supporting the speedier third-generation AT&T data

network. A 3G network has a potential transfer speed of 3 Mbps,

versus 144 Kbps on a slower, 2G (second-generation) network.

Simply put, 3G is better for accessing the Internet and down-

loading large multimedia files on a mobile phone. Jobs made it

even simpler. “It’s amazingly zippy,” he said
.1

Jobs speaks in simple, clear, and direct language, free of the

jargon and complexity so common in business communications.

Jobs is one of the few business leaders who could confidently call

a product “amazingly zippy.” In an interview for
Fortune
maga-

zine, he was asked to describe the interface of Apple’s new OS X

operating system. “We made the buttons on the screen look so

good, you’ll want to lick them,” he said.
2
Even if you think Jobs is grandstanding from time to time, his choice of words puts a

smile on your face. He chooses words that are fun, tangible, and

uncommon in most professional business presentations.

113

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DELIVER THE EXPERIENCE

Jobs, Gates, and the Plain English Test

Seattle Post Intelligencer
tech reporter Todd Bishop wrote a clever piece at the urging of his readers. He ran the transcripts from

four presentations in 2007 and 2008 (Steve Jobs’s Macworld key-

notes and Bill Gates’s Consumer Electronics Show presentations)

through a software tool that analyzes language. In general,

the lower the numerical score, the more understandable the

language.

Bishop used an online software tool provided by UsingEnglish

.com
.3
The tool analyzes language based on four criteria:
1.
Average number of words per sentence.

2.
Lexical density—how easy or difficult a text is to read. Text with “lower density” is more easily understood. In this case,

a lower percentage is better.

3.
Hard words—average number of words in a sentence that

contain more than three syllables. In this case, a higher

percentage is worse because it implies that are more “hard

words” in the text that are generally less understood by the

average reader.

4.
Fog index—the number of years of education a reader

theoretically would require to understand the text. For

example, the New York Times has a fog rating of 11 or 12,

while some academic documents have a fog rating of 18.

The fog index simply means that short sentences written in

plain English receive a better score than sentences written

in complicated language.

It should be no surprise that Jobs did noticeably better than Gates when their language was put to the test. Table 10.1 compares the results for both 2007 and 2008
.4

In each case, Jobs performs significantly better than Gates

when it comes to using terms and language people can eas-

ily understand. Jobs’s words are simpler, his phrases are less

abstract, and he uses fewer words per sentence.

USE “AMAZINGLY ZIPPY” WORDS
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TABLE 10.1
LANGUAGE COMPLEXITY: STEVE JOBS VERSUS

BILL GATES

BILL GATES,

INTERNATIONAL

STEVE JOBS,

CONSUMER

PRESENTER/EVENT

MACWORLD

ELECTRONICS SHOW

Jobs’s 2007 Macworld Keynote and Gates’s 2007 CES Keynote

Average words/

10.5

21.6

sentence

Lexical density

16.5%

21.0%

Hard words

2.9%

5.11%

Fog index

5.5

10.7

Jobs’s 2008 Macworld Keynote and Gates’s 2008 CES Keynote