Steve Jobs Hated the Name “Genius Bar.” How He Came Around, with Ron Johnson

Paula Pant (0:00)

When Ron Johnson was 24, he received a job offer for $120,000 a year. He turned it down in order to take a job that paid only $40,000 per year.

That decision started a chain of events that led to Steve Jobs personally hiring him to design the Apple Stores. In this conversation, you are going to hear from Ron Johnson, the designer of the Apple Store, and later, the CEO of JCPenney, how to manage your career, how to deal with brilliant but tough leaders, how to weigh a lower-paying job that will teach you more against a higher-paying job that would be just a paycheck, how to set goals that are big enough that it inspires everybody around you to work harder, and how to get out of your head when you're overthinking a decision. This is a master class in business, so buckle up. Welcome to the Afford Anything Podcast, a show that knows you can afford anything but not everything. This show covers five pillars, financial psychology, increasing your income, investing, real estate, and E for entrepreneurship. That is the subject of today's episode, but it's not just entrepreneurship. This is business career. This is for anyone who has a job or has ever had a job or who might have a job in the future. This is such a master class in career strategy. Ron Johnson, as I said, churned down $120,000 offer straight out of grad school, got this massive starting salary from Goldman Sachs, said no thank you, and went to unload trucks for $40,000 a year. That started the chain of events that led to him working directly with Steve Jobs, like they were cell phone buddies and talked to each other every night, directly for Steve Jobs for 12 years. He created the Apple Stores. If you've ever gone into an Apple Store at a mall, that is Ron Johnson's design. It's his vision. It's his brainchild. Steve Jobs hated malls, and Steve Jobs hated the name Genius Bar.

Ron Johnson's the one who got him to come around. And later, Ron went on to become the CEO of JCPenney, and he's the author of a book called Shop Different. There's so much we can learn from him. Here he is, Ron Johnson.

Hi, Ron.

Ron Johnson (2:17)

Hello, it's nice to see you.

Paula Pant (2:19)

It's nice to see you too. Thank you for coming here. We've been chatting a little bit behind the scenes.

The first thing that I said to you is I apologized for the fact that this room, this building has some columns. You nearly got, almost got fired over columns. Can you tell us that story?

Ron Johnson (2:35)

That was interesting.

You know, after a lot of time in the retail industry, kind of after a period at Target, I went to work at Apple to create the retail stores, and Steve Jobs had hired me to work directly for him. And we'd spent a lot of time together, you know, designing the stores and getting out of the blocks. And one day I was coaching my son, who at the time was five years old, his soccer team in Menlo Park, California, and the phone rang. It was a Saturday morning. There was Steve, and that was an uncommon for him to call.

But I answered the phone, I was out in the field, and I said, Steve? And he said, Ron, what's with the effing columns? What's with the forest? And I said, nor sure. We had just opened a store that morning, and it was in a mall in suburban Boston. The only way we could do it, it was holding up a third floor of a building. There were some columns in the back corner by the Genius Bar, and Steve didn't like columns.

You know, we had never formally said we will not do a store without columns, but we all knew he would rather have a mall and free space. And he was really upset. And he felt like I broke his trust by not telling him.

Because we kind of had developed an unwritten rule that I had the freedom to do anything I wanted, unless I felt like he might think differently. And then I should just talk to him about it. And I knew when we approved the store that Steve probably wouldn't like it. But I also, this was 2001, the Internet's new, Boston's a long way from the Bay Area. You know, we'll probably get by. But then people sharing photos of the store and Steve, intensely curious, had looked it up. That was really tough. It was like probably my toughest day at Apple.

Because I really disappointed him, I felt.