Steve Jobs couldn't say it. The 5 words he finally managed.

There were about 300 people in the disk drive division, and the man running it was one of Steve's favorites.

Jay Elliot had already decided it had to go. Apple needed a drive it could ship, and the answer was to bring one in from outside. The harder part was the meeting.

If you've got one of these, you already know which one it is. The service tier that takes 2 people to deliver and pays for half of 1. The product your first hire built and still takes personally. The division, if you have divisions. You've known for a while. You've been saying "let's think about it" for longer. That isn't a decision. It's a way of not having the meeting.

Before anyone walked in

Jay set the terms first. The division would go. Every person in it would be offered a job somewhere else at Apple. If there wasn't one, in Jay's words, "we'll find him a job." Nobody was going to lose their job over this.

Notice the order. The people were handled before the product was. By the time anyone sat down in a conference room, the only thing left to say was the thing itself.

"Let's step outside"

They sat down. Steve, Jay, and the man whose division it was.

And Steve wouldn't say it. He talked around it, and the thing he was there to say stayed unsaid.

Finally Jay said it in front of both of them: "Steve, we're here for a reason. You need to tell him why we're here."

"Let's step outside," Steve said.

In the hallway, Steve told him the truth. "I'm really having a hard time." Jay's answer was an instruction: tell him why we're doing this. Tell him everybody's going to be taken care of. He's a good guy. Then go sit down and tell him.

They went back in. Steve looked at the man and said:

"Jay said to tell you."

Why he could

Jay's read of that moment is that it was the greatest acknowledgment Steve ever gave of who was actually running things. I'd add that it's the clearest picture of why Steve kept him around.

Steve had a line about not trusting anyone over 40, and Jay was 44 when they met. The exemption, by Jay's account, came down to stability and honesty. He represented the other side... the IBM side, the experienced side... and he said what he thought, the same way to everyone, including Steve. Steve's instability needed somebody who could deal with it. When the hardest sentence in the building needed saying, that was the person who'd push him through the door.

Set this next to Part 1. Products got blown out. People got a job offer first, before the meeting. Steve's famous ruthlessness about products stopped at the face across the table, and the system still needed somebody to carry the sentence into the room.

What Jay doesn't claim

Jay never named the man, and neither will I. He said "about 300," and he didn't say which drive, so I don't either. The job offers are the terms Jay set; he doesn't report where each person landed. The dialogue is as Jay told it, reconstructed from memory.

The turn

Deciding to kill a product is the spreadsheet part. The cut isn't made until somebody says it to a face... and the people have to be handled before that sentence is.

The hard part of this story isn't the verdict. It's the meeting after it. Look at the order Apple used, because the order is the method: the people first, then the room, then the sentence, said badly if it had to be, but said out loud by the person whose decision it was.

Day 5 of the free course ends with 1 decision written down with an owner and a review date. That's the part this story is about. Start the 5-day course →

Run it on your product

1. Before you cut anything with people attached, write 2 sentences. What happens to the people. Who says it, out loud, in the room.
2. Handle the first sentence before you schedule the meeting. "We'll figure it out" doesn't count.
3. If the person who decided can't say it, the decision isn't made yet. Say it yourself. Say it badly if you have to. The point is that it gets said in the room.
4. End the meeting with the decision written down and dated. "Let's think about it" means the meeting didn't happen.

What this doesn't do: it gets the cut made. Whether it was the right cut is Part 4's arithmetic and the book's 4 questions.