The Sacred and the Mundane

THE FUTURE

Icons of business prove that the more things change, the more important things remain the same

Look at the image and listen closely. You can almost hear the young men tinkering as a single light burns in the detached one-car garage behind a modest house on Addison Avenue in Palo Alto, Calif. It's 1938, and two classmates from the engineering program at nearby Stanford University are about to make history. With nothing more than some loose components and a bench, vise, drill press, screwdriver, metal file, and soldering iron, they will lay the foundation for what will become one of the country's most innovative technology businesses. Today, as we recall that moment, as we live with all the benefits that their company helped bring about, that image of a simple garage workshop evokes something more than just the place where Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard puttered late into the night. It has been transformed into a symbol of genius and entrepreneurial achievement; one that is famous, even legendary.

Now, generations later, early efforts in the family garage have become common fodder for tinkerer legends -- Jobs and Wozniak, for example. Such ignoble beginnings can bestow an almost apocryphal glow on the most monolithic of corporations and other enterprises. It's not too far-fetched to compare such tales -- such symbols -- to the tradition set by Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, who played their own humble roots to political advantage. Just as many of their successors have tried to do the same by laying claim to their own log-cabin roots, so over the past 60 years has it become de rigueur for company founders to hark back to their humble garage origins.

But Hewlett and Packard's garage stands out from the rest. It has special currency in the business world, personifying the core values for which Hewlett-Packard would best like to be known. Yet it wouldn't mean anything if we, as both consumers and human beings, refused to play along. But we do. There is something in symbols like these that we embrace. We depend on stories, on allegory and myth and all the forms tales take, to appreciate and understand life. Because we know something of its story, that unremarkable garage speaks to us about the power of an inventive mind, a determined soul. Such symbols give us hope about our own possibilities.

Icons quench a thirst we have for meaning, for finding good in the work we do.

The symbols become, in our minds, larger than life. The Hewlett and Packard workshop is no longer just a garage. There's something sacred about it, a quality that has been bestowed. It has become an icon.

It's no wonder, then, that last year, after new HP CEO Carleton (Carly) S. Fiorina was charged with regaining the market presence that the company's founders had once commanded, she rallied the troops by returning to the garage -- in advertising, if not in reality.

In the ambitious, and ubiquitous, television ad that reintroduced the connection between HP and its heritage, the Addison Avenue garage floats into view. Fiorina's voice-over tells us that HP is looking to recapture its legacy of inventiveness. But she doesn't have to say anything more; that garage tells us all we need to know.

No marketing message can compare in sheer impact with an icon like that one. Clearly, the marketing campaign that resurrected the structure is manufactured. But the garage-as-icon grew organically, sprouting from a need of its founders, followers, customers, and observers to infuse meaning into the role the company played in their lives -- and, they hoped, in our own. The durability of the image demonstrates the heady importance that we grant to HP's achievements.

Given the quasi-sacred qualities such images assume, it's logical that the icon itself has distinctly religious roots. Originally, icons were small paintings of saints' likenesses, often adorned with images of their saintly acts, that were used to bring blessings to those who held them. Today the icons of business serve a similar, if more secular, purpose. Certainly, companies use their versions of icons to convey the promise that you'll be blessed if you do business with them. But more important, the symbols quench a thirst we have for meaning, for finding good in the work we do. They give us a sense of higher purpose. We yearn to be part of something larger than ourselves. Intellectually, we know that a suburban garage is just a suburban garage. But we accept the symbol as something more. That's why such icons often outlive the people and organizations that first embraced them. Even today, for example, the Ford Model T evokes a sense of a peculiarly American rugged simplicity and a democratization of technology. Why, the effect is almost religious.

How to build an icon
In 1984, when Apple's Steve Jobs was overseeing the creation of the Macintosh computer, his team became known as a band of renegades. They flew a skull-and-crossbones pirate flag over their building. They wore their outcast reputation proudly. And the flag became an icon for this rebel band and the personal-computing revolution they bred.

Even though most of us know that Jobs lost his job in 1985, the flapping pirate flag does not call to mind thoughts of that turn of events. Instead it continues to represent the core values that distinguished Apple, the boldness that made it great. In 1996, when Jobs made his triumphant comeback to head up Apple once again, the revival of the pirate spirit was what was most celebrated. It was the inspiration that fueled the highly successful iMac, a renegade product from a band of corporate pirates if there ever was one.

Any humble object can become an icon -- a flag, a garage. On rare occasions, even a product -- such as the fabled Model T -- can evolve into an icon if it sends a powerful enough message. But advertising images are just too crass to make it as icons. They're too artificial to carry much power.

Icons draw from real stuff. Most often they are commonplace objects or places, symbols of the humble origins from which mighty enterprises grow.

Nike's icon, for instance, is a waffle iron. In 1972 cofounder Bill Bowerman made a waffle sole in his own kitchen for the very first successful Nike running shoe. Bowerman, a track coach at the University of Oregon and coach of the U.S. track team at the Munich Olympics, believed that the stiff leather soles of the running shoes that were then available slowed his runners down. So he experimented with latex, leather, and glue, cooking the mixture in his wife's waffle iron until he got it right.

He and one of his former track stars, Phil Knight, each ponied up $500 to make 330 pairs of shoes with his new, lightweight waffle sole. They would go on to dominate the industry. The Nike swoosh may be a symbol of the brand, but only the waffle iron can be an icon. It stands for everything that Nike, as a business culture, is all about.

The same goes for Sam Walton's red-and-white 1979 Ford pickup. Today that very truck sits in the Wal-Mart Visitor's Center, in Bentonville, Ark., where the megaretailer was founded. Long after Walton's death, in 1992, his truck has come to represent the company's no-frills image and dedication to hard work. So what if Sam Walton was one of the richest men in the world? His truck was a beat-up old Ford, gosh darn it. Both it and its usefulness outlived the revered founder.

How to nurture an icon
The question is whether the icon as a symbol of the higher meaning of business is near the end of its run. Can such low-tech images hope to spark passion in the fast-paced glitterati world of the digital economy?

Well, yes. At a time when there's so much noise, so much hype, so much money, so much so much, such images are what we cry for more than ever. They stand out precisely because they're qualitatively different from the rest of the hypercharged business world. They speak to human nature, the unchanging constant in a changing world.