Apple gave a merchandiser fifteen months to open its first two stores

Jobs' framing of the job, as Johnson recounts it in the book, was a list. "What are the ten things you need to do well?" ^[10] Inventory management was one of them. Johnson said the team that managed it was led by Deirdre, who was involved with the stores before the first one opened ^[11]. Operations was one item out of ten, under a merchant who had come from Target and, before that, the department store Mervyn's ^[2][20].

Fifteen months separated Johnson's first day from the opening of the first two stores ^[5]. He proposed the name for the in-store support counter, "Genius Bar", and the book covers Jobs' initial reaction to it ^[19]. The stores performed weakly at first ^[8]. The article does not include sales figures for that period ^[21].

Asked whether Apple retail has stayed true to the original vision since he left, Johnson told MacRumors, "You know, really, honestly, I do. I'm very impressed." ^[13] He said the stores went through "a little a difficult period after I left" before they were "fulfilling, fabulously well, the initial mission and vision we had for the stores" ^[12].

On the chiefs who followed him, Johnson said, "You know, I was the first retailer at Apple. And I built the initial team and, we relied a lot on other Apple departments, but fundamentally, I think Tim felt that he's got to find a retail leader to run the stores, right?" ^[14] He added that "he started out with an operations leader, but obviously that led to a pretty quick change" ^[15]. What Johnson counts as success now is Apple's attention to the quality, size and location of stores instead of the total count. He also counts its standard for the retail employees the interview calls "exceptional", some of them with the company for years ^[18].

The ten-item list transfers to smaller settings than a chain of stores. Ten things your point of contact has to do well, one owner's name against each. The list shows where the person who owns what a customer meets first sits in the org. If eight of the ten owners are measured on throughput, throughput is your design brief, whatever the roadmap slide says. The second test is time. The month you would shut the thing down falls either before or after the early weakness Johnson describes in the book.