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So it was 1984 and a really good friend of mine had been working at this place called
Apple that I had read a whole lot about in Newsweek. I thought it was a really exciting
company and he was there. I was living in Cambridge at the time. I was born in Cambridge.
I spent all my time in Cambridge. He invited me out for a weekend to visit him at Apple
and I took advantage of it and could not believe having come from the non-profit sector, could
not believe that there was a culture of people who were doing what those maniacs at Apple
were doing. These were people who looked like they worked harder than we did in the non-profit
sector which was a pretty high bar and I came away from there with a feeling of both of
little bit of craziness and a little bit of there's something going on here. I returned
to Cambridge and immediately got a job offer from the Apple, what then called the Apple
Education Foundation and they said why don't you come back to Apple? We will give you this
job. I didn't know, I never really wanted to leave Cambridge. My roots run very deep
there but I knew at the time that I would kick myself if I didn't at least take advantage
of the opportunity. So I went back to Apple. I've never sold my little house in Cambridge
because I doubted really that this was going to work and that I'd probably be returning
to Cambridge again and, you know, for the rest of my life.
I went out there. I began to work for the Apple Education Foundation. After about six
months I frankly wasn't crazy about how they were doing philanthropy at the time for reasons
I won't go into, but it just didn't feel quite right to me. So I decided I was going to leave.
It was a nice try and I would just kind of go back where I came from. But then there
was an interesting sort of point in time at Apple where Apple was distinguishing itself,
particularly from IBM, by saying they're about big corporations and big business. We're about
individuals. I heard that a lot and I began to look around and see what we were, who we
were talking to and there were no disabled individuals in that world, Apple's world view.
It wasn't that they were resistant to it. It's just that, like many people, they just
weren't thinking about people with disabilities and that's when I decided, well, before I
return back to Cambridge and call this a failed experiment, I'm going to write a little proposal
to Apple that says here's why you should be interested in people with disabilities.
The proposal as I recall was about four pages long. It had no ROI; no, it had no finance
information in it at all. Nor was it philanthropic. That was the other key point. It was not to
say we needed to do more charity for people with disabilities. It simply said if we're
about individuals, we need to be about all individuals. And I, weirdly enough, I think
it was within a week, I got an approval on this four page proposal (which I really wish
I could find somewhere) and they said go ahead and make this happen. See if you can make
this happen. So I was delighted because now I didn't have to think about leaving and I
was really, really happy and then I was scared to death. It's a little bit like when in the
non-profits you get, you work really hard to get a proposal and if you get funded then
you go home and my God, now I've got to do this thing! You know, how am I going, it was
fun to write it and now I have to go do it, and so
But one of the things that helped me probably more than anything else in that very early
stage, was John Scully calling me up the day after the proposal was approved and he called
me into his office and he said, look, we've never done this before. I don't know if you
can do it. I'm not sure we can make it happen, but you have to make me one promise. And I
said, well, what's that? And he said you have to promise me that if this fails, it will
fail huge. And I remember thinking, it was like the best business lesson I ever, ever
got because he was saying that, what he was saying was just go for it. If you're going
to do it, do it Apple-like and, you know, and make it happen right. And if you fail,
that's fine, but don't fail because you were just nibbling around the edges. Fail because
something needed to be done and Apple wants to do it, and I, to this day, that's the best
business lesson I've ever, I've told John this on several occasions since then and he
remembers that little meeting. I remember that little meeting and it was a real turning
point in what then became our operation to begin the disability movement. /