Steve Jobs – The Intelligent Collector Magazine

Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Michael Jackson, Roger Enrico, Central Park and a Texas woman named Rogers

An original 1949 oil-on-canvas illustration by Haddon Hubbard Sundblom (1899-1976) for a Coca-Cola advertisement sold for $11,250 at an April 2020 Heritage auction.

Then We Set His Hair on Fire: Insights and Accidents from a Hall-of-Fame Career in Advertising by Phil Dusenberry, chairman, BBDO

By Jim O’Neal

Phil Dusenberry and I became friends when he was at the top of his game and working for Pepsi-Cola in the 1980s for another close friend, Roger Enrico. Both of these men were creative geniuses and the remarkable advertising they created was both legendary and memorable. However, on a personal level, they were quite different.

Roger was a brilliant strategic leader, inspirational speaker, risk-taker (“Big changes to big things”) and exactly what PepsiCo needed as a CEO. He got a break when Steve Jobs lured John Sculley to Apple and Roger took his place as president of Pepsi-Cola. This would lead almost inevitably to chairman and CEO of PepsiCo, which had gradually became weighed down by too many underperforming restaurant concepts and a bloated corporate structure.

Phil was a quiet, almost elegant perfectionist, right out of central casting, who was obsessed by “The Work.” He literally earned the sobriquet as Phil “Do it Again” Dusenberry by carefully evaluating excellent creative advertising (that others could only wish for) and then tirelessly “working” it into jaw-dropping brilliance. He also dabbled in the film business and co-wrote the screenplay for The Natural (Robert Redford). As part of the “Tuesday Team,” he helped write speeches for President Reagan and created the still memorable “Morning in America,” a 60-second spot in 1984 that many credit with helping him win re-election.

The “fire and ice” combination of Roger and Phil resulted in a symbiotic relationship that resulted in truly world-class work that was unparalleled, at least in soft drinks.

Virtually everyone knows about the Pepsi Challenge and how fiercely loyal Coca-Cola drinkers actually preferred Pepsi in blind taste tests. After lots of research to ensure the claim was legal, Pepsi started making TV commercials using real people taking “The Challenge” and it was soon a national campaign. Having a legitimate claim to a preferred product that can be advertised was a real boost in sales. Roger always believed that the Challenge was the real reason that Coke in 1985 changed their original secret formula. The result was New Coke, which turned out to be a marketing fiasco. All they had to do was add a small amount of regular sugar to the concentrate and the Challenge would have ceased to exist. But, for 99 years, no one was allowed to make changes to the original recipe. Leaders sometimes overlook the obvious.

Meanwhile, Roger decided that the Challenge was getting tired. After various forays into fruit-flavored soft drinks (Slice) and tinkering with all the sweeting systems (cyclamates, fructose, etc.), he decided Diet Pepsi was OK (barely) but the Pepsi brand needed an entire rethink. He, Phil and several others were struggling with imagery – easy to say and much harder to get on film – when a miracle happened. Roger got a call from Jay Coleman pitching a Pepsi-Michael Jackson deal. It would include two Pepsi commercials, a national tour and a slew of press conferences.

The only shocker was that boxing promoter Don King was involved and the price was an unprecedented $5 million! It took a week to hammer out a contractual deal when someone asked if PepsiCo Chairman Don Kendall had been told (he was in Russia). When he returned, they set up a special presentation for Mr. Kendall and held their breath. After watching the MJ video, Kendall purportedly told Roger: “That is the most remarkable performer I’ve ever seen!”

With some trepidation, Roger invited Don King and his entourage to PepsiCo corporate headquarters to meet the PepsiCo family. It was quite a spectacle, but soon migrated over to the Tavern on the Green for a big press conference in Central Park. Some people take parks for granted … just natural landscapes with grass, trees and perhaps some water. But, consider the fortunes of New York’s Central Park.

This 19th century park was the creation of journalist William Cullen Bryant and prominent horticulturist /landscape designer Andrew Jackson Downing. The city bought the land and Frederick Law Olmsted provided the plan. Construction started in 1858 and nearly completed by 1873. But the corrupt Tammany Hall politicians who ran the city lost interest, and the funds to maintain the 800 acres disappeared. Trees were unpruned, ponds untended and lawns unseeded. By the early 1900s, the park resembled an abandoned ruin.

However, when Fiorello La Guardia became mayor in 1934, he appointed Robert Moses as parks commissioner and over the next 30 years rebuilt the park. For more on Moses, please read The Power Broker by Robert Caro (Pulitzer Prize-winner and voted one of the top 100 nonfiction books of the 20th century). But, by 1975, NYC was broke again and there went the park budget again. Finally, a woman by the name of Elizabeth Barlow Rogers – from San Antonio – became administrator of Central Park. During her tenure of 16 years, a conservancy fund of $100 million was raised (it’s up to $1 billion now). So Central Park finally looks stable.

Phil Dusenberry died of lung cancer in 2007, Roger had a stroke in 2016, and MJ died in 2009. For several years, they made a powerful trio that helped create a New Generation. Even the venerable Tavern on the Green has been shuttered.

Things change.

Intelligent Collector blogger JIM O’NEAL is an avid collector and history buff. He is president and CEO of Frito-Lay International [retired] and earlier served as chair and CEO of PepsiCo Restaurants International [KFC Pizza Hut and Taco Bell].

Walt Disney is Proof that Great Ideas Can Come Out of Nowhere

Walt Disney’s passport, dated Aug. 19, 1965, sold for $28,680 at an April 2007 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

I never met Walt Disney. He died four months after I joined Frito-Lay in 1966 and was among the last of a generation that smoked three packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day. He died of lung cancer.

However, like virtually everyone else in Southern California, we were familiar with the incredible theme park he built in nearby Anaheim. Disneyland opened to the public on July 17, 1955, and Frito-Lay had a direct relationship with Disneyland through a Mexican food restaurant in Frontierland called Casa de Fritos (Home of Fritos). It featured a unique product called a “Ta-cup” … basically, traditional taco ingredients served in a fried tortilla cup that helped with eating on-the-go using one hand.

I met the manager, Joe Nugent, during a meeting with Frito-Lay corporate officers from Dallas (The Flying Circus) who were in Los Angeles to review our zone’s 1967 profit plan and operating budgets. The only surprise was a mild rebuke to Nugent: “Dammit Joe, we told you last year that we don’t want to make a profit. The whole idea is to expose more people to Fritos and build the brand!” Joe just nodded and resorted to his previous tactic of lowering prices in the hope of lowering profits. Alas, it seemed that the more he dropped prices, the more the crowds waited in line to buy even more. What he experienced was the 1960s version of leveraging overhead costs, which lowered margins but increased total profitability. The Sam Walton slogan of “stack ’em high and sell ’em low.”

Another surprise was the mid-1967 completion of Club 33 at Disneyland, a private club with a top-notch restaurant that could only be accessed with a special card and hidden elevator. Frito-Lay was one of 33 local companies with membership, along with Carnation, Bell Telephone and Bank of America. It was the only place in the park where alcoholic beverages were served and in 2010, I read there was a 14-year waiting list for new members. Frito-Lay is now the crown jewel in the PepsiCo empire and analysts are advocating they get out of the beverage business.

From what I’ve read, Walter Elias Disney was a lot like the two men who started the Frito and Lay companies: humble beginnings, entrepreneurial and ambitious. Disney went broke when no one would buy his first animated films, Alice Comedies, so he moved from Kansas City to Hollywood in 1923, took out a home equity loan for $2,500 and rented the back room of a local real estate office where he created the studio that would become the Walt Disney Company‍. What a success story from another “garage” operation it has become.

We then moved to Cupertino in the Bay Area, where the business guys only seemed to talk about technology (using names like Ampex, Atari and H-P) and whispered about the next garage operation that would be a huge success. What we didn’t realize is that we had moved into one of the greatest wealth-creation areas in the history of the world … where two members of the Homebrew Computer Club – both college dropouts – set up shop to sell their techie friends the circuit boards one of them had invented. There are several versions of why they named their company Apple, but the consensus is Steve Jobs had been working at an apple orchard. Our old backyard is not far from the $5 billion Apple campus, but nobody tipped us about what the future might be.

We never heard the term “Silicon Valley” or about two guys in Vermont who had pooled their resources to make ice cream in an abandoned gas station after installing a 4½-gallon freezer. Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield were on the opposite end of the technology spectrum when they made a low-tech fortune with Ben & Jerry’s. Of course, not every inventor sticks his hand into a tin and comes up with “Chunky Monkey.” Most will fail. Even those who receive patents and set up small companies will not make these kinds of fortunes. Consider poor Eli Whitney, who invented the cotton gin in 1793 while working as a tutor at a Georgia plantation. His was probably the most influential invention in the 18th century and it got him into the history books, but nothing in the bankbook.

But that’s not the point. The dream that it’s possible, that an idea can come out of nowhere and can – with a lot of hard work – lead to success is more alive than ever. That kid working away or thinking about dropping out of Harvard to start his own company can change the world. Still skeptical? Just ask Bill Gates.

Steve Jobs Admired Our Greatest Industrial Designers – and It Shows

A 15-piece “Manhattan” Chrome-Plated Brass Cocktail Set, designed by Norman Bel Geddes and manufactured circa 1937, sold for $9,000 at a December 2008 auction.

By Jim O’Neal

In Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, he devotes a chapter (12) to the evolution of Job’s lifelong obsession with design after listening to his father’s habit of describing the styling intricacies of various cars. It includes brief periods of infatuation with Sony, flirting with the aesthetically sublime Zen Buddhism, Porsche (not Ferrari), rectangles with rounded edges (which drove the Apple team crazy), and, finally, the power of sleek (not slick), thin, clean and (above all) SIMPLE.

Jobs bemoaned the fact that there were no towering figures energizing the world of industrial design the way that Raymond Loewy (1893-1986) and Herbert Bayer (1900-1985) – the last living member of Bauhaus – had done. Especially not in Silicon Valley.

This was certainly not true in September 1935, when a New York Times critic wrote about a stage play in New Haven: “Meeting the scenic requirements of the play called for ingenuity, inspiration and a superior sense of the practical.” This stage designer did not foresee that his design sense would have a far more pervasive effect on everyday American life than he ever could have had as a stage designer. What the critic recognized was a “superior sense of the practical” – that would be obvious throughout the rest of this designer’s career.

His name was Henry Dreyfuss (1904-72), one of the pivotal figures in the emergence of industrial design.

Dreyfuss would move to center stage in the comparatively new discipline of industrial design, where participants were energized by the belief that anything could be improved by design … with the possible exception (perhaps) of the common egg. They would bring this supremely confident attitude to improving the design of a typical door handle as they would the interior of Air Force One.

Shape, color, utility, tactility, materials, even whimsy. All could be brought to bear as needed.

Dreyfuss’ work would influence everything from airplanes to alarm clocks, from locomotives to telephones (personally, I thought his “Princess” phone was a clumsy, unstable pink dud), and thermostats to John Deere tractors. Norman Bel Geddes (1893-1958) – a stage designer himself and one of the seminal figures of industrial design – was an early lasting influence on Dreyfuss. One of his precepts held that “the value of form lies in its ability to express significance clearly.”

I’m not exactly sure what that means, but others use the Honeywell thermostat as an example. While its presence became invisible because it became basic to our lives, I think the Honeywell-type thermostat’s longevity has more to do with the fact that it plays its role so well.

I’m more familiar with Loewy, another giant of industrial design who made a statement whose truth seems indisputable: “The most difficult things to design are the simplest. To improve the design of a threshing machine is easy, particularly compared to, say, a scalpel or needle.” Perhaps the complexity of redesigning the simplest things derived from these items already being so close to the essence of their purpose.

Industrial design, at its best, sends powerful signals of speed, of desirability, of sleekness, of sensuality. Much of the energy in industrial designs defining decades was directed toward streamlining or, more accurately, to use Dreyfuss’ word, “cleanlining.” Loewy summed it up: “Industrial design amounts to the shaping of everyday life”… the most inspired of those designs shape it for the better.

Steve Jobs must have embraced this to the fullest since all the Apple products I use seem to have a uniquely superior combination of form and function that I find addictive.

We Should Let Geniuses Do What Geniuses Do

This signed photograph of Thomas Alva Edison, taken sometime around 1910, realized nearly $3,900 at an April 2013 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

Thomas Alva Edison was awarded about 1,100 patents in the United States and more than double that worldwide.

They are generally grouped into categories that include electric power, telegraphy/telephony, recorded sounds, batteries, cement and motion pictures. His practice of keeping meticulous records to protect his intellectual property became the “gold standard” for future scientists, engineers and inventors in general.

Naturally, he made a lot of money, which proved useful when some of his ideas turned out to be expensive commercial failures. At times, he appeared to lack practical sense or perhaps he lacked the “Steve Jobs gene” when it involved customer preference. Another more plausible explanation is that he simply did not care, period.

One of the more interesting examples is his refusal to adopt the concept of movie theaters (people might sneak in without paying), so he held out for hand-crank, peep-show boxes. In 1908, he confidently predicted that airplanes had no viable future (the Wright brothers disagreed).

Then he became mesmerized by the possibilities for concrete and formed the Edison Portland Cement Company and built a huge factory. By 1907, Edison was the fifth-largest cement producer in the world and had four dozen patents to make a better cement, some of which was used to build Yankee Stadium.

But his abiding passion was to fill the world with cement houses.

The concept was to pour concrete into giant molds to form walls and floors, followed by baths, sinks, cabinets, toilets and even picture frames. A four-man team could build a new house every two days for $1,200 (one-third the cost of traditional structures).

The concept was scheduled to be showcased at a cement industry convention in 1912 in New York. However, when the show opened, the Edison exhibit was empty and Thomas Edison never discussed the issue publicly. There was also no word on the fate of the cement piano that was scheduled to be exhibited.

He was now interested in modernizing war and casually predicted he would be able to induce comas in enemy troops through the use of “electrically charged atomizers.” It is not clear how this idea was abandoned. He also worked on a plan to build giant electromagnets to catch enemy bullets in flight and then “return to sender.” It was another mysterious project that was abandoned.

One last example was a heavy investment in an automated general store where customers would insert coins into slots and then bags of coal, onions, nails or potatoes would come sliding down the chute. The system never worked. It never came close to working.

If you believe in reincarnation, then there is a good chance Thomas Edison is back. This time his name is Jeff Bezos, who had a nutty idea about selling books over the internet and now owns a major print newspaper and is in a race to conquer outer space, since NASA has scaled back. Elon Musk has managed to find time to enter the rocket business, too, while he tinkers with electric cars and batteries.

Our country seems to be blessed when it comes to producing geniuses. Let’s hope the government doesn’t put up too many regulations or red tape as we go hurtling into the future.

Intelligent Collector blogger JIM O’NEAL is an avid collector and history buff. He is President and CEO of Frito-Lay International [retired] and earlier served as Chairman and CEO of PepsiCo Restaurants International [KFC Pizza Hut and Taco Bell].