012. The Apple Store Creator on Why the Most Important Thing You Bring to Work Is You ft. Ron Johnson

What if the most important thing you bring to work isn’t your résumé, your expertise, or even your ideas?

Ron Johnson helped transform Target, built the Apple Store alongside Steve Jobs, and later became CEO of JCPenney. Across a career spent reimagining some of the biggest names in retail, he came to believe that your most important contribution at work is something no résumé can capture: your inner voice. It’s the perspective you discover when you get still enough to realize what you actually believe.

In this conversation with John Ortberg, Ron talks about learning to hear that voice beneath all the others, what Steve Jobs taught him about honesty, and how success can make it harder to recognize what is actually driving you. He also reflects on the failure at JCPenney, the question his father asked that he couldn’t shake, and the words from Psalm 23 that met him in a season of isolation.

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WHAT THIS CONVERSATION EXPLORES:

• Why Ron believes the most important thing you bring to work is your inner voice

• What Steve Jobs taught Ron about telling the truth as a form of kindness

• Why solitude matters when you’re trying to hear what you actually believe beneath all the voices around you

• How a garden changed the way Ron thought about leading people and helping them flourish

• The three-hour interview with Steve Jobs that changed the course of Ron’s life and eventually led to the Apple Store

• The ideas behind the Genius Bar and the Fifth Avenue Apple Store that never sleeps

• Why Ron left Apple for JCPenney, and the question his father asked him: “How much success do you need?”

• How failure, isolation, and “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want” changed Ron’s relationship with ambition

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

• Shop Different: How Retail Revealed Apple’s Genius — Ron Johnson and Zander Nethercutt

• A Return to Love — Marianne Williamson

• The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace — M. Scott Peck

• When We Are Seen: How to Come Into Your Power–and Empower Others Along the Way — Denise Young

• My God and I: A Spiritual Memoir — Lewis Smedes

ABOUT FORMATION:

Formation is a podcast that explores the science and soul of spiritual formation. Each episode brings together the ancient wisdom of the contemplative tradition and the best of modern research. John Ortberg sits down with some of the most rigorous and honest thinkers working at the intersection of faith and human flourishing for extended, unhurried conversations about how we are being shaped. New episodes every other week, wherever you listen to podcasts.

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