“I CALLED STEVE a couple of times after he sold NeXT to Apple,” Lee Clow remembers, “and every time, he said he wasn’t sure if he was going back, that the place was a mess, that Amelio was a dummy. Then one day in the summer, I get a call and it’s Steve. ‘Hey, Lee,’ he says, ‘Amelio resigned!’ as if it was a big surprise even to him. ‘Can you get up here? We’ve got work to do.’ ”

Talk about an understatement. Apple’s litany of woes seemed never-ending.

Just about everything was headed in the wrong direction. In Apple’s fiscal year ending September 26, 1997, the company lost a whopping $816 million. Its annual revenues had shrunk to $7.1 billion, down precipitously from a peak of $11 billion in fiscal 1995. The steady erosion of Apple’s business had punctured investor confidence, and the stock price since 1995 had lost nearly two-thirds of its value: a block of shares purchased in late 1995 for $3,000 was now worth roughly $1,000.

Those weren’t even the scariest numbers. These were the glory years for the PC industry; 80 million personal computers were sold in 1997, up 14 percent from the year before. Sales of Macs, however, had dropped by 27 percent, to a mere 2.9 million machines, giving Apple a minuscule 3.6 percent sliver of the market that year. Much of the pain was self-inflicted: the few buyers who didn’t opt for PCs were often making purchases from the growing number of manufacturers turning out Macintosh clones.

But the deepest reason demand had softened was that Apple’s products were stale, expensive, and increasingly irrelevant. Lacking the technological advantage of a state-of-the-art operating system, Spindler and Amelio had allowed Apple’s marketing teams to order up all kinds of different models of the Macintosh, in hopes that computers with specialized features would appeal to particular customer niches. The effort was a fiasco, littering the market with a confusing and redundant array of slightly different Macs, each requiring unique parts and assembly methods, each promoted with its own inconsistent and frequently conflicting marketing message.

There was also a grab bag of other failures. Apple had spent nearly a half billion dollars developing and promoting Sculley’s Newton, but had managed to sell only 200,000 since its 1993 debut. That hadn’t stopped Amelio from hatching a Newton sibling, albeit with a keyboard, for elementary school students. Called the eMate, it was an oddly intriguing device that looked like a junior laptop done up in translucent aquamarine, with a bulbous cover and an oblong hole along one edge that functioned as a handle. It too failed to sell well. And then there were the printers. Believing that it had to offer a full-service office solution, Apple still sold its own printers. But its only noticeable contribution to the product was the plastic shell it designed to go around printer engines it purchased from Canon. Apple usually sold the machines at a loss. A hybrid Mac/TV for college students and a cheap consumer multimedia computer/game machine called the Pippin rounded out Apple’s desperate array of ill-defined, marketing-driven products. Seen together, this mishmash of offerings represented a company that had lost its soul and become derivative. By the winter of 1997, hundreds of thousands of unsold machines gathered dust in warehouses.

THAT PHONE CALL to Clow was the beginning of Steve’s first big move as iCEO. Steve decided Apple needed an advertising campaign to reaffirm Apple’s old core values: creativity and the power of the individual. It needed to be something radically unlike the meek and confused product advertising that Apple had been offering consumers for years. Instead, this campaign would celebrate the company—not the company as it was that summer of 1997, but the company Steve imagined Apple should be. On the surface, it seemed an outrageous and perhaps spendthrift goal, given the company’s losses and layoffs. But Steve was insistent. And that’s why Clow made the journey north from TBWA\Chiat\Day’s offices in the Venice section of Los Angeles to Apple headquarters in Cupertino.

Technically, Steve made Clow compete for the Apple account with two other agencies. “But he basically told me that it was ours, if I could deliver what he wanted,” remembers Clow. He had several advantages over his competitors. First, of course, he had created the most memorable ad in Apple history (and arguably in the history of advertising), the “1984” Super Bowl spot for the original Mac. Second, he and Steve had a good rapport. They were both middle-class kids with limited formal educations, and they both abhorred the conventional patterns of corporate behavior. While Steve had by now given up the open-toed-sandals look for jeans and a standard T-shirt, Clow came to work in Hawaiian shirts and zipped around the offices on a skateboard. Furthermore, Clow admired Steve’s brilliance and was unafraid of his temper. “I grew up working for Jay Chiat,” he remembers, “and Jay could let loose some tantrums of his own. He was just as ferocious as Steve. But their goals were both the same. Extraordinary work, at any cost. And like Steve, Jay wouldn’t get in your way as you tried to achieve that. Both of them understood that you were going to fail a lot.”

When the time came for Clow to present his work, he and his team had “Think Different” ready. Steve hesitated briefly when shown the first boards for the campaign, which paired the phrase with photos of noteworthy creative mavericks. His worry? That any campaign celebrating individual genius would suffer from the idea that Steve was simply out to celebrate his own creative genius. But he went with Chiat\Day anyway. “His decisiveness was so different from the crew that had been there,” Clow remembers. “No sending things off to some marketing exec somewhere for approval, no vetting by some committee. In the old regime, you never knew who was making the decision. With Steve it was totally different. It was him and me. You don’t get that at any companies—no CEO gets involved the way he does.” The campaign went through several iterations over the course of a few anxious weeks, with Steve fretting the details right up until the final night. Clow pushed hard for Apple to go with a recording of Steve narrating the stirring free-verse essay that elaborated upon the campaign’s motto. He sent the studio that was to broadcast the ad during the network premiere of Toy Story both Steve’s version and another read by the actor Richard Dreyfuss. In the morning, Steve called Clow to tell him they had to run Dreyfuss’s version. “If we go with mine,” Steve said, “it’ll become about me. And this can’t be about me. It’s about the company.” It was not the decision of an egomaniac, of someone only out for himself. “Which is why,” Clow remembers, “he’s the real genius and I’m just the ad guy.”

So on the day of the broadcast, it was Dreyfuss’s voice behind a slide show of portraits of Albert Einstein, John Lennon, Pablo Picasso, Martha Graham, Miles Davis, Frank Lloyd Wright, Amelia Earhart, Charlie Chaplin, and Thomas Edison, among others:

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.

The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.

About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward.

Maybe they have to be crazy.

How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?