Post 15 — Apple Almost Never Says It Removed Anything
This is the final issue of Behavior Follows Rewards. It is about why organizations tend to reward what gets added and rarely reward what gets taken away, with Apple as the example.
A note to close
This series was never meant to run forever. It began the Saturday before Memorial Day and it ends the Saturday before Labor Day, which is about the right length for what it was for: to test the thesis against real cases, and to build the research behind it.
What comes next is the deeper version of the same work. When there is something worth sending, I will send it here. This list stays, and it will not be used for anything else.
Everything published stays up and stays free. Comments stay open and I will read them.
Thank you for the time you gave this, and thank you especially to those of you who wrote back when something was wrong. You made it better.
One last thought follows.
Every week I took one real case — a company, a government program, a league — and showed how the reward shaped the behavior.
Apple changed chief executive on the first of September. It is the company I reach for whenever I want an example of a business that knows what not to build, so this is a reasonable moment to say the one thing about subtraction I am sure of.
Every organization rewards what gets added. A launch, a feature, a headcount someone can point to. A new project creates a budget, a budget creates headcount, and headcount is how seniority gets measured almost everywhere. Every one of those is something you can point to.
Removal is none of those things. A product that is never built has no revenue line to celebrate and no team to promote. Travel never taken never makes it to the expense report. The manager who cancels a project has made himself smaller. And the cost of being wrong is immediate: the customers who wanted the thing will say so, publicly and loudly. The executive who adds a mediocre product is rarely blamed. The executive who removes a beloved one is named.
The hard part is doing the thing the incentive system probably doesn't reward.
Which is where Apple comes in, and not as the exception you would expect. Apple takes things away constantly — a headphone jack, a home button, a Touch Bar, the charger out of the box. Read its own announcements of those decisions and it almost never says so.
The iPhone 7 release does not mention the headphone jack coming off; it announces the earphones and the adapter that replace it. The iPhone X release does not say the home button is gone; it says the software replaces it with fast and fluid gestures. The 2021 MacBook Pro release does not say the Touch Bar was a mistake; it says function keys replace it. Across the announcements I read for this, Apple used the word removing only once, in October 2020, and its own sentence reads in full: “Apple is also removing the power adapter and EarPods from iPhone packaging, further reducing carbon emissions and avoiding the mining and use of precious materials, which enables smaller and lighter packaging, and allows for 70 percent more boxes to be shipped on a pallet.” That was also the only announcement that gave a number for the result.
So even at Apple, a subtraction is announced as the addition of something else. Not because anything is being hidden. A removal on its own gives you nothing to announce.
That is the whole of it. You get credit for what you add. For what you take away, the credit goes to whatever replaces it. When nothing replaces it, there is nothing to put a name on — and that is why an organization keeps building.
Behavior Follows Rewards. The pattern shows up wherever people are measured and rewarded.
Ask yourself: When did your organization last reward someone for removing something? For taking something off the plate? For offering less?
If you are working through an incentive design challenge in your organization — trying to understand why a policy, initiative, or team isn’t doing what you designed it to do — that is the work. Advisory Services →
—Wayne
Going Deeper
I keep coming back to one question: what was the last thing your organization decided not to build, and did anyone outside the room ever hear about it?
The archive: every case in the series, from the beginning. Read every post →
Sources
Apple Inc. "Tim Cook to become Apple Executive Chairman; John Ternus to become Apple CEO." Apple Newsroom, press release, April 20, 2026.
Apple Inc. “Apple introduces iPhone 7 & iPhone 7 Plus, the best, most advanced iPhone ever.” Apple Newsroom, press release, September 7, 2016.
Apple Inc. “The future is here: iPhone X.” Apple Newsroom, press release, September 12, 2017.
Apple Inc. “Apple introduces iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max with 5G.” Apple Newsroom, press release, October 13, 2020.
Apple Inc. “Game-changing MacBook Pro with M1 Pro and M1 Max delivers extraordinary performance and battery life, and features the world’s best notebook display.” Apple Newsroom, press release, October 18, 2021.
BFR was written to be accessible, welcomed, and celebrated by every reader — not simplified, not elevated. Just clear.
