When Steve Jobs took the stage to unveil the iMac almost a quarter of a century ago, he was basically beaming with pride:

He'd returned just nine months earlier to lead the company he'd co-founded, after his unceremonious firing a dozen years earlier.

He was thrilled to have been successful already at changing Apple's image; this was after Apple's "Think Different" marketing campaign, that people still talk about today.

And, he was practically bouncing off the stage as he rolled out the first new products since his return -- a massive upheaval after Jobs has gotten rid of 70 percent of Apple's product line.

But there was one key statistic that Jobs touted right at the beginning of his presentation, that he said showed that Apple was now accomplishing the "most important" thing any company has to do if it wants to be mong the truly great leaders:

Here's how he put it:

"Don't lose them!" And, how do you measure whether an organization loses great people?

Well, you hire the best you possibly can, and then you look at the company's annual attrition rate: What percentage of its employees are still with the company at the end of each year.

According to Jobs, Apple's employee attrition rate had been 33 percent during the year before he joined the company. (It was like the old cliche I heard in law school: "Look to the person at your left and look to the person at your right; one of you won't be here at the end of the first year.")

After less than a year with him at the helm, he said, it had dropped to 15 percent.

Without context that doesn't strike me as a stellar end-result, but according to Jobs it was below "the Silicon Valley average."

Also, he'd only been back at Apple for less than a  year, and a much more recent government report from 2021 says overall attrition rates in the United States now average just over 50 percent -- or else 25 percent when you consider only voluntary turnover.

I'm going to include the full video of Jobs's presentation at the end of this article. It's quite interesting to watch how excited everyone gets over things that are beyond commonplace now -- like the idea of an iMac designed with Internet connectivity as a core feature, or Jobs's excitement over the machine's aesthetics, which might seem a little dated to our quarter-of-a-century-later eyes.

But that question of retention and attrition rates seems especially relevant today -- after a pandemic, and a few months of massive numbers of layoffs, and the changing nature of work, and "quiet quitting," and all the rest.

And, it's the big takeaway if you're running a business. In a way, it's like anything in life:

The only thing better than finding an amazing new place to move, is to find an amazing new reason to love the place where you already live.

The only thing better than getting a new customer is keeping a new one who wants to do even more business with you.

The only thing better than recruiting a new employee, is finding that a real A-gamer on your team is stepping up, adding tons of value, and really feeling loyalty to what you're building together.

Actually, let me add one more -- and this one is for my wife, so we can see if she reads these columns -- the only thing better than finding new love is finding yet another reason to love the one you've been with for more than a few years.

O.K. Valentine's Day isn't until next month, and our anniversary isn't until June, so let's bring this back to Jobs. How did he move so quickly to slash the attrition rate at Apple so drastically? I'll let him explain:

The audience laughed at that last part, but when you factor in stock splits (on a 56 to 1 total basis since then), Apple was trading at about 24 cents a share on the day Jobs gave this speech; even after a tough last year or so, it was at $145.93 when I wrote this!

Besides, don't write off that last point: Whether you're running a private company or a public one, find a way to share the wealth.

Jobs was rich, but he wasn't among the top 200 wealthiest people in the world back in 1998, yet he's the one we're writing about and learning from a quarter of a century later. (And let people work remotely, if you're up for it!)

Anyway, here's to low attrition, to icons of entrepreneurship, and to the fact that I'm writing this on a MacBook Pro and there's a better-than-even chance you're reading this on an iPhone. None of it would have happened if a third of Apple's employees had quit back in 1998.

Inc