I spent nine years at Apple. It’s the place where I finally grew up. I wasn’t just managing a team anymore. I was leading hundreds, thousands of people. It was a profound shift in my career and in who I was. After a decade of failure, I finally made something—actually two things—that people actually wanted. I finally got it right.

But it didn’t feel like success at first. Or even in the end. It was still work, every step of the way.

I appealed to an alternative crowd. We all know that sex sells – but I wasn’t that kind of artist. I signed my first record deal when I was twenty-six. I was a grown woman, I had my politics down, I had my attitude and my band. I wasn’t manipulable. I didn’t get much negativity about being bisexual – by the mid-1990s people were cooler about gay sexuality – but at the same time it meant that I couldn’t be marketed as the straight sexy rock chick.

This is not a story about land; it’s a story about abstraction. TNC avoided the trap of abstraction—saving 2 million acres per year—by converting abstract blobs on a map into tangible landscapes. TNC realized, wisely, that the context had grown more ambiguous, and the solutions had grown more ambiguous, but that their messages could not be allowed to grow more ambiguous. Concreteness is an indispensable component of sticky ideas.

This story was collected by Gary Klein, a psychologist who studies how people make decisions in high-pressure, high-stakes environments. He spends time with firefighters, air-traffic controllers, powerplant operators, and intensive-care workers. The story about the baby appears in a chapter called “The Power of Stories,” in Klein’s book Sources of Power.

Geoffrey Moore’s influential 1991 book, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Technology Products to Mainstream Customers. This book popularized academics’ concepts of “network externalities” and “standards lock-in” and was the bible for people who wanted to be, or to spot, the next Microsoft.