Tag: Steve Jobs

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Guy Kawasaki: Corporate Evangelist

It is a common cry that the internet has changed everything and almost equally common to hear that it has transformed marketing. One person leading the charge to dedefine marketing in the technology age is Guy Kawasaki; formerly, and perhaps most famously, Chief Evangelist for Apple.

Guy Kawasaki

Short Biography

Guy Kawasaki was born in 1954, in Honolulu. He says of his school that ‘it is not as well known as its rival, because no presidents of the US went there’. However, it did allow him to study psychology at Stanford University, from where he went on to UCLA, after a week at UC Davis; starting Law School, but finding it wasn’t for him. After gaining his MBA at UCLA, his first job was in the jewellery trade, which taught him how to sell.

Kawasaki’s next job took him into the milieu in which he has remained: the technology industry. It was when his employer was taken over, and he was asked to move to Atlanta, that he made the move instead to Apple, in 1983. There he took the role of ‘Software evangelist’ – his job was to convince developers to create products for a new computer that, at the time, had a tiny user-base, no backwards compatibility, and minimal sales. He stayed in this role for four years.

His next role was leading a software business, creating products for a new computer… He says deprecatingly of himself that he believed his own hype, but for a while, the database software that Acius created was among the best for the Apple system. A spell of journalism followed (in the Mac arena) and then he collaborated to set up another software company. But in 1995, Kawasaki returned to Apple as their ‘Chief Evangelist’ charged with developing and protecting the brand.

Leaving Apple again in 1997, he co-founded a technology venture capital business and gradually built up a wide portfolio of advisory positions with tech businesses. Indeed, he continued to found businesses too – most notably Alltop, and increasingly became a much in-demand speaker and author. He is currently Chief Evangelist at graphics and design software service company, Canva.

Kawasaki’s Ideas

The first thing to say is that Kawasaki’s ideas are not original, and I doubt he would claim it for them. His skill is creating a coherent narrative around ‘marketing by enchantment’ – using the ideas of soft influence to engage an audience and build a loyal customer base for a product or service. He himself likens the content of his book, Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Actions, to Dale Carnegie’s earlier book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. He also describes himself as the author of thirteen books, or of one book, written thirteen times. Be aware of this when shopping, as it does contain a grain of truth!

For me, Enchantment is the book that contains his central thesis. He describes ‘enchantment’ as ‘to charm, delight, enrapture’, and as ‘the process of delighting people with a product, service, organization, or idea.’

So how can you create enchantment?

Kawasaki identifies three primary requirements for enchantment:

1. Greatness

Greatness is about quality – you cannot truly enchant with a sub-standard product. If you want to enchant, you need to start with the passion to create a great product that people will crave, because it goes well beyond good: in Steve Job’s words; ‘crazy good’. Canva, with which he is currently associated, has been described as ‘the easiest to use design program in the world’. Whether or not you believe this is true, the fact that people with knowledge say this is a sign of its greatness (and it is pretty good – and free to use!). It is also an example of another of Kawasaki’s points: that a grand vision is not important, drawing the supposition that Richard Branson almost certainly had no concept of ‘Virgin Group’ when he started Virgin Records – he simply set out to create a great record label. For many years, Canva has been targeted at individuals; only recently has it started to create an enterprise level offering.

2. Likeability

You need to make your product or service likeable, by being humble, generous, decent and doing what you say you’ll do. Answer your phones quickly, and do the right thing for people. Kawasaki is mistrustful of charisma and instead urges real engagement with customers and prospective customers. Show them courtesy and respect, and do nice things for them and they will surely come to like you and your brand.

3. Trust

Long-term, likeability will turn into trust. When you continually delight with both the quality of your product or service and treat people exceptionally well, they will come to trust you. Once you have that, as long as you do not squander it, you have created real and valuable capital for your brand.

I think you can see that none of this is revolutionary.

So why is it important? It is important because it works, yet is not that widely acted upon. The burden of Kawasaki’s advice is honoured more often in the breach than the observance, as the vast majority of corporations continue to invest highly in traditional forms of marketing and advertising, which fail to respectfully engage with their markets. Why? I think because it is easier. I think that you can readily hire an agency for the one, but need exceptional individuals and exceptional commitment to ‘do enchantment’ well.

Presenting to Enchant
A short diversion

I was very much taken, while researching this blog, with Kawasaki’s simple advice for presenters, so here it is…

The 10-20-30 Rule:

  • 10 Slides
  • 20 minutes
  • 30 point font

Use lots of graphics and images

Where you can, demonstrate rather than explain

Kawasaki Speaking

Guy Kawasaki is a much in demand speaker. Here he is at TEDx talking about ‘The Art of Innovation’. This is one of my favourite TED talks with plenty of aha moments.

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Steve Jobs: Unity of Opposites

Steve Jobs is one of the most analysed and written about figures in twentieth century business. On the one hand, what more can the Pocketblog say about him? On the other, how can we possibly ignore him?

Steve Jobs

Short Biography

It is hard to disentangle the biography of Steve Jobs from that of the company he co-founded, Apple. Perhaps it is enough to say that he was born in 1955, was adopted, and grew up in California, where he had eclectic interests from the start, but dominating them all was an interest in computing. While working at Atari, he was described by its cofounder, Nolan Bushnall, as ‘very often, the smartest guy in the room’.

Jobs had already been introduced to a technically excellent engineer and enthusiast, Steve Wozniak, with whom he hooked up for a number of minor ventures where Jobs’ acumen was combined with Wozniak’s expertise. In 1976, they formalised the relationship, cofounding Apple together with one of Jobs’ Atari colleagues, Ronald Wayne. Wayne is sometimes described as one of the unluckiest men alive, having sold up his shares early on, for very little money, concerned that of the three, he was the only one with assets at stake, should the nascent company fail.

The rise and rise and fall and rise of Apple is history and very well documented elsewhere. Perhaps the turning point in many ways came around the end of 1983. Concerned about the rise of Microsoft, which had entered the market in 1981 and was starting to threaten Apple’s hegemony in personal computing, Jobs made the decision to hire heavy weight corporate expertise, in the form of former PepsiCo President, John Sculley. Together, they launched the Apple Macintosh with a breakthrough TV advert directed by Ridley Scott, that many people of my generation still remember clearly. Here it is…

However, despite a successful launch, Jobs and Sculley had different visions for the technical basis of future Apple computers. It was the corporate man who won the confidence of the Board and, in 1985, Jobs found himself fired. In the period up to 1996, when Jobs returned to Apple, he built two businesses, whose legacy dominates the entertainment industry.

NeXT Computers

Whatever happened to the other computer company that Jobs founded: NeXT? Is it just a footnote or did it really have an impact? Very much the latter. It was a NeXT computer that Tim Berners-Lee worked on, when he created what we now call the World-Wide Web. And it was NeXt software that Apple subsequently used to build the iTunes store.

Pixar

In 1986, Jobs bought the graphics division of George Lucas’ Lucasfilms  for $10 million, and renamed it Pixar. Its first film was Toy Story, and virtually everything it has created since has been Hollywood magic and financial gold-dust. When Jobs sold Pixar to Disney in 2006, he became Disney’s largest shareholder, by far.

Back to Apple

When Apple bought NeXt in 1996, Jobs returned to a business that, under three CEOs, had declined from 20% to 5% market share. Jobs cut investment in many projects and focused on new computers and then in other, breakthrough digital appliances: the iPod, iPhone and iPad.

The big innovation, however, was not the technology, but the move into digital sales of music and then books, films, applications and just about anything.

It is a triumph for a view that split Jobs from Apple all the way back in 1985: the integration of software and hardware.

In 2011, Jobs resigned from Apple towards the end of a long battle with pancreatic cancer, which finally defeated him in October 2011. Pocketblog marked the event.

What can the rest of us learn from Jobs?

I think that what made Jobs remarkable was the way he embraced opposites and brought unity to them. Form and Function, of course, in designs that he called ‘insanely great’. His products had to be the best they could be in both beauty and power.

Microsoft and IBM became powerful players, and today it is Google and Samsung too. But all of these companies respect a significant divide between hardware and software. Each specialises. Apple did not and continues to create tight integration and a closed system that, many argue, is the key to their simplicity and reliability*.

But the biggest integration is almost certainly the one that is primarily responsible for Apple’s awesome commercial dominance today (early 2015): the fusion of computing and entertainment. The iTunes store that sells TV, film, books, and more to consume on Apple hardware, via Apple software. Whatever next: Apple production?

So what else can we learn?

I take away five lessons form the business life of Steve Jobs:

  1. The drive and passion to create what he wanted; his vision, no matter what.
  2. The eclecticism that led to design ethics and a range of business interests that made Apple the company it is
  3. The ruthlessness and acumen that has been both lauded and criticised but, when focused well, has fed the drive
  4. The faith he had in the place of art, design, and beauty in commerce
  5. The confidence to dare to be different, combined with the acumen to make his distinctiveness the core of a brand that looks today as if it will outlive hm by many years.

In His Own Words

Whilst it is tempting to post some of Jobs’ greatest presentations in the form of landmark product launches, instead, here is a short video of Jobs addressing students of Standford University, in 2005.

 

 

 

 

* Declaration of interest: the author of this blog switched from Windows to Mac 12 months ago and has no regrets.

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Listening to your Customer

Steve Jobs famously eschewed focus groups and market research in designing new Apple products.  He did not want to supply what customers wanted.  He wanted customers to want what he created.

Whether Apple will be able to sustain that level of creativity is a question only time will answer.  But Jobs’ attitude did not mean that Apple was deaf to its customers – quite the opposite.  Having created the kind of loyalty that just about any other corporation can only dream of, everything Apple does has been tailored to retaining that crazy loyalty.

Marketing departments typically spend their time and resources looking for ever better ways to ensure that potential customers hear their message.  Customer service departments focus on fixing customer problems.  Who in your business is dedicated to listening to the customers you have, to build loyalty?  It’s cheaper and easier than acquiring new customers, and it’s cheaper and easier than fixing relationships with disappointed customers.

The big question is ‘How?’

How can you really listen to the voice of your customer? 

Surveys are great – especially low cost, easy-to-implement online surveys using tools like Zoomerang or Survey Monkey.  These have the benefit that they take little effort from your customer (and why should they make a big effort?) and can be supported by an appropriate incentive like a small reward or a competition entry.

The gold standard for good feedback on what you do (and don’t do) is follow-up calls or meetings from someone separate from the team that serves your customer.  To make it work for both you and your customer, you must welcome absolutely frank assessments and ask good questions to secure details that make appropriate actions easy to target accurately.

But what if your customers won’t talk to you?  You can always employ a ‘professional customer’ – mystery shoppers.  They are great for thorough, detailed and accurate assessment of what you do.  Unlike real customers, however, they cannot give you information about what else they want, from your product or service lines.

Customer focus groups or ‘customer panels’ can do that.  They are a lot of work to plan and organise and expensive too – often requiring specialist consultants, room hire, and inducements to participate.  This is a form of market research and the Marketing Pocketbook offers eight more variants on what we have above.

The forgotten question is Why?

In case ‘why would you listen to your customer?’ seems like a pointless question with an obvious answer: ‘of course you must’ – stop for a moment.

Of course you must, but unless you know why you are going to do it, you rune the risk of asking the wrong questions, choosing the wrong format, and mis-using the answers.  It is all too easy to feel like you are doing something useful by sending people out to listen to your customers, but before you do so, make sure you have a purpose and design the process accordingly.

A Paradigm Shift

Michael Porter identified two sources of competitive advantage:

  1. Industry Cost Leadership
  2. Product Differentiation

Arguably, Apple has neither, with high prices for products that are being successfully emulated by their main rivals.  So how are they succeeding?  I believe by a third source of competitive advantage: brand loyalty.

As a prevailing business strategy, this is new force in big business, but one we can all exploit, by building an organisation that excites and values its customers so much that we win the kind of fanatical following that Apple has.

If you can do that – with or without one of Porter’s two other sources of competitive advantage – you have the basis for a long-term business.

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On Competition: Internal Forces and the 7-S Model

Tom Peters is a maverick thinker with a provocative style and use of language.  We introduced his work in October 2011.  However, far earlier in his career, while he was still at international consulting firm McKinsey, he co-developed a tool that rapidly fell into the mainstream.

Like last week’s Five Forces Model, the McKinsey 7-S model is provocative in a conservative sort of a way: it can provoke deep insights into your organisation, but is far from revolutionary.  It is radical in the true* sense of the work, rather than in the ‘way out’ sense it has come to adopt.

* Radical, from radix, meaning root.  As in radish.

The Origins of the 7-S Model

The 7-S model was created by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman (and, I am sure I read once, somewhere, another colleague, un-credited in the book) and was published widely in their business best-seller, ‘In Search Of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies’.  The authors do credit Anthony Athos and Richard Pascale for their help in developing the model.

They acknowledge its ‘obviousness’ but rightly, I think, assert its great utility.  In last week’s Pocketblog, I suggested that Porter’s Five Forces Model needed an additional element to account for the forces within a business.  I think this is a great model for that purpose.  It also serves very well for non-profit organisations in the public and charitable sectors.

The Seven Ss

Okay, the authors also recognise that, at times, they needed a shoe horn to force the model into Seven Ss, rather than, say 4 Ss and a few other letters.  But it works very well, and the alliterative nature makes it memorable and therefore more useful.

McKinsey7S

The fundamental tenet of the model is that, for an organisation to succeed, it must bring seven dimensions into good alignment.  Gaps and mis-alignments will be sources of failure or, at least, internal tensions and therefore performance challenges. Let’s illustrate this with an admired company.

Shared Values

At the heart of the model is the need for shared values.  Apple’s whole business is aligned around the values of design and user experience.

Style

Led by  Steve Jobs, the business had a style that combined ruthless attention to detail, with an entrepreneurial flair that encouraged ideas.  People have been free to innovate – as long as they met Jobs’ exacting standards.

Staff

Consequently, Apple is able to attract the very best staff, and is very demanding of them.

Skills

Staff come with passion and a lot of skills, but Apple invests massively to keep staff at the peak of product knowledge and technical excellence.

Structure

I can only speculate about the business structure, but I would expect it to echo the style – loose in the sense that alliances and collaborations are promoted in the development arena, but tight around the operational details, like supply chain and retail.

Systems

Apple’s procurement and supply chain systems have become legendary as they have built capacity for launching and supplying huge new market-dominating products.

Strategy

Under Jobs, the strategy was to focus on a small number of products and to make them innovative and excellent – enabling the business to capture a huge market share relative to its size, and build a loyal customer following.

The 7-s model is represented by seven inter-connected circles arranged with six spaced around the seventh (Shared Values) in the centre.  This networked ‘Atomium-like’ image illustrates well, the network nature of these dimensions and their inter-relatedness.  There is also a big © symbol attached to it so, notwithstanding the numerous reproductions in derivative books and websites, we’ll settle for our alternative representation and a picture of Brussels’ Atomium!

Atomium

The Atomium
by o palsson

Rights granted under Creative Commons Licence

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12 Blogs for Christmas

Holly&Ivy

This has been a great year for the Pocketblog, seeing reading figures rise substantially and reaching the milestone of our 100th blog posting.

So, with Christmas coming at the end of the week, let’s do a round-up of some personal favourites from among this year’s Pocketblogs.

Here is something for each of the twelve days.  Enjoy!

1. Start as you mean to go on: Happiness

After some New Year’s Resolutions to start the year off, we dived into the subject of Happiness, with ‘Happiness – as simple as ABC?’ about Albert Ellis’s Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy – the fore-runner of CBT.

2. … and Start Topical

We then moved into a subject that was much in the news in February; and still is.  With ‘Bankers’ Bonuses and Brain Biology’, we looked at recent neuroscience and how that relates to Adams’ Equity Theory.

3. Generations

In February too, I wrote two blogs about sociological ‘Generations X, Y & Z’ and ‘Generation Y at work’.  I followed this up by another about what comes ‘After Generation Y?’.

4. The Gemba

In May, inspiration waned for a week, so where did I go to find it?  ‘The Gemba’.  I got it back, and later that month, got idealistic in ‘Reciprocity and Expectation’ looking at the Pay it Forward ideal and the realities of Game Theory.

5. Why do we do what we do?

In the first of two blogs on how to predict human behaviour, I looked at ‘How to Understand your Toddler’ (mine actually) and Icek Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behaviour.  Later in the year, in ‘Predicting Behaviour’, I looked at whether a simple equation (hypothesised by Kurt Lewin) could predict all behaviour.

6. One of the Best Business Books of the Year

… according to the Journal Strategy & Business is Richard Rumelt’s Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The difference and why it matters.  In ‘What Makes a Good Business Strategy’ we looked at some of his ideas.

7. The Apprentice

This year, I have been a big fan of both series and have written my own episode by episode analysis of both The Apprentice and Young Apprentice.  I also did one blog on each for Pocketblog: ‘The Apprentice and Five Levels of Leadership’ and, for Young Apprentice, ‘Decision Failure’.

8. Drucker Triptych

Has any one individual been as influential in establishing management as a pragmatic academic discipline as Peter Drucker?  To recognise his various achievements, I wrote a triptych of blogs over the summer:

  1. The Man who Invented Management
  2. Management by Objectives
  3. R.I.P. Corporate Clone: Arise Insightful Executive

And one of Drucker’s direct contemporaries was W Edwards Deming, so I also took a look at ‘Demings’ System of Profound Knowledge’.

9. Crazy Times

Will history look on Tom Peters with the respect that it holds for Drucker and Deming?  Who knows?  But without a doubt, Peters has been influential, insightful and provocative for thirty years or more, and I am sure many of his ideas will survive.  In ‘Crazy Times Again’, I drew a line from FW Taylor (father of ‘Scientific Management’) to Peters.

10. The Circle Chart

In ‘Going Round in Circles’ I returned to management models and one of my all time favourites: Fisher and Ury’s Circle Chart. I applied it to problem solving rather than, as they did, to negotiation.

Fisher and Ury are experts on conflict resolution, as is Morton Deutsch. In ‘Conflict: As simple as AEIOU’, I looked at a fabulously simple conflict resolution model that originated in Deutsch’s International Centre for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution.

11. Two Notable Events

Two notable events made the autumn memorable for Pocketblog: one sad and one happy.

  1. In ‘A Bigger Bite’ we marked Steve Jobs’ passing
  2. With ‘Three ways to get it wrong’, we marked our hundredth blog, by looking at one of the towering social psychologists of today, Daniel Kahneman

12. And finally, our most popular topic

Tuckman’s model for group formation has proved to be our most popular topic by far this year.  We have returned to it three times, each time looking at a particular facet:

  1. ‘Swift Trust: Why some teams don’t Storm’
  2. ‘Team Performance Beyond Tuckman’
  3. ‘Tuckman Plus’ is the first of two posts.  It is the last topic post of 2011 and its companion (‘Part 2: Transforming’) will be the first of 2012

So here’s the deal

  • Have a very merry and peaceful Christmas.
  • Have a very happy and healthy New Year.
  • Be good, have fun, stay safe, and prosper.

From all at Management Pocketbooks,
our colleagues at Teacher’s Pocketbooks too,
and from me particularly.

Mike

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A Bigger Bite

What is management without vision and inspiration?

The sad news about Steve Jobs’ untimely death has spurred more blogs than anyone has the time to read, so a shorter than usual pocketblog and a simple observation.

A bigger bite out of Apple

Making the complex seem easy and the sophisticated, a doddle to use: this is more than talent, or skill: it’s art.

Last week, for the first time in my life, I heard a major news story first, not on the radio, not on the TV, not in the press, nor even from a colleague, friend, or acquaintance.  I heard it on Twitter.

… on an iPad.

The world is a better place for everyone who is bringing us new technology and more effective communication.  Yes there are compromises and a price to pay, but who would trade it?  Very few.

Steve Jobs brought us the Mac, Pixar, the iPod, iTunes and more.  But here’s the big one for me: without him, we may still think of a mouse only as a small mammal.  Without Steve Jobs, what would the move to touch screen mean?

This image is the landing page of the Apple website, as I write this blog. (c) Apple 2011

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