What I Learned From Steve Jobs [real deal]

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By Guy Kawasaki



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Many people have explained what one can learn from Steve Jobs. But few, if any, of these people have been inside the tent and experienced first hand what it was like to work with him. I don't want any lessons to be lost or forgotten, so here is my list of the top 12 lessons that I learned from Steve Jobs.

1. Experts are clueless
Experts-journalists, analysts, consultants, bankers and gurus-can't "do" so they "advise." They can tell you what is wrong with your product, but they cannot make a great one. They can tell you how to sell something, but they cannot sell it themselves. They can tell you how to create great teams, but they only manage a secretary. … Hear what experts say, but don't always listen to them.



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2. Customers cannot tell you what they need

… If you ask customers what they want, they will tell you, "Better, faster and cheaper"-that is, better sameness, not revolutionary change. They can only describe their desires in terms of what they are already using-around the time of the introduction of Macintosh, all people said they wanted was better, faster and cheaper MS-DOS machines. The richest vein for tech startups is creating the product that you want to use-that's what Steve and Woz did.

3. Jump to the next curve
Big wins happen when you go beyond better sameness. The best daisy-wheel printer companies were introducing new fonts in more sizes. Apple introduced the next curve: laser printing. Think of ice harvesters, ice factories and refrigerator companies. Ice 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0. Are you still harvesting ice during the winter from a frozen pond?

4. The biggest challenges beget best work.



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I lived in fear that Steve would tell me that I, or my work, was garbage. In public. This fear was a big challenge. Competing with IBM and then Microsoft was a big challenge. … I, and Apple employees before me and after me, did their best work because we had to do our best work to meet the big challenges.

5. Design counts
… Mere mortals think that black is black, and that a trash can is a trash can. Steve was such a perfectionist-…and … he was right: some people care about design and many people at least sense it. Maybe not everyone, but the important ones.

6. You can't go wrong with big graphics and big fonts
Take a look at Steve's slides. The font is 60 points. There's usually one big screenshot or graphic. … So many people say that Steve was the world's greatest product introduction guy...don't you wonder why more people don't copy his style?

7. Changing your mind is a sign of intelligence
When Apple first shipped the iPhone there was no such thing as apps. Apps, Steve decreed, were a bad thing because you never know what they could be doing to your phone. … [Six] months later … Steve decided, or someone convinced Steve, that apps were the way to go-but of course. Duh! Apple came a long way in a short time from Safari web apps to "there's an app for that."

8. "Value" is different from "price"
… Price is not all that matters-what is important, at least to some people, is value. And value takes into account training, support and the intrinsic joy of using the best tool that's made. …

9. A players hire A+ players Actually, Steve believed that A players hire A players-that is people who are as good as they are. I refined this slightly-my theory is that A players hire people even better than themselves. It's clear, though, that B players hire C players so they can feel superior to them, and C players hire D players. If you start hiring B players, expect what Steve called "the bozo explosion" to happen in your organization.

10. Real CEOs demo

 

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… [Why] is it that many CEOs call upon their vice-president of engineering to do a product demo? Maybe it's to show that there's a team effort in play. Maybe. It's more likely that the CEO doesn't understand what his/her company is making well enough to explain it. How pathetic is that?

11. Real CEOs ship
For all his perfectionism, Steve could ship. Maybe the product wasn't perfect every time, but it was almost always great enough to go. The lesson is that Steve wasn't tinkering for the sake of tinkering-he had a goal: shipping and achieving worldwide domination of existing markets or creation of new markets. …

12. Marketing boils down to providing unique value
Think of a 2 x 2 matrix. The vertical axis measures how your product differs from the competition. The horizontal axis measures the value of your product. Bottom right: valuable but not unique- you'll have to compete on price. Top left: unique but not valuable-you'll own a market that doesn't exist. Bottom left: not unique and not value-you're a bozo. Top right: unique and valuable-this is where you make margin, money, and history. …

Bonus: Some things need to be believed to be seen
When you are jumping curves, defying/ignoring the experts, facing off against big challenges, obsessing about design and focusing on unique value, you will need to convince people to believe in what you are doing in order to see your efforts come to fruition. … Not everyone will believe-that's okay. But the starting point of changing the world is changing a few minds. This is the greatest lesson of all that I learned from Steve.

***



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Guy Kawasaki is the author of Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions. He is also the co-founder of Alltop.com, an "online magazine rack" of popular topics on the web, and a founding partner at Garage Technology Ventures. Previously, he was the chief evangelist of Apple. Kawasaki is the author of nine other books including Reality Check, The Art of the Start, Rules for Revolutionaries, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, Selling the Dream, and The Macintosh Way. Kawasaki has a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from UCLA as well as an honorary doctorate from Babson College.



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Why Bootstrapping Is As Over-Rated As Raising Money

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 TechCrunch
Ashkan Karbasfrooshan 

Photo credit: Leonard John Matthews
Entrepreneurship requires balancing unbridled optimism with delusional foolishness.  Most entrepreneurs are mocked and misunderstood until they are wildly successful, at which point the chorus changes from “good luck with that ‘business’, pal” to “I always believed in ya, buddy!”


Master of your Domain

There is an undeniable appeal to the notion of bootsrapping your company to success without venture capital. While bootstrapping has many advantages aside from control and ownership—…—the reality is that the disadvantages may be greater. …


Yes, Mo Money = Mo Problems, but Money = Lifeline
Throwing money at problems is usually a short term fix.  …
But with no safety net (let alone a warchest) on your balance sheet, you can’t really pivot if your business is hitting a wall.  Even if you’re doing well, money is your lifeline, so lacking it may starve even the most promising of bootstrapped companies, preventing you from investing in growth or supporting your clients.  So in a best case scenario, you’re operating with one foot on the pedal with another in the grave.  You’re basically in a perpetual state of fund-seeking, which is far more distracting than being in fundraising mode.…


Give equity to grow equity
Fundraising is an art, and in Silicon Valley, conventional wisdom suggests that you “raise as much money as you can”.  …

Except raising as much money—or diluting—as much as one can is good for investors but bad for entrepreneurs. …

But this shines a light on another reality of value creation: you have to ensure that others want to see you succeed and prosper, and the only way to do that is to hand out equity; as John Doerr says “no conflict, no interest”.


Meet the Board: Your More Objective Bad Cop
Once you have investors on board, the board they assemble will come in handy when you need to make tough decisions.  Knowing that you have a regular evaluation and review of the business’ operational and financial metrics helps you succeed, plain and simple.

It’s also helpful for the CEO to be able to play good cop to the board’s bad cop.  Indeed, many CEOs lack an objective sounding board and have an emotional attachment to an idea which not only wastes money but more importantly, the best years of your life.

So while too many companies chase the flavor of the month at the behest of their investors, the board will push you until your business takes off or you need to pivot.


Psychological Price Floor
While businesses should be valued on their financials, the historical valuation that investors place on your company may play a role in at least determining a floor price in a worst case scenario or a framework, at least.  …

Conversely, I have been told at least a dozen times that not having raised any venture capital values my company at a discount.


The Perception Problem: Red flag?
Moreover, not raising money from professional investors is—in all honesty—a potential red flag.  It’s rare for an entrepreneur to run a business and spend millions of dollars without having any outside help.  When that is the case, it’s a normal reaction to wonder: why?  Why hasn’t outside money been raised?  It’s unfair, but saying that it’s never come up would be a lie.


No Sympathy Points
Ultimately, while you may score extra points for building a large business despite being bootstrapped, you don’t actually score many points for running a small business if you have avoided venture capital, even though 99.9% of VC-funded companies wouldn’t exist or last as long as yours if they didn’t have VC funding to rely on.

The cliché is that it’s not the destination that matters, but the journey.  …  In the sports and business world, it’s all about the outcome.  No one remembers the score, let alone how the teams played the game, they remember who won, even if it means giving in to greed and resorting to bad behavior.

When it’s said and done, you can own 100% of a lemonade stand or 1% of Coca-Cola. While these are extreme polar opposites and a middle ground does exist, you have to understand that neither approach to building a business comes without its share of problems and drawbacks. In some ways, you build a business despite bootstrapping or raising VC, and not because of it.

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Editor’s note: Contributor Ashkan Karbasfrooshan is the founder and CEO of WatchMojo.  Follow him @ashkan.

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The Business Case for Reading Novels

Harvard Business Review blog
4:02 PM Wednesday January 11, 2012
by Anne Kreamer | Comments (27)
Anne Kreamer

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I've been a devoted, even fanatical reader of fiction my whole life, but sometimes I feel like I'm wasting time if I spend an evening immersed in Lee Child's newest thriller, or re-reading The Great Gatsby. … That slight feeling of self-indulgence that haunts me when I'm reading fake stories about fake people is what made me so grateful to stumble on a piece in Scientific American Mind by cognitive psychologist Keith Oatley extolling the practical benefits to be derived particularly from consuming fiction.

Over the past decade, academic researchers such as Oatley and Raymond Mar from York University have gathered data indicating that fiction-reading activates neuronal pathways in the brain that measurably help the reader better understand real human emotion — improving his or her overall social skillfulness. … It turns out that when Henry James, more than a century ago, defended the value of fiction by saying that "a novel is a direct impression of life," he was more right than he knew.

In one of Oatley and Mar's studies in 2006, 94 subjects were asked to guess the emotional state of a person from a photograph of their eyes. "The more fiction people [had] read," they discovered, "the better they were at perceiving emotion in the eyes, and...correctly interpreting social cues." In 2009, wondering, as Oatley put it, if "devouring novels might be a result, not a cause, of having a strong theory of mind," they expanded the scope of their research, testing 252 adults on the "Big Five" personality traits — extraversion, emotional stability, openness to experience, agreeableness and conscientiousness — and correlated those results with how much time the subjects generally spent reading fiction. Once again, they discovered "a significant relation between the amount of fiction people read and their empathic and theory-of-mind abilities" allowing them to conclude that it was reading fiction that improved the subjects' social skills, not that those with already high interpersonal skills tended to read more.

Theory of mind, the ability to interpret and respond to those different from us — colleagues, employees, bosses, customers and clients — is plainly critical to success, particularly in a globalized economy. The imperative to try to understand others' points of view — to be empathetic — is essential in any collaborative enterprise.

Emotions also have an impact on the bottom line. A 1996 study published in the journal Training and Development assessing the value of training workers at a manufacturing plant in emotional management skills … found that union grievance filings were reduced by two-thirds while productivity increased substantially. And a study of a Fortune 400 health insurance company conducted by Peter Salovey, a psychology professor at Yale, looked at the correlations between emotional intelligence and salary and found that people rated highest by their peers in emotional intelligence received the biggest raises and were promoted most frequently.

To bring the subject home, think about how many different people you interact with during the course of a given day … Then think about how much effort you devoted to thinking about their emotional state or the emotional quality of your interaction. It's when we read fiction that we have the time and opportunity to think deeply about the feelings of others, really imagining the shape and flavor of alternate worlds of experience. …

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… And if you want your diet of fiction, as it's shaping your mind to be more emotionally acute, to be specifically relevant to work, there is a body of great literature about business and organizational behavior. For instance, Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now, inspired by 19th century financial scandals among the British elite, resonates powerfully today. In his autobiography, Trollope wrote that "a certain class of dishonesty, dishonesty magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places, has become at the same time so rampant and so splendid that there seems to be reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable. If dishonesty can live in a gorgeous palace with pictures on all its walls, and gems in all its cupboards, with marble and ivory in all its corners, and can give Apician dinners, and get into Parliament, and deal in millions, then dishonesty is not disgraceful, and the man dishonest after such a fashion is not a low scoundrel. Instigated, I say, by some such reflections as these, I sat down in my new house to write The Way We Live Now." …

… In addition to the Trollope, below are some of my favorite books to get you started.

Kurt Andersen, Turn of the Century — set in 2000 and 2001, a successful TV producer husband and digital entrepreneur wife, trying to balance the demands of work and life, wind up pitted against each other as executives in a U.S. media empire. His mistrust grows when she becomes a favorite of the Rupert Murdoch-like chairman. Meanwhile, their hedge-fund-manager best friend is involved in big-time stock manipulation. (Full disclosure: my husband is the author)

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Jane Austen, Sandition — in this unfinished fragment of a novel, Austen departs from her typical marriage plot to describe the zealous entrepreneurialism of a real estate speculator. While we can never know how the novel would have ended, we can be pretty sure his housing bubble will burst.

Charles Dickens, Bleak House — Dickens' tenth novel explores the human cost of prolonged litigation through the eyes of Esther Summerson, who is caught up in a multi-generational dispute over the disposition over an inheritance. Anyone who has ever been entangled in a lawsuit will revel in the characterization of the process. At the time of publication, 1852–1853, public outrage over injustice in the English legal system helped the novel to spark legal reform that culminated in the 1870s.

William Gaddis, JR — in the 1976 National Book Award winner, the 11-year old protagonist, JR, secretly trades penny stocks, using the tools of the trade at the time — money orders and payphones — to build a fortune. Written entirely in dialogue, the absurdity of a precocious child's feat satirizes as Gaddis put it, "the American dream turned inside out." His description of dysfunctional boards and the corrosive effect of corporate takeovers and asset stripping are as current today as they were 30 years ago.

Joseph Heller, Something Happened — Heller's stream of consciousness second novel follows a regular-joe middle manager as he prepares for a promotion. The messy interweaving of his thoughts about his job, family, sex, and childhood perfectly distill how complicated the selves we bring to work really are.

Anne Kreamer was the Executive Vice President, Worldwide Creative Director, for Nickelodeon and Nick at Nite. Her books include Going Gray, What I Learned About Beauty, Sex, Work, Motherhood, Authenticity, And Everything Else That Matters, and more recently, It’s Always Personal, which explores the new realities of emotion in the workplace.

Related articles

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The 5 essential functions of a great boss

The 5 essential functions of a great boss - CBS News: 'via Blog this'

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December 27, 2011 9:58 AM

• PRINT
• TEXT

By

Jeff Haden

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(MoneyWatch)

Great business owners become great based on their actions. ... Results are everything.

But probably not the kinds of results you might have in mind.

Consistently accomplish these five functions and you, your company -- and most importantly your employees -- all reap the benefits. ...

1. Develop every employee. ... Without great employees, no amount of focus on goals and targets will pay off. Employees can only achieve what they are capable of achieving, so it's your job to help every employee become capable of achieving more.

... As a manager you owe it to your employees to provide the training, mentoring, and opportunities they need and deserve. In the process you listen, guide, and develop loyalty and commitment. Reviewing results and tracking performance is transformed from enforcement into personal progress and improvement -- both for the employee and for business.

Employee development is your primary responsibility as a boss. Spend the bulk of your time developing the skills of employees; goal achievement becomes a natural, long-term result.

2. Take care of problems immediately. ... Interpersonal squabbles, performance issues, inter-departmental feuds all negatively impact employee motivation, enthusiasm, and even individual work ethic.

Small problems never go away. They always fester and grow into bigger problems -- and when you ignore an issue, employees immediately lose respect for you. Without respect you can't lead.

Never hope a problem will magically disappear (or someone else will deal with it.) No matter how small, deal with every issue head-on.

3. Rescue a struggling employee. Every team has an employee who has fallen out of grace: Publicly failed to complete a task, blew up in a meeting, or just makes particularly slow progress. ...

When that happens it's almost impossible for the struggling employee to turn a corner on his own. ...

But that weight is not too heavy for you to move.

Before you remove a weak link from the chain, put your full effort into trying to rehabilitate that person instead. Step in and address the situation, but do so in a positive way. ... Express confidence, be reassuring, and most of all tell him you'll be there every step of the way.

Don't relax your standards, though. Just step up the mentoring and coaching you provide.

Granted, sometimes it won't work out, so see the effort as its own reward.

4. Serve others -- never yourself. ... Never say or do anything that in any way puts you in the spotlight, however briefly. ... Never say, "This took a lot of work, but I have finally convinced upper management to let us..." If it should go without saying, don't say it.

Your glory should always be reflected, never direct. When employees excel you excel. When your team succeeds you succeed. ...

Consistently act as if you are less important than your employees and everyone will know how important you really are.

5. Stay humble. ... Some admire what you have accomplished; most respect you for your hard work and achievements. So sometimes an employee will just want to talk or to spend a little time with you.

When that happens you can blow that person off, or you can see the moment for its true importance: A chance to inspire, motivate, reassure, or give someone hope for greater things in their life.

The higher you rise, the greater the impact you can make, and the greater your responsibility to make that impact.

© 2011 CBS Interactive Inc.. All Rights Reserved.

• Jeff Haden
  
  
  Jeff Haden learned much of what he knows about business from managing a 250-employee book manufacturing plant. Everything else he picked up from ghostwriting books for some of the smartest CEOs and leaders in business. He has written more than 30 non-fiction books, including four Business and Investing titles that reached #1 on Amazon's bestseller list. Follow him on Twitter at @Jeff_Haden.

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The Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives - Forbes



Forbes
1/02/2012 @ 10:47

Eric Jackson, Contributor



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Sydney Finkelstein, the Steven Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, published “Why Smart Executives Fail” 8 years ago.

In it, he shared some of his research on what over 50 former high-flying companies – like Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, Rubbermaid, and Schwinn – did to become complete failures.  It turns out that the senior executives at the companies all had 7 Habits in common.  Finkelstein calls them the Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives.

… Here are the habits, as Finkelstein described in a 2004 article:

Habit # 1:  They see themselves and their companies as dominating their environment
This first habit may be the most insidious, since it appears to be highly desirable.  Shouldn’t a company try to dominate its business environment, shape the future of its markets and set the pace within them?  Yes,but there’s a catch.  Unlike successful leaders, failed leaders who never question their dominance fail to realize they are at the mercy of changing circumstances….
CEOs who fall prey to this belief suffer from the illusion of personal pre-eminence:…  As far as they’re concerned, everyone else in the company is there to execute their personal vision for the company. 
Warning Sign for #1:  A lack of respect

Habit #2:  They identify so completely with the company that there is no clear boundary between their personal interests and their corporation’s interests
…  We want business leaders to be completely committed to their companies, with their interests tightly aligned with those of the company.  But digging deeper, you find that failed executives weren’t identifying too little with the company, but rather too much.  Instead of treating companies as enterprises that they needed to nurture, failed leaders treated them as extensions of themselves.  And with that, a “private empire” mentality took hold.

CEOs who possess this outlook often use their companies to carry out personal ambitions.  The most slippery slope of all for these executives is their tendency to use corporate funds for personal reasons.  … Being the CEO of a sizable corporation today is probably the closest thing to being king of your own country, and that’s a dangerous title to assume.
Warning Sign for #2: A question of character

Habit #3:  They think they have all the answers
… Leaders who are invariably crisp and decisive tend to settle issues so quickly they have no opportunity to grasp the ramifications. Worse, because these leaders need to feel they have all the answers, they aren’t open to learning new ones.

…  Leaders who need to have all the answers shut out other points of view. When your company or organization is run by someone like this, you’d better hope the answers he comes up with are going to be the right ones.  …
Warning Sign for #3:  A leader without followers

Habit #4:  They ruthlessly eliminate anyone who isn’t completely behind them
CEOs who think their job is to instill belief in their vision also think that it is their job to get everyone to buy into it.  Anyone who doesn’t rally to the cause is undermining the vision.  Hesitant managers have a choice: Get with the plan or leave.

The problem with this approach is that it’s both unnecessary and destructive. … In fact, by eliminating all dissenting and contrasting viewpoints, destructive CEOs cut themselves off from their best chance of seeing and correcting problems as they arise.  Sometimes CEOs who seek to stifle dissent only drive it underground. Once this happens, the entire organization falters.  …  Eventually, these CEOs had everyone on their staff completely behind them. But where they were headed was toward disaster.  And no one was left to warn them.
Warning Sign for #4:  Executive departures

Habit #5: They are consummate spokespersons, obsessed with the company image
You know these CEOs: high-profile executives who are constantly in the public eye.  The problem is that amid all the media frenzy and accolades, these leaders’ management efforts become shallow and ineffective. …

Behind these media darlings is a simple fact of executive life: CEOs don’t achieve a high level of media attention without devoting themselves assiduously to public relations.  When CEOs are obsessed with their image, they have little time for operational details. …

As a final negative twist, when CEOs make the company’s image their top priority, they run the risk of using financial-reporting practices to promote that image.  Instead of treating their financial accounts as a control tool, they treat them as a public-relations tool. The creative accounting that was apparently practiced by such executives as Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling or Tyco’s Kozlowski is as much or more an attempt to promote the company’s image as it is to deceive the public: In their eyes, everything that the company does is public relations.
Warning Sign of #5:  Blatant attention-seeking

Habit #6: They underestimate obstacles
Part of the allure of being a CEO is the opportunity to espouse a vision. Yet, when CEOs become so enamored of their vision, they often overlook or underestimate the difficulty of actually getting there.  And when it turns out that the obstacles they casually waved aside are more troublesome than they anticipated, these CEOs have a habit of plunging full-steam into the abyss.  …

…  Some feel an enormous need to be right in every important decision they make, because if they admit to being fallible, their position as CEO might seem precarious. Once a CEO admits that he or she made the wrong call, there will always be people who say the CEO wasn’t up to the job.  These unrealistic expectations make it exceedingly hard for a CEO to pull back from any chosen course of action, which not surprisingly causes them to push that much harder.  …
Warning Sign of #6:  Excessive hype

Habit #7: They stubbornly rely on what worked for them in the past
Many CEOs on their way to becoming spectacularly unsuccessful accelerate their company’s decline by reverting to what they regard as tried-and-true methods. … Instead of considering a range of options that fit new circumstances, they use their own careers as the only point of reference and do the things that made them successful in the past.  …

Frequently, CEOs who fall prey to this habit owe their careers to some “defining moment,” a critical decision or policy choice that resulted in their most notable success.  … The problem is that after people have had the experience of that defining moment, if they become the CEO of a large company, they allow their defining moment to define the company as well – no matter how unrealistic it has become.
Warning Sign of #7:  Constantly referring to what worked in the past

The bottom line: If you exhibit several of these traits, now is the time to stamp them out from your repertoire.  If your boss or several senior executives at your company exhibit several of these traits, now is the time to start looking for a new job.

Related articles

• Why CEOs fail, and what to do about it (business.financialpost.com)
• Worst CEOs: A Check Up From The Head Up (npr.org)
• Maintaining success after exit of charismatic CEO (sfgate.com)