Steve Jobs’s Seven Rules of Success courtesy of Carmine Gallo

PM: I have followed Apple since 1985 and I think Carmine Gallo has correctly identified seven principles that Steve Jobs followed. I am presently doing research on why Apple was such a poorly managed company before Jobs was fired. Anyone who has insight on this, please contact me. When Jobs came back to Apple, lead to company to new success that no one including myself would have predicted.  Here is what Mrs. Gallo has crystallized about Job’s method.

1. Do what you love. Jobs once said, “People with passion can change the world for the better.” Asked about the advice he would offer would-be entrepreneurs, he said, “I’d get a job as a busboy or something until I figured out what I was really passionate about.” That’s how much it meant to him. Passion is everything.

2. Put a dent in the universe. Jobs believed in the power of vision. He once asked then-Pepsi President, John Sculley, “Do you want to spend your life selling sugar water or do you want to change the world?” Don’t lose sight of the big vision.

3. Make connections. Jobs once said creativity is connecting things. He meant that people with a broad set of life experiences can often see things that others miss. He took calligraphy classes that didn’t have any practical use in his life—until he built the Macintosh. Jobs traveled to India and Asia. He studied design and hospitality. Don’t live in a bubble. Connect ideas from different fields.

4. Say no to 1,000 things. Jobs was as proud of what Apple chose not to do as he was of what Apple did. When he returned in Apple in 1997, he took a company with 350 products and reduced them to 10 products in a two-year period. Why? So he could put the “A-Team” on each product. What are you saying “no” to? 

5. Create insanely different experiences. Jobs also sought innovation in the customer-service experience. When he first came up with the concept for the Apple Stores, he said they would be different because instead of just moving boxes, the stores would enrich lives. Everything about the experience you have when you walk into an Apple store is intended to enrich your life and to create an emotional connection between you and the Apple brand. What are you doing to enrich the lives of your customers?

6. Master the message. You can have the greatest idea in the world, but if you can’t communicate your ideas, it doesn’t matter. Jobs was the world’s greatest corporate storyteller. Instead of simply delivering a presentation like most people do, he informed, he educated, he inspired and he entertained, all in one presentation.

7. Sell dreams, not products. Jobs captured our imagination because he really understood his customer. He knew that tablets would not capture our imaginations if they were too complicated. The result? One button on the front of an iPad. It’s so simple, a 2-year-old can use it. Your customers don’t care about your product. They care about themselves, their hopes, their ambitions. Jobs taught us that if you help your customers reach their dreams, you’ll win them over.

From: Entrepreneur.com

PM: October 25, 2011: Started my research on why Job’s rose from the ashes at Apple by reading the new biography.

More Information on Steve Jobs

Apple put on an 70 min celebration of life of their leader on October 17. All Apple shops around the worlds were close so that employees from all over the world could participate live in the event. Watch the Video here.

The new Steve Jobs biography came out October 24, 2011. It its available electronically for the Kindle

An excellent, on target, review of the book is available on FT.com

Why the CEO of HP was fired after only 10 months on the job

The proximate cause was the HP Stock price.

For more distant causes click on “more”.

Excerpts from the NY Times article reporting the reasons for the ouster.

The upheaval at H.P. came after several weeks of mounting concerns among board members, senior executives and investors about how the former chief, Léo Apotheker, had handled a major strategy shift at the company announced last month, according to interviews with several people briefed on the board’s discussions.

While the board still endorses the strategy change — which includes a possible spinoff of its personal computer business, the closing of a line of mobile devices and the $11.7 billion acquisition of the software maker Autonomy — its members felt that Mr. Apotheker had bungled communicating the plans to H.P. employees and outsiders.

“It’s not about the strategy, it’s about the guy,” said one of the people with knowledge of the board’s discussions, who was not authorized to speak publicly.

In an interview, Ms. Whitman, who became a member of the board this year, said the process that had led to Mr. Apotheker’s ouster took place over about three months, and came to a head in late August. Once she was aware that she would be a candidate to succeed him, she said, she recused herself from the selection of a successor.

[...]
The atmosphere in the executive ranks at H.P. beneath Mr. Apotheker became increasingly tense over the past several weeks. “They were demoralized and confused,” said one former H.P. executive who stays in contact with colleagues still at the company. “They felt there was no process matching the vision, no structure for execution.”

H.P.’s board was becoming more unsettled by Mr. Apotheker’s communications with investors, including bullish statements about H.P.’s prospects that turned out to be embarrassing in hindsight. At an investor conference in the spring put on by Sanford C. Bernstein, the investment firm’s analyst Toni Sacconaghi asked Mr. Apotheker how confident, on a scale of one to 10, he was that H.P. would earn $7 a share during fiscal 2014.

The Co-evolution of Industries and Important Features of their Environments

The Reason why HP is divesting its PC Business

From the WSJ: H-P is the world’s largest marketer of PCs. Yet Mr. Apotheker said that it isn’t possible for the Palo Alto, Calif., company to continue to invest in that business and make required structural changes to the rest of H-P. Developing a steady stream of devices that consumers want requires a lot of money and new product-development cycles that are “much faster than a conglomerate can move in most circumstances,” he said. H-P’s PC unit produced $40.1 billion in revenue and $2 billion in operating profit in its most recent fiscal year, profit that was used to fund other operations. As a standalone company, the PC unit would be able to invest in its own future, he argued.

Full Story

Kodak Tries for 30 Year to Turn its Business Around

The WSJ reports:

ROCHESTER, N.Y—After three decades of serial reorganizations, Eastman Kodak Co. is struggling to stay in the picture.
The 131-year-old company lost much of its film business to foreign competitors, then mishandled the transition to digital cameras. Now it is quickly burning through its cash as it remakes itself into a company that sells printers and ink.

On July 26, Kodak reported its fifth consecutive quarter of losses. The company’s junk-rated debt coming due in two years has moved below 80 cents on the dollar, signaling the market sees a risk of default. The company’s already battered stock has taken an especially tough pounding in recent days, falling 10% Wednesday to $1.77. Prior to this week, Kodak hadn’t closed below $2 since the 1950s, according to the Center for Research in Security Prices at the University of Chicago.

Read Full Story

Update January 5, 2012.  Kodak files for bankruptcy

Economist.com: Update January 14, 2012. Kodak is at death’s door; Fujifilm, its old rival, is thriving. Why?

Feb 1, 2012: Wharton Professors comment on the demise of Kodak. What’s Wrong with This Picture: Kodak’s 30-year Slide into Bankruptcy

Learning From Failure:  From Webvan to Zappos

Funny Description of what the life of an entrepreneurs is like

Rudy Giulani’s Six Principles of Leadership

I am only a moderate fan of Rudy Giulani, but I strongly agree with the 6 (eight) principles of leadership he recently shared at a conference in Sydney as reported in BRW, June 23-29, 2001, p. 50.

1. Leaders have strong belief and vision
You can’t expect to have people follow you if you don’t know where you are going yourself. A leader must convey his vision to his people, “Be clear, consistent and have goals,” he says. Engage your people in the vision. People will help you achieve your vision if they have instrumental in brining that vision through.”

2. Be optimistic and solve problems
“You have to be an optimist. People follow people who have hope and who help solve problems.  The only people who succeed in life overcome problems in and find solutions.”

3. Be courageous
“If you are not afraid, then you’re not alive, because things go wrong. It’s the unpredictable thing that happen, which you will need to be prepared for,” he says.

4. Preparation
Prepare as much as you can so when things go wrong, you’re able to put into practice the techniques you’ve learned. “No matter how much you practice or prepare, something will always go wrong. But by having practices in place, you’re better prepared.”

5. Teamwork
Ask your what are your strengths and weaknesses?  Find people who have the skills to balance out your weaknesses.

6. Communication and Leadership
Everything you say means nothing if people don’t understand you. Leaders establish loyalty, he says, because they are teachers and they motivate people. “Take good care of people who work for you.”

The Northwestern University 2011 graduation you at least want to see on YouTube

Nokia needs to win back confidence for turnaround

Nokia is in trouble. The CEO realized that to win time before new phones based on Microsoft Operating system are coming out, he needs to win back confidence of key stakeholders. It will be fascinating to watch whether Nokia will be able to stem the market share loss. Clearly, the CEO understands the urgency of the situation and his communication strategy seems to be on target.  Read the full article about Nokia’s new N9 smartphone on NYTimes.com. Click on more to find stats on how Nokia is losing market share.

From Knowledge at Wharton: According to Gartner, Nokia’s global first quarter market share across all mobile devices was 25.1%, down from 30.6% a year ago. In smartphone platforms, Nokia’s Symbian operating system had a market share of 27.4% in the first quarter, down from 44.2% a year ago. RIM’s operating system market share was 12.9% in the first quarter, down from 19.7% in the same period a year ago. Those losses came at the expense of Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android smartphone systems.

Can Apple Retail Executive Lead J.C. Penney?

The NY Times reports: J.C. Penney has poached the head of Apple’s retail stores to head its company starting in November, making investors hope that a man who rethought how to sell computers can also rethink how to sell clothes, cosmetics and accessories. The Apple executive, Ron Johnson, will replace Myron E. Ullman III as Penney’s chief executive on Nov. 1, the retailer announced. Mr. Ullman will then take a role as executive chairman.
“In the U.S., the department store has a chance to regain its status as the leader in style, the leader in excitement,” Mr. Johnson, 52, said in an interview. “I saw a very shared vision amongst the board to really take this great American brand and make it become something unbelievably exciting.” He added, “It will be a period of true innovation for this company.”

PM: It will be interesting to watch whether Johnson can port his computer retailing skills to an apparel setting. He may but he may not if key factors for winning are sufficiently different.

Read full story at NYTimes.com

Information Overload in Water Systems

PM: What does not get measured does not get managed. This is a principle I subscribe to. But you need a second principle to make this work: Avoid information overload. Here is an example of how a company figure out how to analyze large amounts of data to identify useful information that can be acted upon.

Pipe Dreams: To plug leaks from the water supply, you first have to find them.
An effective way of detecting leaks [in municipal water systems], both accidental and deliberate, would therefore be welcome.
TaKaDu, a firm based near Tel Aviv, thinks it has one. The problem, in the view of its founder, Amir Peleg, is not a lack of data per se, but a lack of analysis. If anything, water companies—at least, those in the rich world—have too much information. A typical firm’s network may have hundreds, or even thousands, of sensors. The actual difficulty faced by water companies, Dr Peleg believes, is interpreting the signals those sensors are sending. It is impossible for people to handle all the incoming signals, and surprisingly hard for a computer, too.

TaKaDu’s engineers have therefore developed a monitoring system called a statistical anomaly detection engine that is intended to identify clues in the data which might otherwise be missed. It applies a range of statistical tests (linear-regression analysis is one of the more familiar) to the data stream, and thus works out when the incoming signals are deviating significantly from normal behaviour. Sometimes such deviations are caused by faulty meters. Sometimes they are caused by leaks. Either way, that is valuable knowledge.

To know what is unusual you have, of course, to know what is normal. Even a 1% change in flow rate can sometimes be significant, if it is persistent, but that is not always the case. Existing leak-detection systems therefore have thresholds built into them, to avoid false alarms. The price of this is that small leaks may go undetected and thus unrepaired, which can lead to larger leaks later. The detection engine attempts to work out what is important by using a process of continuous modelling to define normality. This identifies both obvious patterns—such as daily, weekly and annual flow-rates—and subtle ones, such as correlations between the behaviours of widely separated parts of the system that are brought about by things like similarities in network layout or in the behaviour of local customers.

Full Story on Economist.com

Bob Lutz: Life Lessons From the Car Guy

This fascinating excerpt from Bob Lutz’s book highlights a couple of key issues: one needs to have deep knowledge about an industry to make the right decisions, one needs to select the right leadership style for the organizational context, and finally if one wants to have a long last impact, one needs to institutionalize the change. The reason why Lutz failed to institutionalize is product develop process at Chrysler but believes that it will stick may have nothing to do with him: GM went through bankruptcy and the old ways may have been forced to retreat.

Read full story at WSJ.com

A few days later Lutz was interviewed about the book and the article by the WSJ. Click on

For every Social Scientists: Mattias K. Polborn translates an Ancient Letter from the Editor

Mattias K. Polborn writes: Preface
I have recently found an ancient scroll, written in Reformed Egyptian, in my crawl space. It turned out to be a rejection letter from the editor of an ancient scientific journal, Geometrica, addressed to Ptolemaeus of Alexandria, the famous geographer. It is a remarkable document that shows how little scientific publishing has changed since ancient times.
Before proceeding to the full translation provided below, the critical reader may wish to ask how this document came into my basement. While details remain clouded in mystery, there are some strong indications that the document is genuine. Specifically,
• it was found in mid-America, the prime location where Reformed Egyptian docu- ments are found;
• after I completed the translation, the original document mysteriously vanished without a trace;
• the document contains sentences that are almost verbatim the same as written much later by different people who definitely had no knowledge of the text in my basement.

Read full letter here.

Burt Teplitzky on Using Humor in Sales Pitches

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: How do you go about incorporating humor into sales presentations?

I use humor to reinforce a point in selling a product or service. My formula is punch them with the joke, stick them with the point and leave them with the benefit. When you take a joke and incorporate it into a conversation or a presentation, it carries a lot more power. It carries the power to change people’s minds, reinforce what they think or feel, and to sell something. That chosen joke is no longer just a joke. It becomes a gem, a humor gem.

Speaking in front of an audience for fun and profit only requires one laugh every three to six minutes. This should be your goal. In a comedy club, you need to have at least three laughs per minute to get regular stage time.

Remember, your audience wants humor and they fear that if they don’t laugh, you will stop using it. They don’t want to have to suffer through a dry presentation.

Read full interview in the WSJ.

PM: The general point being made here is that you need to figure out how to establish a relationship with the person you want to sell to. In the end, you need to provide them with reason to go with you rather than competitor. Everything else being equal, the reason might be that they like you more because it fun to be around you.