Here is an excerpt from an article written by Margaret Heffernan for BNET, The CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.
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Tracking the achievements of Steve Jobs isn’t a difficult thing to do. They’re big, public and – especially in technology – remarkably long lasting. More tricky but, I think, more interesting, is eliciting from those achievements the lessons we could learn from his successes if we tried.
[Here are the first three of the six lessons.]
1. Style is Content
From the outset, Jobs and Apple believed in style: in fonts, in graphics, in industrial design and in marketing. It’s easy to under-estimate how eccentric this was at the time – and how eccentric it remains today. While most organizations believe that style is the exclusive purview of marketing, few achieve it even there. Most hardware and software remains remarkably clunky, ugly or simply derivative. (The Kindle is hideous; the Fire a pale imitation.) When I first started working in technology 15 years ago, style was dismissed as frivolous and that’s the status it still holds in most companies today. Anyone who imagines that Apple’s success derives entirely from what’s inside the box (and there are more than a few) has missed a very obvious point.
Conventional wisdom divides thinking into the left brain and the right brain. The left is all systematic, rational, linear while the right is more emotional and creative. What Jobs demonstrated was that success lies not in emphasizing one over the other but in bringing them together. The physical representation of this was clear when he took over Pixar. The new campus planned 3 separate buildings: for creatives, for producers and for business people. He insisted that they be brought under one roof, with toilets at the center – because that’s where everyone meets and talks.
2. Patience Beats Speed
For all that Apple is known for fast product development, the truth is that Jobs was very good at waiting. After his return to Apple in 1997, when the company teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, he did what any smart CEO would do: slashed product lines (15 desktop models to 1) cut software and hardware engineers, eliminated peripherals, reduced inventory and retailers and moved most manufacturing offshore. There is nothing brilliant about this; it’s textbook stuff. But asked in 1998, by Richard Rumelt, what he was going to do next, in order to move Apple beyond its fragile niche position, Jobs had a gutsy answer: “I am going to wait for the next big thing.”
Wait? In a technology business? That took courage. Of course, once he’d figured out what the next big thing was, Jobs was methodical and patient – again – in putting in place everything he’d need to take advantage of the seismic shift in the environment when the U.S. market moved to broadband.
It’s also worth remembering that, during the three years he did this, he was remorselessly hammered by industry analysts not one of whom understood what he was up to.
3. Drama Trumps Romance
Jobs’s product launches were famed for their drama. But one thing they didn’t offer was romance. The products did what they said they’d do. Marketing commentary around them didn’t promise fantasies, illusions or daydreams. Apple promoted its products but didn’t hype them. This may seem a lackluster quality but it built trust. Apple said its products were easy to use not because (like many of its competitors) it hoped that was true, or because it was true for the PhD engineers who’d invented them, but because it was true. It seems peculiar to celebrate a company for truth in advertising but that’s one reason why Apple customers, once smitten, stayed loyal.
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To read the complete article, please click here.
Margaret Heffernan worked for 13 years as a producer for BBC Radio and Television before running her first company. She has since been CEO of five businesses in the United States and United Kingdom, including InfoMation Corporation, ZineZone Corporation and iCAST Corporation. She has been named one of the Internet’s Top 100 by Silicon Alley Reporter and one of the Top 100 Media Executives by The Hollywood Reporter. Her books include The Naked Truth, How She Does It: How Female Entrepreneurs are Changing the Rules for Business Success , and recently published Willful Blindness. She has appeared on NPR, CNN, CNBC, and the BBC, and writes for Real Business,The Huffington Post, and Fast Company.