Three leadership qualities I learned from Steve Jobs

“Here’s to the Crazy Ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world – are the ones who DO!”
~ Apple Computers ~

The 1997 quote from the famous “Think Different” marketing campaign for Apple products might have been conceived to represent the elusive qualities of Apple product users, but it is also a very good description of Steve Jobs himself whose business philosophy and colorful life has been described in his biography written by Walter Isaacson.

Yes, I did read the 600+ pages of Steve’s life including the proud and not so proud moments both as a leader and as a family man. I saw him as a youngster who thought the rules did not apply to him, a young college drop-out who chose to study Buddhism rather than finish Reed College. I saw a young entrepreneur whose way to get what he wanted was by either yelling or sobbing uncontrollably in front of his business partners and finally I saw him as a powerful CEO whose way to approach difficult problems was to avoid them all together including avoiding his early cancer diagnosis that might have cost him his life. Was Steve Job’s way to get what he wanted right? Not exactly. Was it successful? You bet.

Knowing his unconventional way of management here are three leadership qualities that made me appreciate Steve Jobs regardless of his self-centered way of managing Apple as a business.

VISION

His early life experiences as a Zen Buddhist with a strong belief in the power of sublime minimalism contributed greatly to his understanding of himself as an artist and subsequently shaped his positioning of Apple as a company at the intersection of technology and humanity. His vision for Apple was to develop products whose simple user interface and graceful design would delight users of all ages. He witnessed how companies such as Microsoft were able to dominate the software market by developing and subsequently licensing their operating system to run on multiple 3^rd party platforms. Jobs was firmly against that approach. He wanted end-to-end control over the user experience which he achieved by limiting his software to run on Apple products and retaining full control over user experience both in terms of hardware and software.

Jobs not only believed in his vision but truly lived it through his actions: the way he build his team at Apple, the way he chose his business partners, the way he advertised his company…. heck, even the way he dressed and conducted himself at business meetings. There was no going half way. The way Jobs stood by his vision inspired his employees and commanded great respect from his business partners and even his competitors.  We need more leaders able to develop a clear vision and stand by it the way Jobs did.

FOCUS & DETERMINATION

“Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are.”
– Nolan Bushnell who founded Atari, Inc.

Once Steve had his vision he was able to filter out distractions to make the path to success perfectly clear. When he took over Apple in 1997 and the company was on the brink of financial disaster he knew to eliminate all but a handful of key products & projects that matched his vision. That freed up resources and funds for Apple to survive and turn its finances around.

The book makes it obvious that Jobs did not tolerate “velvety” leaders that were afraid to offend others. He was direct and unfiltered which took some getting used to. He blamed President Obama’s unwillingness to upset others as his greatest weakness. He was equally direct and unfiltered with his top hires as he was with rank and file Apple employees.

Being a very intense man (at early age he thought himself how to stare at someone without blinking) he demanded nothing but full devotion from his employees that he hand-selected and considered his A-team. While his determination was widely considered extreme and even nicknamed Steve’s “Reality Distortion Field” most of his employees were willing to put up with it because he made them believe in things they never thought were possible and most importantly he helped them achieved the impossible.

PASSION FOR GREAT USER EXPERIENCE

“Some people say, ‘Give the customers what they want.’ But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!” People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.
– Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs did not invite users into his design studios. He never relied on market research and never crowd-sourced the ideation process. Instead, Jobs surrounded himself with top designers (incl. Pixar’s John Lasseter and Apple’s Jony Ive ) who appreciated his minimalist esthetics and followed his design simplicity. He and his team relied on themselves and their gut feeling to develop products that users did not even realize they needed such as iPod or iPhone.

“My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary.”
– Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs believed he created a company with “a deep current of humanity in [their] innovation” where “simplicity was the ultimate sophistication” and where great engineers similarly to great artists had a deep desire to express themselves. Because of Apple’s out-of-the box design approaches Steve was able to change entire industries: the music industry with iPod (1000 songs in your pocket) and iTunes that included pay-per-song music selling, the phone industry with iTunes store with 3^rd party apps, the retail industry with Apple stores and finally the publishing industry with iPad. Was it easy? Not at all. The book describes in great details the struggles Jobs went through to convince the music industry to break records into individual songs and to agree to sell them for 99 cents. There were other projects ready to be worked on including Job’s desire to re-shape the textbook industry by offering electronic versions of texbooks that were more interactive, easy to update and ultimately less expensive to purchase. Unfortunately he ran out of time to complete that project.

It was refreshing to see a CEO so focused and determined to make great user experience the leading theme in Apple’s vision. It paid off immensely with Apple becoming the most valuable brand in the world.

STEVE JOBS’ WINNING LEADERSHIP COMBO

1. Clear vision, 2. unwavering determination to execute on that vision and 3. great appreciation for top-notch design – this was Job’s winning leadership combo that caused a start-up in his parents garage to grow and change the world of business.  I recommend for every business leader and aspiring entrepreneur to pick up Walter Isaacson’s book. There is plenty to learn from this iCEO.

 

 

No need for a lab coat when using social media for research

I recently had an interesting exchange with an acquaintance of mine who is in charge of multiple customer research initiatives that are based on traditional research methodologies including surveys and focus groups. He openly expressed his disapproval of using social media for any type of statistically valid research due to his inability to control where his social data is coming from. While he continued to list all important points that make traditional customer research far superior from what I can gather through social media monitoring service I could not help, but notice a bigger point that he was missing entirely:  ubiquitous access to social data that anyone (with or without a research lab coat) can begin to manipulate and analyze for relevant insights.  This creates opportunities for anyone (and marketers in particular) who are willing to learn a few tricks of the trade to use social media data not to replace but to supplement their formal market research initiatives.

Jason Falls and Erik Deckers in their recent Entrepreneur.com article “How to Use Social Media for Research and Development” take a similar stand on empowering everyone marketers, product managers and small business owners to take advantage of data from social media conversations. How? They lists two major ways:

1)      REACTIVELY by using free or paid social data monitoring and mining tools to access, analyze and gather insights from existing conversations

2)      PROACTIVELY by seeking customer answers to direct questions posted in social channels.

Let’s analyze both from two different perspectives:  a small business owner’s point of view who often needs to rely on himself to perform all relevant research activities as well as a marketer in an enterprise setting who has an ongoing need for relevant customer insights that limited corporate market research resources cannot satisfy.

What’s the future of the “social strategist” position?

I am a proud parent of a UCONN freshman (go Huskies!). Recently my son and I had several conversations aimed at helping him figure out how to get the best of his early college experience. He quickly ventured into bigger questions about discovering his life passions that will hopefully change into a fulfilling long-term career. Just like I was several years ago he is questioning his course selections and doubting his original major choice. He is anxious to get it all figured out regardless of the fact that he has been attending college only for the past couple of months! What’s the rush? – I ask. Isn’t college supposed to be a place for exploration?

How to spruce up your Social Media 101 presentations

I am in the process of talking to a whole bunch of social media practitioners-in-training about the value of social media and I am constantly looking for ways to spruce up these Social Media 101 presentation aside from just having a bunch of PowerPoint slides to walk folks through. Here are some ways I broke the monotony of “death by PPT slides”

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VIDEOS

You cannot go wrong energizing your participants with some upbeat music & cleverly along with visuals. Here are the powerful three I keep on using over and over

Social Media Revolution  -the basics – use these powerful stats to explain the basics concept behind social media

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Social Media Revolution in Business – yes, it has the powerful ROI stats there

What do you need to know about your conversation participants before setting up your social media strategy?

As part of J.Boye’s ” Knowledge sharing for digital decision makers” Conference I had a chance to participate in a workshop delivered by Bob Boiko (University of Washington) titled “Social Media and Information Strategy”.

Bob presented his information strategy framework to include

1. Identifying your business goals
2. Identifying your audiences
3. Figuring out the information types you are going to share with your audience
4. Lastly picking your channels to facilitate info. delivery

His info. strategy would follow this basic template

” We deliver the right info (aka content model) to the right people (your audiences) the right way (through appropriate channel/s) to meet our goals (aka business goals).”

The addition of social media conversations revises his strategy template to now mention information exchanges.

“We deliver the right content or facilitate information exchanges for the right people in the right way to help us meet our business goals.”

In a way this strategy building framework reminded me of Forrester’s POST methodology that I have been advocating when helping my stakeholders build their social media strategies at Pitney Bowes (my employer)

Forrester's POST methodology

But what I’d like to share with you here is Bob’s laser sharp focus on better understanding the conversations themselves

Blogging for marketing and communication profs

I recently had a chance to talk to a group of Public Relations professionals about blogging. Although I did multiple “Intro. to Blogging” talks in the past couple of years I needed to pause and really think about this one. PR folks don’t need training on how to communicate (heck, they can be my teachers on this topic), but what they need is a clear understanding on how to adjust their writing style for blogging success including understanding differences in blogging goals, audience, content and most importantly tone.

Blogging vs. marcom writing

Blogging vs. marcom writing - what's the difference?

The anatomy of a blog post (aka writing for the web)

Starting with a great blog post title and finishing with a call to action great blog posts have a specific anatomy. BTW, I’ve used one of the posts from the HubSpot blog  because I believe they are doing a superb job illustrating all of my blog anatomy points AND I highly recommend for great insights about marketing automation.

What’s the “R” in Return on Investment in Social Media

Katie Paine never fails to come up with a cute acronym to illustrate her point. First it was her cruciate to eliminate HITS from our metrics vocabulary. While for most of us measuring hits means tracking the number of times our website’s server is responding to a request to serve a web page, image or any other file, Katie’s definition of HITS = How Idiots Track Success. Nice! I bet from now on you will never use this KPI in your metrics dashboard.

Here comes another funny acronym Katie coned to help us understand the R in Social Media ROI. It’s KBI which stands for Kick Butt Index. According to Katie the beginning of every successful social media measurement starts with identification of your goals (the R in ROI). If we want to “kick butt” we need to know what “kick butt” means. Are we expected to:

• Improve positioning in our specific marketplace
• Communicate key messages
• Increase brand advocacy
• Increase engagement in the brand
• Demonstrate thought leadership
• Increase customer satisfaction
• Improve company’s reputation
• Bring in qualified leads

Have you noticed that the above list of goals has nothing to do with social media? These are business-specific goals. Knowing them and agreeing on which ones are key will help you determine what KPIs you need to measure in social media to prove success. It often happens in large enterprises that these overarching goals get lost in translation or get misinterpreted or misunderstood. Your job BEFORE committing to executing a social media program is to clearly identify what overarching business goal(s) that you will be contributing to and identify your KPIs accordingly.

Monitoring Social Media Conversations for Your Brand

How many times have you heard that the biggest value of social media participation for your company comes from listening? Great, but what does this really mean to effectively listen to social media conversations? What should we concentrate on analyzing while the fire hose of social media conversations continues to drown us in data?

A few weeks back I was fortunate to listen to a panel discussion at the Connecticut Social Media Breakfast meeting with three queens of social media measurements: Katie Paine from KDPaine & Partners, Jenifer Zeszut of Lithium Technologies (former CEO of Scout Labs) and Genevieve Coates from Radian6. (Trust me, the air of the auditorium at the Quinnipiac University was so saturated with insights that it was literaly hard to breathe.) All of these women spend significant amount of time every day coaching their clients how to gain insights from social media monitoring and subsequently how to measure the effect of clients’ engagement to respond to these insights.

Social Media Engagement Journey

During the panel, Jenifer Zeszut talked about five stages of social media engagement that she calls the Social Engagement Journey. The farther you are on the engagement journey the more advanced your social media monitoring and measurement needs are.

all of Jeniffer Zeszut’s presentation slides

It usually starts with the PR department concerned with brand reputation management who ends up to be the first in line to monitor social media to find and fight PR fires.

Blogging is NOT dead

OK, I’ve had enough. No more articles proclaiming that blogging is dead and that the rapid growth of Facebook and Twitter and increasing shorter attention spans of digital content consumer is making blogging obsolete , please.

While we go through changes in the way we create, distribute & consume content online blogging for me continues to be one of the most effective ways to establish and maintain my permanent presence digitally. As such, I would never consider abandoning it in favor of snack-sized content publishing platforms. What I do instead is to look for ways channels can complement one another and work in concerts as part of a well maintained digital hub.

One of my favorite corporate blogging gurus Debbie Weil recently gave a talk as part of the Blogging Success Summit 2011. The topic of her presentation was “Leveraging Your Blog as a Social Media Hub” . According to Debbie (and I agree with her POV), your blog is your digital “castle”, your permanent digital space where you control the content and where you set your own rules. The rest of the social media ecosystem is “borrowed territory” where content exchanges might be more frequent and more real-time, but where they are harder to find and consume overtime.

The trick to your social media publishing success is not to eliminate any one of your digital channels in favor of the other, but to use them in concert leveraging the best features each one has to offer. While your blog continues to be your thought leadership content repository, it only works when others can find it. That’s where other social media channels come in that make it easy for you to draw attention to your blog (e.g. Twitter) and to engage in near-real-time conversation with your digital tribe (e.g. LinkedIn groups).

QR Codes – oh… the World of Possibilities

Last week I attended (and spoke at) the MarketingProfs’ Digital Marketing Forum, an annual gathering of smart marketing minds who, for this year’s event, traveled to a snowy Austin, TX to explore what’s emerging in the area of digital marketing. This was my 5th MarketingProfs event (I know I am a veteran) which as usual turned out to be a star-studded gathering with Jay Baer and Amber Naslund debuting their “Now Revolution” book and Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman debuting their “Content Rules” book, both of which I highly recommend.

If you’ve ever been to a MarketingProfs event you know that it is a great networking opportunity first and foremost. I took advantage of it and had lengthy discussions with Steve Woodruff about opportunities for social media in pharma and healthcare industries and discussed content marketing strategies with Jeffrey Cohen, the editor of the Social Media B2B blog.

So what left the biggest impression for me at this year’s conference? – you ask. Well, several things including the abundance of QR codes popping up in handouts, callouts, napkins, books pages and other physical objects spotting of which was followed by many conversations regarding how to use QR codes for marketing and customer loyalty programs. And rightfully so QR codes are finaly taking off in America with most recent survey from Mobio showing a 1200% increase in QR code usage in the last 3 months of 2010.

What are QR codes?

A lot of great articles including Jeff Korhan’s recent blog in Social Media Examiner & a an earlier one from Mashable go over the QR codes basics, so I will happily refer you to them regarding the history of QR codes, adoption rates and so on. Here I will just list the basics.

• QR codes (as well as their cousins Microsoft Tags, Datamatix, etc.) are two-dimensional codes that can be generated easily (and for free) and displayed for anyone to scan with their smart phones.
• QR codes  enable easy connections between physical objects and the digital world.
• To read a QR code you must have a special application called a QR Reader.
• By scanning a QR code with your mobile phone you can link to a URL, bookmark (favorite), text, phone number, SMS or a vCard (contact)

Examples of QR code Implementation

Despite a small (but fast growing) adoption rates of consumers familiar with the QR code technology in the US, we are seeing an explosion in creative uses of QR codes to connect consumers to digital content while they are away from their computers, but have access to their smart phone. Here are some I fund particularly appealing