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Guy Kawasaki - 12:02 AM (edited) - Public (Sat01) What I Learned From Steve Jobs 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 dont want any lessons to be lost or forgotten, so here is my list of the top twelve lessons that I learned from Steve Jobs. Experts are clueless. Expertsjournalists, analysts, consultants, bankers, and gurus cant 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. For example, the experts told us that the two biggest shortcomings of Macintosh in the mid 1980s was the lack of a daisy-wheel printer driver and Lotus 1-2-3; another advice gem from the experts was to buy Compaq. Hear what experts say, but dont always listen to them. Customers cannot tell you what they need. Apple market research is an oxymoron. The Apple focus group was the right hemisphere of Steves brain talking to the left one. If you ask customers what they want, they will tell you, Better, faster, and cheaperthat is, better sameness, not revolutionary change. They can only describe their desires in terms of what they are already usingaround 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 usethats what Steve and Woz did. 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? The biggest challenges beget best work. I lived in fear that Steve would tell me that I, or my work, was crap. In public. This fear was a big challenge. Competing with IBM and then Microsoft was a big challenge. Changing the world 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. Design counts. Steve drove people nuts with his design demandssome shades of black werent black enough. Mere mortals think that black is black, and that a trash can is a trash can. Steve was such a perfectionista perfectionist Beyond: Thunderdomeand low and behold he was right: some people care about design and many people at least sense it. Maybe not everyone, but the important ones.

You cant go wrong with big graphics and big fonts. Take a look at Steves slides. The font is sixty points. Theres usually one big screenshot or graphic. Look at other tech speakers slideseven the ones who have seen Steve in action. The font is eight points, and there are no graphics. So many people say that Steve was the worlds greatest product introduction guy..dont you wonder why more people dont copy his style? 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. Safari web apps were the way to go until six months later when Steve decided, or someone convinced Steve, that apps were the way to gobut of course. Duh! Apple came a long way in a short time from Safari web apps to theres an app for that. Value is different from price. Woe unto you if you decide everything based on price. Even more woe unto you if you compete solely on price. Price is not all that matterswhat 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 thats made. Its pretty safe to say that no one buys Apple products because of their low price. A players hire A+ players. Actually, Steve believed that A players hire A playersthat is people who are as good as they are. I refined this slightlymy theory is that A players hire people even better than themselves. Its 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. Readl CEOs demo. Steve jobs could demo a pod, pad, phone, and Mac two to three times a year with millions of people watching, why is it that many CEOs call upon their vice-president of engineering to do a product demo? Maybe its to show that theres a team effort in play. Maybe. Its more likely that the CEO doesnt understand what his/her company is making well enough to explain it. How pathetic is that? Real CEOs ship. For all his perfectionism, Steve could ship. Maybe the product wasnt perfect every time, but it was almost always great enough to go. The lesson is that Steve wasnt tinkering for the sake of tinkeringhe had a goal: shipping and achieving worldwide domination of existing markets or creation of new markets. Apple is an engineering-centric company, not a research-centric one. Which would you rather be: Apple or Xerox PARC? 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 uniqueyoull have to compete on price. Top left: unique but not valuableyoull own a market that doesnt exist. Bottom left: not unique and not valueyoure a bozo. Top right: unique and valuablethis is where you make margin, money, and history. For example, the iPod was unique and valuable because it was the only way to legally, inexpensively, and easily download music from the six biggest record labels. 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. People needed to believe in Macintosh to see it become real. Ditto for iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Not everyone will believethats 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.

Guy Kawasaki originally shared this post: (Thu01) Someone transcribed my impromptu reminiscence of Steve Jobs from the Social Media Examiner webinar. This is the text. Hat tip to +Morgan Ramsay for doing this. You can also hear the audio version here: http://vimeo.com/30115815 I don't know if everybody has heard, but about ten minutes ago, Apple announced that Steve Jobs died today. And so, I have to tell you, I don't think it's appropriate nor probably the best thing to do for any of us to necessarily be focusing on Facebook marketing right now. And so, I am going to talk about Steve Jobs and Apple, and what Steve has meant to me, what Steve has meant to the industry, and personal computing, and just Internet and everything, if you don't mind, rather than talking about Facebook marketing. I hope that is okay with all of you. This announcement literally happened as we were prepping and getting all our things together for the conference that we are now attending. It could not have happened with less notice to us. So, I hope it's okay with you that I'm going to switch topics completely. And my phone, my cell phone and my other phone, is just ringing off the hook with people trying to get quotes from me. But I'm going to do this webinar instead. Here's the story. I joined Apple in 1983. My past at Apple was that I interviewed for a job with Apple the first time in order to work in what was called the Apple University Consortium. And the Apple University Consortium was Steve Jobs' vision that the place to seed Macintoshes would be universities. At the time, K-12 was pretty much dominated by the Apple II, so he saw that the next level of computing would be, of course, colleges. So he created a program, it was headed by a guy named Dan'l Lewin, whose charter was to convince universities to use Macintoshes. And it started with places like Carnegie

Mellon and Stanford. The first job I interviewed was to work in that group. I don't know, it just wasn't a good fit for me. So about six months went by and then the second job I interviewed for at Apple was to be software evangelist. And a software evangelist job was to meet with soft and hard companies and convince them to do Macintosh products. That's the job that I took. The second job that I tried for at Apple. And if you really want to know the inside story, the reason why I got that job is because my college classmate Mike Boich was working in the Mac division. And so he hired me because we knew each other, we were friends. So one could say it was purely nepotism. Let's talk about the Macintosh division. The Macintosh division, I think, was probably the greatest collection of egomaniacs in the history of California, and that is saying a lot, believe me. So the closest thing I can say to describing what it was like to work there You know how after the Superbowl, there's a TV camera on the winning quarterback and the TV camera says, "Where are you going to go now?" to the quarterback, and the quarterback says, "I'm going to Disneyland." Well, working in the Macintosh division in the mid 80s was like working at Disneyland, or more accurately, being paid to go to Disneyland. Basically, the division was on a mission, a mission from Steve, as opposed to God. And this mission from Steve was that we wanted to prevent worldwide domination of information and freedom from IBM. So we looked at IBM as the enemy. This was the whole point of the 1984 commercial. That if IBM ruled the world, it would be boring, totalitarian, George Orwellian--just an ugly society of mediocrity and conformity and thought control. And Apple was going to send the proverbial act into the image of big brother. It was religious fervor in the sense that we were fighting a mighty opposite. Which was IBM, the totalitarian mainframe company. And so we were I'd say about fifty people. We had a building on Mariani Drive. There's a story about how someone put a pirate flag above the building, that's true. Steve Capps, the person who wrote the Finder, got a pirate flag and put it up there because we were going to be pirates. Knock the establishment. This was Steve's division. What we did is we worked very, very hard because we truly thought we were on a mission to improve people's creativity and productivity and prevent totalitarianism, primarily of IBM. The group was a very interesting collection of people. There were people like me who had MBAs, and I was hired despite having an MBA. There were people like Burrell Smith, who Steve found working in an Apple II repair department. Andy Hertzfeld, who wrote much of the Macintosh ROMs and was an old -- or, not old, no one was old at the time -- but an experienced Apple II programmer. It was a collection of just great software and hardware engineers. There were artists like Susan Kerr, who created much of the early graphics and icons of Macintosh. Joanna Hoffmann was the first person who did the marketing function for the division. Mike Boich, as I said who I worked for, he and I went to Stanford together. He went to HP, the calculator division of HP in

Corvalis. He was recruited out of there. The person who recruited him was a guy named Mike Murray. Mike Murray was the director of marketing of the Macintosh division. Subsequently, he went to work for Microsoft and he became Microsoft's VP of HR. So, it was a merry band of pirates. Steve himself had only attended one semester of Reed, a college in Oregon, so here we were, on paper not so qualified. We had a few PhDs. One person was Bruce Horn, he was a PhD student from I believe Carnegie Mellon. He was the coauthor of the Finder with Steve Capps. And so, it was a great place to work because, man, we were going to change frickin' history. And I can't tell you how euphoric it was to work there. Because it was such bright people and we had such a mission to change the world. So that was the Macintosh division. I guess one of the high points of that division [interrupted by vibrating phone] Anyway this was the division. Some aspects of the division that you might interesting. Steve bought the division a Bsendorfer Grand Piano. And some of the people played Bsendorfer Grand Piano. There was a BMW motorcycle for the division. We also had a travel policy that any flight over two hours qualified for first class. I tended to interpret that rule as the two hours begins at the moment you leave your apartment. So I lived in Los Altos. Los Altos to SFO can be 45 minutes or so, so I basically flew first class everywhere. It was a great time. Across the street was the Lisa division. The Lisa division was creating basically a very large Macintosh. But it was $7,000. Big footprint. Arguably, the Lisa taught us many lessons that we applied to the Macintosh and made Macintosh successful. A social media analogy would be that Google Buzz is to Google Plus was Lisa is to Macintosh. So that was the Macintosh division. Macintosh was announced on January 24, 1984, in De Anza College where Steve unveiled it. At the time, he was not wearing a black mock turtleneck. His thing was a double-breasted suit with a bowtie. So he introduced it, and that was one of the most enchanting moments of my life: to watch Macintosh be introduced by Steve Jobs. The first time I saw a Macintosh was in the back of that building, the Macintosh division building. At the time, I was in the jewelry business and my friend Mike Boich showed me a Macintosh, and I was an Apple II user and that was a religious experience also because back then with an Apple II you were fortunate if you had a 24x80 terminal screen, you moved the cursor around with cursor keys. Graphics was using Xs and Os to draw things. The first time you saw a Mac, right, was multiple fonts, and multiple sizes, and multiple stylesintegration of text and graphics. And the first time you saw Mac Paint with graphics, paint cans, brushesit was a magical experience. Now, what happened after that was that we had a very successful launch. The goal was to sell a quarter million Macintoshes in the first hundred days and we achieved that goal. Back then, the whole thing with Macintoshes and developers were we told them three stories: it was a very rich technical environment, this great programming environment, very rich ROM set; we told them that it was a good financial bet because we were going to bring people to personal computing who had never used a personal computer before; and finally, it was a good hedge because at the time the IBM personal computer division was starting to publish software, so we were explaining to people that if IBM started publishing software in your segment under their own label, you would be dead. So that was our evangelism pitch. And I think mostly what appealed to developers was the richness of the Macintosh programming environment. Back then, the decision was being made by engineers and nerds, not MBAs and marketing people. So that's what really sucked people in. It was very, very interesting albeit challenging

programming environment. SNow we're in mid-1984, things are going pretty good. We're selling a lot of Macs, had that post-launch glow. Sort of hit the wall because businesses were not embracing Macintoshes. It didn't have some crucial pieces of software thanks to me. It was slow in a lot of operations. It took us a good two years to significantly revise that product. I think mostly because we were still tired from shipping it at all. And after that, there was what I called the Wonder Years. I wonder when there will be software, I wonder when we'll turn the corner. As businesses were rejecting it, we went through this period of euphoria, then we went through this period of down in the dumps. This is one of those major times when according to all the experts Apple was supposed to die. We brought in some adult supervision, i.e., John Sculley. A lot of interesting things happened. It culminated with some layoffs, culminated with a board decision picking between John Sculley and Steve Jobs. So Steve Jobs was out. He went out and started NeXT: the big black cube computer built on UNIX. And things did not exactly pick up. A few years went by, they made Mike Spindler CEO, and then they made Gil Amelio CEO. Gil Amelio decided to buy NeXT, I think, for $400 million dollars. Steve came back to Apple first as an advisor, temporary, to help Gil and stuff. And then, eventually, Gil started imploding and Steve came back, introduced the iMac. And from there, the rest is kind of history, right? So, the iMac, if you remember, it was that teardrop shape-looking computer that came in colors like blueberry and cherry and, I don't know, tangerine and stuff. That sort of, the industrial design of that computer, I think, was really sort of what rekindled people's enthusiasm for Macintosh. And fast forward a few years and we have things like the iPod and iPhone and iPad. Macintosh flipped to less than 5% market share; it subsequently has returned. I don't ever know if it will be more than 10%, but it's definitely on the upswing. I can tell you with total certainty that Steve Jobs was a great, if not the greatest, influence in my life. From him I learned, one is an appreciation of design, an appreciation of elegance and simplicity. I learned how far you can push people, that you can get the best work out of people by pushing them with great challenges. Steve wasn't exactly a warm and fuzzy guy, but he got the best results out of people. He could drive you crazy because the trash can icon didn't look right or a certain shade of black wasn't black enough. He was heavily influenced by Paul Rand, the logo designer. I consider it an honor to have worked for him in the Macintosh division. And only 100 or so people can say that, so what a time! What a time! And if you look back, no matter how you feel about Apple, you have to say it was among the starters of the personal computer industry. It definitely made the graphical user interface go mainstream. If you look at it, Steve Jobs created the, in a sense, the Apple I standard, the Apple II standard, the Macintosh standard, then he created his smartphone standard iPhone, iPod standard, iPad standard. Lots of companies and people are fortunate to create one revolution, but Steve Jobs arguably created four or five. I truly do believe that if you look at all the CEOs over the history of business, I don't think there's a CEO who has done more for his employees, his shareholders, and his customers. The world is a lot worse off without Steve Jobs. May he rest in peace. But wow what a job he did for everybody, personally for me, and many, many people who worked for the Macintosh division. And I think in many ways, for many of the people who use Apple products that these Apple products made them more creative, more productive and brought joy and enchantment to their lives.

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