People resist it, forget it, are afraid of it or, worst of all, it is administered poorly.

Use your tools if you really want to be lean.  Start here.

Despite widespread adoption of Social Media, most companies are still missing the point and failing to engage the medium effectively or powerfully. This was evidenced with the ads at the 2012 Super Bowl XLVI; there were few extensions and few integrations beyond the initial hashtag or web link. Nearly a third miss going that far, according to Altimeter Group.

You’re not Thinking 4th Dimensionally 

Most in the communications/promotions world think only 1 or 2 dimensionally. It results from a need to see how their personal work/project impacts a certain space – they put it out there, then gather metrics on their impact. It’s simple, it’s easy. It’s also short sighted. Like any field of play, a 3 dimensional player will eventually advance ahead of the 1 or 2 dimensional player. This is what made Tim Tebow so exciting to watch in his debut season. Just when the “stronger” team thought they had it won, Tebow pulled a new move that was not expected – like running his own touchdown play. (alright, enough with the football, back to business). For you sci-fi fans, this is the equivalent of James T. Kirk beating the no win scenario… by changing the rules of the test.  To use social media effectively, you have to be able to “see the future” just a little bit.

This is why social media can be so powerful – it offers a relatively inexpensive means to move into a 3 or 4 dimensional plan against a more powerfully equipped opponent who has more resources for far less money. It sounds silly, but it works. Just ask Gary Vaynerchuk. All innovation is based on this principle – gain 1 dimension against  your opponent and you can out-play them.

Watching the Super Bowl ads was disappointing. Most of us in the social media communications business expected LOTS of interactive commercials. Alas only a couple played their game using the new rules. The bad news is this means that so many companies still don’t get it. The good news is, for entrepreneurs and neophytes, you have a lot of opportunity to gain advantage by looking at those extra dimensional opportunities.

Three and a half Strategies to Give You Advantage:

Old School: Everyone in a place I know, visibly doing a job I’ve assigned.  Ahh, comfort and control.  Sure I have the expense of land, plant, equipment, furniture, utilities and specific staff for just those pieces of infrastructure.  I like it this way.  We’ve always done it this way, etc.

Modern Business:  Let’s minimize the “plant” infrastructure or minimize it radically.  Let’s only spring for the equipment necessary to out-place all or nearly all of our staff.  Modern technology allows anyone anywhere to communicate and collaborate effectively, closely and real time.  The best business processes allow you to keep staff accountable to achievable goals, motivated (even excited) about the job and mission and just as (or more) efficient at dramatically lower costs.

Social Gillie offers you the best focused assistance with achieving the “modern business” model above.  To creat a remote effective workforce you’ll want it just how you choose.  We provide solutions from initial assessment to comprehensive development of strategies, requirments, tools, training, implementation, coordination and reporting.  A program designed by you to achieve your goals and needs.

Climb out of the comfy “backside in seat” money-pit in your operations.

Contact Social Gillie today to find out more!

The Holy Grail of Start-Ups: Angel Investors

At Social Gillie, we have walked with partners who have gone through the pangs of funding a Start-up. We have walked our own entrepreneurial ventures and we have both seen and felt the challenge, walked through the preparations of presenting to Angel Investors and Venture Capitalists, experienced the agony of giving a great performance that fell on deaf ears. We have also experienced the elation of winning that A, B or C round of funding that gets the company launched in a new direction. We also know the challenge of the “boot strap” start up.

Venture Funding Resources

We know that for many of our clients and many in our audience, this is a major issue – to launch their expansion or get new products to market. So, as the capital is beginning to loosen a bit in the Venture Capital arena, we at Social Gillie are providing a new channel on our blog. Follow us for updates in the Venture Capital and Angel Funding arena – under our “start-ups” category. We will share news, ideas and current events in Venture Funding as we find them, learn them and experience them with our clients or partners.

Fund Hunting Rituals

A helpful article has recently come out from Forbes, on the joys and labors of the “courting ritual” of venture funding.  We will keep you posted as new and insightful information arises.

Happy fund-hunting to all!

The Social Gillie Team

Engineering business relationships has more pieces to it than many are aware of. What are you after? What needs to be done?

• What do I have that I can use?
• Who do I have relationships with?
• How do I communicate with each?
• What tools and technology do we use to communicate?
• How do we measure our effectiveness?
• How do we implement what we need?
• How do we continuously benefit and improve from our efforts?

Our specialty is helping you answer those questions and implement the processes and policies necessary to grow your base of relationships.  Communicate better, attract more business, get the best people and suppliers.  Be valued in your community and your market segment.

Social Gillie will take you there.

The most important question about using any particular Social or Mobile Relationship tools is not How?, but rather Why?  There is so much talk about how this or that tool is used, how it’s implemented, how to build a network, how to organize contacts, etc. Yet, this is at best the secondary concern. And it is the lack of answering the Why question that keeps many business leaders shy about using the many Social Media and mobile computing platforms in the market today. Don’t get me wrong: I think that Social is good for almost everyone in business; but there are both risks and costs associated for every benefit in social media that need to be addressed.

Obvious Benefits 

For the first half of the modern* digital business age, the focus was on productivity tools. Rivals such as Corel, Lotus and Microsoft began creating productivity software for the every day business user and these tools had a sudden impact on every aspect of business, especially for mid-sized businesses. Functions that were highly specialized and took days, could be done in just hours by less skilled people. As companies adapted, they found more opportunities to improve their daily processes so that almost every role in the business world transformed. A sales manager in a small company could create his own spreadsheet to track clients, the sales team and predict orders, where before it required the accountant or office manager a couple of days to generate such reports. Back then, the crucial question was “how” to use the software, because the “why” was obvious to most.

I remember in the early 90s, working for a manufacturer’s representative who’s leaders had been to a trade show and became convinced that they needed to develop a corporate-wide distributed data management system. At the time, it seemed obvious – put all of the data into one system that can be accessed by all branches for all business functions. Obvious benefit. Then, the show came around to laptop computers. No longer does the sales man carry a brief case. He carries a laptop. The corporate president blurted out in his deep southern drawl “Why in the world would I want all of my salesmen carrying around computers???” He went on to answer his own question with expletives assessing how “dumb of an idea” that would be.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube all have enormous (although inflated due to multi-account use) user bases.  You email contacts from years past and your professional networks.  Yes, even your Postal mail and physical correspondence are all sources for relationships evaluation and identification.

The bottom line is to share with everyone what you’re doing.  Seek to benefit others as an integral part of your relationships and you will profit more, learn and improve everyone involved.

Epic Contenders

Most people involved in modern business know of the rivalry between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. It was common knowledge that Jobs considered Microsoft products inferior and that there was a professional rivalry between them. Yet, it may escape attention that there is generally a common respect, even among rivals and adversaries, between successful people.

It’s interesting to note that Bill Gates sent a letter to Steve Jobs as he was dying. Yes, even Bill Gates had an appreciation for Steve Jobs, his often quoted adversary and critic. And Steve reportedly kept that letter by his bed – ostensibly to comfort himself in his last days. How fascinating. I think that says a lot about both men.

A Worthy Opponent

Jobs made no secret of his disdain for the Microsoft empire and it’s rise to power. In many ways it seems that Steve was actually propelled by a quest to do something “better” for the consumer. The best stories, the great epics, involve rivals and titanic struggles. This one, for all of it’s mundane techy detail, was no less fascinating than the greatest good vs evil stories of historic battles.

Social Gillie Team

When Good is Bad

We recently had a prospective client sit with us who has “done it all” so to speak, in the realm of digital communication promotions. The company is a consulting firm that has invested a large amount of time and resources into developing traditional internet and social media programs. They have an entire team that has worked on branding, artwork, websites, blogging, tweeting and selling their product on the web. It’s all good stuff! There’s been a massive effort, for a relatively small company. But we suspected that it wasn’t going well for them based on what we could see. 

The Harsh Reality

We invited this prospect to meet with us because we had previously bid their project, but they took a different plan with another vendor. They turned us down, going with the other firm’s strategy and using a different philosophy. When we checked back, we could see from the work that they had not implemented several of our key recommendations. We met to review their experience with the other plan.

When we asked how their plan is working, the blank look came back, “not so good. We’re flat on all sales for that project.” Well, we weren’t surprised. The platforms are all there, the efforts are all professional and polished. But, there is no implementation of the Business Relationship Engineering principles which we had recommended.

• What do I have that I can use?
• Who do I have relationships with?
• Who do I want a relationship with?
• How do I communicate with each?
• What tools and technology do we use to communicate?
• How do we measure our effectiveness?
• How do we implement what we need?
• How do we continuously benefit and improve from our efforts?

Is it “marketing”?  Is it “recruiting”?  Is is “advertising”?  No.

It is a specific strategy, set of processes, tools, measurable metrics and trained staff focused on creating positive new relationships and sustaining existing ones to increase individuals’ own overall productivity as well as the impact, reach and efficiency of the overall organization. Use the integration of Systems, Hardware and People to create a collaborative environment fostering every business relationship.

Contact us for more information.

Fresh Insights on Business Communications

This week, a fresh view has come out that is truly fascinating: Adam Ladd, an Online Communications Designer recorded his 5 year old daughter’s impressions of brand logos. There’s a lot of intrigue in the insights that come from her brief quips. The most noteworthy is Ladd and his wife obviously have a java addiction. Ha! (Don’t we all). But, there are many others that come out.

We help enterprises large and small identify, manage and integrate each stream or conduit of relationships that are mission critical.  Your employees in and out of the workplace, your leadership, your suppliers and of course your target customer, member or constituent.

Many don’t realize that the underground streams (e.g. your employees at a social gathering with others outside your orbit) impact your efforts and success as much as your advertising or marketing might.  Your business relationships require attention, measurement and sustainment.  You also will benefit from fresh relationships in each conduit.  From finding the talent to make you better, to enhancing your ability to serve those you wish to.

Identify each stream.  Measure its use and find its impact.  Integrate it to your common enterprise messaging.  Ensuring that everyone in your business communications conduits has the best, latest information.  Build relationships that keep others talking accurately about you and encouraging others to be in a relationship with your organization.

We provide comprehensive analysis, strategic planning, training, integration and fulfillment in ways custom designed for each person or enterprise.

When should you Consider Outsourcing, In-sourcing or Consulting? Will these empower your company, or dilute your creative energies? Do they offer gains of intellectual property, or risk losing them? Beware of formulaic answers, but seek sound methodology. Using consultants has distinct benefits that should be considered and some risks to avoid. Not every consulting engagement is alike. Many smaller companies do not realize that they can generally set the terms of usage of consultants. If you cannot do so with one company, you can simply shop for another provider who will work with terms that you like. Even if you are locked into a contractual engagement with one company, there are usually short term remedies that allow you to step around those contracts for certain situations.

Talking about Tech Origins

In the late 1980s and through the 1990s MCI, the bygone telecommunications innovator, built internal consulting teams within their company to develop new products and new services that completely changed the face of telecommunications; driving the innovations that make so many amazing things possible today, which are now part of our every day life. They invested billions on creative transformation. There are walls lined with patents and a list of hundreds of innovations in technology, all of which were birthed in that technology incubator.

Many innovations that go well beyond telecommunications actually owe their genesis to the engineers working there back then.

Consider these:

Why?  Because Murdoch is smart and understands that the easiest way to propagate a message widely and fast is via the social communication engine that is all the rage.

You can create new conversations, re-energize stale relationships and engineer all of your relationships’ communications just by riding the wave of technology with solid planning, processes and policies.

There are more people waiting to hear from YOU.

Who Owns Your Peeps -part 2  (see part 1)

Case of Mistaken Identity-Retention?

Credibility Devaluation?
One can only wonder what PhoneDog expects to win by suing Mr. K. If their valuation claim of $2.50 per month damages per follower is realized in a judgment or settlement, how do they expect to collect? Their valuation of the Twitter followers puts their expectation to collect in the range of greater than $350,000; a somewhat punitive action against a single employee. Furthermore, we wonder if PhoneDog considered the damage this may do to their ability to recruit new employees to do the same job, as well as the damage it does to their credibility with the disputed followers? We can expect a devaluing of public opinion that will result and our estimation is that this will be greater cost to PhoneDog than their supposed loss of followers.

Strategic Delay or defacto assent?

Many questions come to mind: If PhoneDog attached this valuation to their account at the beginning, why did they not create a succession plan for Noah to surrender the account credentials on or before his last day? We also wonder if they done so, since filing the lawsuit, with their other employees? According to studies, Social Media account followers are largely driven by personality, even when there is a brand attached. So, it seems unlikely that PhoneDog will retain these followers, even if they succeed against Mr. Kravitz in court. Can they win anything by reclaiming the account? That leads us to consider that they don’t actually care about the account.

Tit for Tat?

We wonder further: what is the motivation? According to the New York Times article published on Christmas day, there was a previous lawsuit in play – in which Noah Kravitz claimed losses against PhoneDog, for “15 percent of the site’s gross advertising revenue because of his position as a vested partner, as well as back pay related to his position as a video reviewer and blogger...”. So, what began as a tit for tat battle over back-pay and vesting will undoubtedly shape the way businesses use social media and who owns the followers you build on your account. Bloggers are all watching this case closely, as there will surely be ramifications and ripple effects that impact anyone using social media at any level in their job description for the future.

Better Choices

In our estimation, companies like PhoneDog need better social media policy that defines their expectations and plans for how employees and contractors are intended to use social media for the company. Their biggest mistake was in assigning him to blog and tweet, without a plan for who owned the accounts and what he was to do with the accounts when he left the company. Since no one at PhoneDog took control of his credentials, it seems clear to us that the company had no plan retain the account and that their claim is an after-thought. At Social Gillie we have seen this before, but usually it’s the case that employees leave and the employers contact them much later seeking credentials to accounts that have become dead due to lack of activity, because there was no retention plan in place.

Broad Implications for Everyone

Whoever wins this case, it seems certain that we will all lose something of the freewheeling nature of the social media frontier. We are all certain to have to compensate for the outcome as we build business relationshipsonline. The future of social media relationships will no doubt be impacted.

Contact Social Gillie for guidelines to establishing, growing and retaining your business networks. We specialize in Business Relationship Engineering, a process of achieving business objectives by fostering every business relationship.

In the dynamic world of business and information, buzzwords can be annoying as the “latest fad”. Many speak out in frustration or disagreement at calling everything “social” these days.  At Social Gillie we’re focused on prioritizing the relationships that make your business a success if managed well (or a failure if not). And that goes way beyond marketing. Its not “Social Business” or “Social Media” or “Social Marketing”.  It’s much more: Business Relationship Engineering.

Let’s drop the “Social media” buzz words but not forget that these are relationship platforms, tools that offer new ways for people to do what they have always wanted to do: relate to their world in a way that matters. Relationships matter, as the slogan goes; But there are so many types of relationships that matter! And it’s okay because effective relationships are also profitable.

Making our case for us

Providing one more piece of evidence to our recent point that the new economic virtue is “trust”, the automobile insurer Esurance has completely revamped their advertising/marketing campaign around the concept of Trust and Trustworthiness. Good for them. We hope they live up to it and that the campaign succeeds hugely.

The Social Media revolution is about developing trust through interactive dialogue. People want to get things that work and they want to know that when they buy something that doesn’t work, that there is a policy of fixing it – a way to get answers and solutions from the manufacturer.  No company is immune to the new tone of scrutiny.

Many retail outlets have made empires out of the policy that if you return a purchase to them within a certain period of time, they’ll take it back… no questions asked. Because fundamentally, we all know that there is an expectation that your stuff will work. But, really, shouldn’t the manufacturer already have that policy? Why should a middle-man have to take up that slack? If I pay a nickel for something, I expect to get a nickel’s worth of use from it. And when I pay $500 for something, i’m expecting an entirely different scale of value. I want it to work, or I want you to fix the problem until I get $500 worth of value.

The customer is tired of paying for stuff that doesn’t work, and having to wait in line when it doesn’t work. Companies that fast-track the solution for the purchaser will have a line of new customers. Because we want your stuff to work – or fundamentally we’re going to quit trusting you.

Business Based on Trust

At Social Gillie, we have been focused on trust since before the founding of this company and what has led our founders into the Social Business market is this fundamental belief that people do business with people who are trust-worthy and that great companies are based on the values that lead their customers to trust in them. Every great company from the original tech boom days was focused on making things that worked – and making their customers happy. When did that change? Why? It seems like everyone lost their integrity in the 90s.

At Social Gillie, we work hard to ensure that you have effective ways to meet expectations of your customer, whoever that is. Business Relationship Engineering gives you the edge, very effectively, to meet and exceed those expectations.

The question most frequently asked of us.  What do you guys do?

We help businesses, ministries, non-profits, individuals and campaigns effectively use Business Relationship Engineering.

What you sell, who you hire, who your leaders are, who supplies and the general public are all dependent on the number, nature and quality of the relationships you maintain and how you communicate in them.

Business relationship engineering is the integration of systems, hardware, and people to create a collaborative environment fostering every business relationship.

We provide assessments, planning, training, implementation and fulfillment specializing in digital, mobile and social communications programs.

We are your foremost resource for comprehensive real-time and Interactive communications consulting services.  Use the right tools, be on the forefront of public awareness.

For most business leaders, talking is not our first priority and it seems like an uncomfortable stretch to have open dialogue with the market place; It almost becomes “stage fright”. Yet, it wasn’t always like this. In times past, the business leader was accessible – whether the corner drugstore owner or the head of a department store chain. If you wanted to lodge a complaint, or make a suggestion, you could reach the owner. It seems those times are long gone, right?

Well no, they are actually back again. Even at the height of the modern impersonal corporate machinery, the most memorable and endearing companies we think of have a personality attached. Remember which companies had these slogans?

“…I’m not just the President, I’m also a client.” No doubt you remember the company – Hair Club for Men, even if you don’t remember the President’s name – Cy Sperling.
“You’re going to like the way you look, I guarantee it!” Certainly almost every businessman who ever went into a Men’s Wearhouse store did so because of George Zimmer’s personal guarantee. He didn’t have the finest men’s clothing, nor the cheapest. But his personal guarantee put many a competing clothier out of business. By the way, George loved to play softball with his employees – he was accessible.

Now, you may think: “Well that’s fine for a national chain operation that sells a product. But I have a service company and I need something different.” And it’s true, there is a difference between the Go-to-Market strategy for product vs. service companies – but it’s also true that people buy based on trust. This is true now, more than ever. Even IBM, the great “Big Blue” of the computer services world, has gone social.

Consider this great slogan from a local businessman in my area who provides a service: “If you like what we do, tell a friend. If not, tell me – I’ll fix it.”* He has built the largest and most successful mortgage brokerage in the region by making himself available to his customers for more than a decade.

Social Media is changing the culture of everything in business today. People are much more savvy, much more informed than ever before – and they expect to learn something about a company and it’s service or product before they buy. They also want to know they can express their opinion about the product once they have purchased, whether good or bad.

Consider the greatly renown Steve Jobs. When his customers began to tell him that the iPhone 4 version “sucked” because of reception problems, he argued back at them through the media. But he also sucked it up and found a fix to the problem. It wasn’t the finest example of customer service responsiveness in the history of the world, but it’s poignant that even Steve Jobs couldn’t ignore his customers.

In the current market, having too much sloganeering and too much marketing savvy can actually work against you. Many companies are succeeding by just getting on social media and talking with their clients – sharing their passion for delivering the customer’s needs without scripts, without slogans; while other companies with bigger budgets are floundering.

So is social media just good for marketing? No, far from it. In our opinion, marketing is actually the weakest link for social because marketers “don’t get it” for the most part. Social is about dialogue. Open dialogue with anyone who is pertinent to you, your business or your values. It’s not about scripts or polish. It’s about honesty. Traditional marketing says you only “put your best foot forward”. But… social isn’t about image. It’s about trust.

So, how do you get started? You just get started. Certainly, you organize your intentions, create a strategy, draft a plan, ensure your message and branding are there. But you must get started – this isn’t a fad, this is a tectonic shift in the market. If you wait, someone else will jump ahead of you and capture valuable market share. It’s like the land rush of the 1880s – waiting is a bad strategy.

These are just a few questions that can help you evaluate your strategy for impact:

What would best give your company a great productive or competitive edge?
What platforms are the best for your company, product, service?
Where do your customers hang out?
How do your employees communicate already?
Consider how many ways you can gain from using social:

Customer Service is a great place to begin. Best Buy’s CEO Brian Dunn has done an excellent job in making customer service everyone’s job at Best Buy through social media.
Vendor Management is a great way to employ social media. Why waste time and money setting up elaborate systems, when you can create controlled (closed or open) communication networks through various social media tools – to keep your vendors synchronized with your business.
Project Coordination can be greatly enhanced through social media, whether you run a large engineering operation, or a small landscaping company.
Marketing, Branding and Sales certainly have many ways to benefit from social – and there are many more possibilities.

Today’s customer is tech-savvy, market-wise and looking to buy from and work with companies that demonstrate attentiveness and trustworthiness. If your company becomes available and responsive, in ways that your competitor is not, you will gain market advantage fast.

So, how do you get started? Contact Social Gillie today for a Business Relationship Engineering analysis and audit. We take time to explore your company, your needs and your marketplace, then we provide a comprehensive report. We customize solutions and we respond to you. We charge a nominal fee, but provide rebates for services provided if you use Social Gillie as your services provider. We will also help you benchmark the success of your other provider(s).

There once was a manager who operated exclusively on a premise that “perception is reality”.  Unfortunately this made her too malleable and indecisive.  Rather than building cohesion in her organization she was perceived by her subordinates, peers and executives as a wishy washy climber.  This was not her intent nor her personality.  She was a hard working professional who cared about people.  Her insistence on behaving to adhere to her GUESS as to how others perceived things caused her own philosophy to be disproven.

A recent political candidate was driven out of a race because public perception was manipulated by media and others.  Another, with demonstrated character challenges in his past is going strong.  Another example of giving credibility to a perception and not to a proven reality is a harmful approach.

We must acknowledge the perceptions of others by inquiring.   We must measure reality in business so that mis-perceptions can be shown in a non-threatening and productive fashion.  Learn to monitor what others are saying about you and learn to communicate and demonstrate your positive realities.  This is an integral part of Business Relationship Engineering.

Social Gillie can help you do that.

1. News Outlets have a new shot in the arm, driving traffic from folks who may have been ignoring the news elsewhere.
2. Many social media users are unaware of the implications and risks of their usage of these emerging tools.

The continued growth of new social media tools indicates that there is a hunger for people to be connected, informed and interactive that has been missed by the old school media sources. However, it is also painfully obvious that these tools are taking control of our activity in ways that most are unaware of and that many are not thrilled about.

In their article, FastGush points out “Facebook asked developers to introduce private mode on their apps so that users could use them without sharing any kind of data on Facebook” because users were caught unaware that the previous configuration was publishing their reading habits to their networks without their knowledge.

As Social Media continues to flourish, there is great value to business and personal interaction on these tools, for those who are aware of their features, and risk for those who are not.

A good example is how I’m writing this post. I’m not actually “writing”, this article, I’m speaking it.

I’m using something called Dragon dictation. Microsoft and Google and any big player that you come across will probably be deeply involved in voice recognition technology.  Another solution is to use a composite tool or something that will aggregate all of your social traffic into and understandable interface. There are a lot of players out there. Some you may have heard of some you may have not, similarly the social network cloud is crowded with people trying to get your attention.

With Social Gillie you get a clear roadmap of the confusing wilderness of social media and more effectively communicating with your employees, your supply chain, dependent organizations, partners and of course, your customers or constituents. We’ll show you the tools you need and help you develop the most effective process for using them. Our custom solutions are cost-effective and can leave very little footprint on your organization or can effectively supplement any aspect of your social media management that may be missing.

Contact us today

• Creative
• Optimistic
• Magnanimous
• Passionate
• Humble
• Genius

Of all the amazing things that are Steve Jobs’ legacy, of which there are many, I think that Steve’s greatest can be captured in these six words. Because I believe that Steve Jobs will be remembered not only as a great creative genius, but for much more than that.  

Genius

Most people think of his genius in context of the 300+ patents he holds. It’s true that Steve took his creative experiences and incorporated them into his software, believing that everyone would enjoy using it and that it would make other people more creative. But I think that his creative genius transcends the products he invented. Steve believed that ordinary people wanted to do what was currently impossible. That is probably his greatest genius.

Humble

It seemed to me that he rarely boasted of his genius, unless it was to point out that he created something before Microsoft; a little bit tongue in cheek – since most people already knew it. Some would say that he pridefully railed against Microsoft for inferior products, but others would point out that he was just stating facts plainly. He also never trusted in his wealth as being important or significant. Steve was as unimpressed with wealth as anyone I have ever read. He spoke of the fact that this world’s wealth is only temporary and he lived as though every day would be his last. It seemed to me that Steve kept a healthy view of his mortality and became more humble as time went on.

Passionate

He knew what he wanted: excellence. More than anything, Steve wanted his products and his company to be the best at what they did. He knew how to motivate his engineers to capture that energy with passion, once flying a pirate flag above the offices of his engineering team to motivate and inspire them – the result was the Macintosh which he predicted would be “insanely great”. One of my fondest quotes of Steve Jobs is “The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament”. It seems his solution worked.

Magnanimous

Although he has spoken of being fired by his own company and being fired by the CEO that he hired, he has never spoken of it bitterly, at least not that I had ever heard. Instead, he has said that although it was painful, it was the most important thing that could have happened to him at the time. When he took back the role of CEO at Apple, Steve brought the NeXTstep operating system that he had created for NeXT workstation in the interim – and it became the foundation for the new MAC OS.

Optimistic

The impact that Steve has had on the artistic and business world supersedes his products. He had infectious genius. Although I had used the early Macs at Kinkos, long before I could afford a computer, I never owned one of his products until this year. Yet, his optimism was something that I found inspiring. In a way, Steve’s philosophy on business and creative endeavors motivated me to believe I could do more and go farther than I had been told.

Creative

The creative spark that Steve brought with him was continuously shared with all of us, in one form or another. His Pixar animated movies have become bywords and metaphors for people around the world and I think you can see a little of Steve Jobs’ personal emotions and motivations in the movie Toy Story, when Woody endures being replaced by Buzz Lightyear as the top guy among the toys; with Woody later coming to the rescue. What fascinates me most about Steve’s life is that he not only created in positive and optimistic ways, but he believed in the creative spark in others. He believed that everyone would love the opportunity to create, compose, design and build excellent things. So, he created things that helped others be more creative and more productive. One of the most inspiring things I heard him speak of was that you should persevere until you find the one thing in life that you can love and then continue to persevere until you can do it with excellence, no matter how late in life. Steve believed in empowering the creative spark in others. In my opinion that is, more than the rest, his greatest legacy of all.

Thank you Steve Jobs, for your amazing contributions.

If you missed the link above, please watch this brief address to the graduating class at Stanford. I believe you will be inspired by his story and by his humility.

Some great quotes of Steve Jobs, on successful entrepreneurship:

• “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
• “I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.”
• “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”
• “A lot of companies have chosen to downsize, and maybe that was the right thing for them. We chose a different path. Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets.”
• “My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better.”
• “Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.”
• “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me.”
• “Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.”
• “In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.”
• “I’ve always wanted to own and control the primary technology in everything we do.”

In First Things First, Stephen Covey shares the following story:

One day, a time management expert was speaking to a group of business students and, to drive home a point, used an illustration those students will never forget.

As this man stood in front of the group of high-powered overachievers, he said, “Okay, time for a quiz.” Then, he pulled out a one-gallon, wide-mouthed Mason jar and set it on a table in front of him. Then he produced about a dozen fist-sized rocks and carefully placed them, one at a time, into the jar.

When the jar was filled to the top and no more rocks would fit inside, he asked, “Is this jar full?”

Everyone in the class said, “Yes.”

Then he said, “Really?” He reached under the table and pulled out a bucket of gravel. Then he dumped some gravel in and shook the jar, causing pieces of gravel to work themselves down into the spaces between the big rocks.

Then, he asked the group once more, “Is the jar full?” By this time, the class was onto him. “Probably not,” one of them answered.

“Good!” he replied. He reached under the table and brought out a bucket of sand. He started dumping the sand in and it went into all the spaces left between the rocks and the gravel. Once more he asked the question, “Is this jar full?”

“No!” the class shouted. Once again, he said, “Good!” Then, he grabbed a pitcher of water and began to pour it in until the jar was filled to the brim. Then, he looked up at the class and asked, “What is the point of this illustration?”

One eager beaver raised his hand and said, “The point is, no matter how full your schedule is, if you try really hard, you can always fit some more things into it!”

“No,” the speaker replied, “that’s not the point. The truth this illustration teaches us is: If you don’t put the big rocks in first, you’ll never get them in at all.”

What are the ‘big rocks’ in your life? A project that YOU want to accomplish? Time with your loved ones? Your faith, your education, your finances? A cause? Teaching or mentoring others? Remember to put the BIG ROCKS in first or you’ll never get them in at all.

So, tonight, or in the morning, when you are reflecting on this short story, ask yourself this question: What are the ‘big rocks’ in my life or business? Then put those in your jar first.