On Internet Business

The innovation ‘secrets’ of Steve Jobs

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Entrepreneur Resources, Leadership

Some books allow you to piece together the way another individual works, even if that individual seems to prefer not to talk about their own working habits. Carmine Gallo has pulled together the strategies used by Apple and insights from Apple employees whow’ve worked with Steve Jobs, to reveal the package of ‘secrets’ that make the Jobs strategy so explosive.

And the first thing is, these aren’t secrets. Perhaps Jobs is unusual in his relentless focus (which is one reason he doesn’t talk to the media about how he operates, he just wants to focus on the outcomes of the way he operates: new products, new ideas, new experiences) but these are concepts that have been around for a good while. So what makes the ‘insanely different’ into ‘breakthrough success’?

Partly I think it’s the combination. Jobs carries through on his seven key ‘secrets’ simultaneously. He doesn’t lose traction by having career worries in the middle of designing customer experience and he doesn’t dilute his vision by trying to recast it into the vocabulary of banks or investors. The purity of his approach might be high risk, but it’s also high gain.

So what are the ‘secrets’?

1. Do what you love. Jobs says that he’s followed his heart and that’s what allowed him to use his passion to create innovation. Instead of thinking ‘career’ he thinks ‘love’ and that guides his decisions.
2. Put a dent in the Universe. Find people like you and work with them, don’t compromise on people who don’t have vision but do have skills. Skills can be learned or outsourced, vision can’t.
3. Kick start your brain. Jobs believes that a broad set of experiences gives us better understanding of others. There’s a Zen parable that says that the Zen student reviews what he learns every day, and the Zen master reviews what he unlearns every day – in other words, kick-starting your brain by removing your old learning can help you see the world differently. That’s what allows Jobs to spot ways to change the world for his customers.
4. Sell dreams, not products. Is a natural progression from the previous point – if you can share your dream, you turn your customers into people who share your vision.
5. Say no to 1,000 things. Which also builds on the third secret. If you aim for simplicity and unlearn valueless thinking, you simplify. Jobs calls this eliminating the unnecessary so that the necessary can speak.
6. Create insanely great experiences. Using your heart and passion, building dreams and relying on vision means that your business is emotional. While that’s often a bad word in business speak, it’s allowed Apple to create deep loyalty and great affection in those who use its products.
7. Master the message. Make excitement the test of a product. If you can’t make people insanely excited about your new idea, you can’t create the buzz that makes it a success.

It boils down to a series of paradoxes: big vision allied to ruthless focus; trend prediction matched with emotional appeal; disruptive products paired with classic customer service, all united by a constant ability to deliver.

Apple tattoo courtesy of Terry Johnston

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Business hero: Nando Parrado

Posted by Michael under Leadership

There are few people in the world whose lives are utterly changed by a single experience. Nelson Mandela in prison, 33 Chilean miners rescued after 69 days trapped underground and, for me, Nando Parrado.

His is one of the most courageous and determined lives of the modern age, showing astonishing leadership, decision-making, supreme endurance and survival – all based on team work created under almost impossible circumstances. Nando Parrado makes other business leaders pale in comparison.

As no more than a boy, playing rugby for his college, he flew to Chile for an international friendly. Travelling back by plane with his family and many of his friends, he was involved in a horrific crash.

Survivor to business leader

Stranded high in the Andes, his mother and little sister killed by the plane crash, he and fifteen others survived. With one companion, Nando Parrado walked out of the mountains to get help for the rest of the survivors and they all went on to resume their lives after being lost for 72 days. The things he had to do to stay alive were beyond the understanding of most of us: eating the flesh of those who had died, trekking through pathless snowy mountains for eleven days, coming home to find his family had cleared his room and given away his belongings, and that the family business was on the brink of collapse because his mother, who died in the crash, had been key to its success.

Values for life and business

It takes incredible insight, discipline and self-belief to recover from such horrific situations, let alone to build a wonderful life, a secure family and successful businesses. But that’s what Nando Parrado did.

Now he’s a motivational speaker and business leader, president of the family company and the founder of two TV media production companies and a cable one. Parrado says that three values helped him not just survive but thrive: family, confidence and friendship.

Or as he puts it, ‘after having experienced a human situation where our limits of physical and mental suffering were constantly reached and even exceeded, I have come to understand that family is what made us survive.’ In addition he now finds confidence easy, ‘life is simpler than it looks’ is his mantra, along with ‘eat every sandwich, kiss every girl’ an allusion to the things that the young survivors said to themselves they wished they had done, and would always do, when they got back to safety.

Making decisions is straightforward he says, because the worst than can happen is that he will be wrong. After what he lived through, that’s nothing to worry about.

And friendship? He still lives in the same district in Montevideo he grew up in, as do fifteen of the sixteen survivors. None of them had counselling and none of them seem to have struggled to cope with their experiences. Parrado says that friendship was his inspiration to trek out, with one friend at his side and others relying on them for any hope of survival.

Now his view of the world is straightforward, ‘Sometimes I ask myself why people need to experience extreme situations to understand the real values of life. These values are so clear and so near us, yet we rush by them looking for the “important” things. Eat every sandwich, kiss every girl. Life is simpler than it looks.’

Andes photograph by here everywhere

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Online retail and online advertising – boom or bust?

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Online Retail

Two reports in the past month have highlighted the way that online adverts and online retail are impacting each other and the global economy.

Online advertising seeks a future

The annual global media survey undertaken by Deloitte suggests that online advertising needs to innovate or die.  While the popularity of both printed and online newspapers had increased significantly, the influence of online advertising seems to be declining and online adverts are regarded as more annoying than print ones. Apparently, despite the continuing rise in internet use, the influence of internet advertising on buying behaviour remains low in the majority of countries surveyed. In some it is actually declining. Exceptions to this finding Japan, where online advertising takes first place for influence and Korea, where online ads are nearly as powerful as television in their effect on consumer preferences.

The future of advertising online was expected to be customisation: using the internet’s interactive nature to craft intelligent adverts that recognised and responded to the needs and interests of individuals. But there’s a backlash against this vision of the future too, as the survey revealed that consumers in almost all countries were reluctant to provide personal information to websites or have their internet browsing history tracked.

Interestingly, social media (the fourth-most popular internet activity behind search engine use, e-mail activity and news and current affairs) was still rising and may offer an alternative to online advertising.

Online retail seeks profitability

The recent conference of the International Council of Shopping Centres reveals that while many retailers are involved in online selling, far fewer have found it lucrative.

Issues that retailers wrestle with include set up costs for an online shop, stocking it and writing the kind of copy that entices consumers. Then there are what could be called ethical questions: when stocks run low, do you sell the last items to online customers or ones standing in front of a sales advisor in a physical shop?

Many retailers say they’re struggling to understand how to balance the online/physical equation, but they know they can’t walk away from it. Shoppers, especially those aged under thirty, demand the ability to buy online. Even more importantly, e-commerce can fund physical business: customers tend to spend three times more in an actual shop than they do on a website but many consumers are researching those shop purchases online before they travel to buy. And there’s another reason that online retail is booming: niche markets. Retailers are able to put end-of-run or stock clearance items online to clear space in a physical store for new items, and they can also offer specialist items (rare vinyl records for music retailers, collectables for enthusiasts and unusual sizes for clothing) online that they wouldn’t have space for in stores. E-commerce sales rose 18% globally last year, so it’s an important balancing act to get right.

Shopping trolleys courtesy of iboy_daniel

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Negative Business Language: why EMEA should be outlawed

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, customer service, Leadership

Back in 1991, Gerald Ratner destroyed his career, his family business and the livelihoods of many of his employees when he made an after-dinner speech to the Institute of Directors saying that his company, ‘…sold a pair of earrings for under a pound, which is cheaper than a prawn sandwich from Marks & Spencer, but probably wouldn’t last as long’ a position he worsened by saying a few minutes later that some  products were cheap because they were ‘total crap’.

We’re all supposed to have learned this lesson now – to have removed the tendency to talk down to our customers and to categorise them as if they don’t matter and their opinions don’t influence everything we do. And that’s good.

So why is it that the big boardrooms still have a tendency to treat geography as if it’s a nuisance, and cultures as if they are inconvenient? Isn’t that just like saying you sell your customers crap?

Boardroom Bloopers

Increasingly I’m hearing EMEA in common business usage – if you haven’t heard it yet, it’s an acronym for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. On one level, I can just about see the reasoning for the largest multinational businesses to amalgamate continents into massive units. But I draw the line when I am told that I’m from the ‘EMEA’ region.

Europe, Middle East and Africa is vast. It includes three of the seven continents, more than a quarter of the planet’s total landmass and nearly a third of the world’s population. Our earliest discovered ancestor, several world religions, the rarest minerals on earth, both World Wars, and the richest (Lichtenstein) and poorest (Democratic Republic of Congo) national populations are all to be found in, or originated from, this ‘region’.

From Austria to Zimbabwe, from Switzerland to Saudi Arabia, EMEA contains an incredible variety of culture, resources, wealth and politics.  How can grouping such diverse areas under one homogenous name have any marketing benefit? And what does it say about businesses that they feel the need to lump and dump in this way, denying the identity, needs, opportunities and challenges of geography, culture and identity?

Cultural Ignorance A Bad Boardroom Tool

How would a New Yorker feel about being asked, ‘how are things in NORAM (North America, Canada and Mexico) or someone from Sydney being told they are from JAPAC (Japan and Asia Pacific)? 

It’s my view that the term EMEA and others like it represent the lowest point of cultural ignorance and insensitivity – it should never be used outside the company board room and even there, it’s hardly a useful tool to winning friends, influencing people or understanding the world you’re trying to work in.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m English from the UK part of Europe – end of story. I don’t seek to deny anybody else their origins and identity and I don’t see the need to remove the richness of nationality, culture, ethnicity or anything else just so that there are a few less words on a powerpoint presentation.

Remember Ratner – people deserve to be treated as equals, even when they aren’t present and especially when it’s their money we are trying to obtain – respect is the least we owe to those who buy from us, and the best return we can make for their investment in our businesses.

3D map image courtesy of kcp4911

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Small Business and Social Media – useful tool or trouble ahead?

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Online Retail, Social Media

Looking at recent research into small businesses and social media there’s a confused picture emerging.  BusinessBlogs suggests that a lot of social media marketing being done by small businesses is wasting time and money. But the University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business, found that adaptation in this area is moving faster, and is more positively viewed by small American businesses, than had been expected.

What is the small business social media experience?

Very different, according to whose research you read. BusinessBlogs may have a vested interest in finding problems as it has a Facebook for Business ebook to promote, while the academic research is a follow up on a similar phone-based survey, run in 2008. BusinessBlogs says:

1. For most SME’s (small business enterprise) social media or social networking for business benefit is an unknown quantity …best avoided until adequate know how is acquired.
2. Businesses need reasonable knowledge of how to participate effectively in online communities and understand the cost benefit ratio for the business so time wasting activities are avoided.
3. Each social network requires a unique strategy for engagement. … [you would] not use the same engagement strategy for Facebook and Twitter.
4. Use of automation tools to remove a lot of the manual input is a must for small business and this expertise is not in house – Businesses need to engage 3rd party social media professionals to identify what is appropriate to meet the needs of the business. A ‘one size fits all mentality’ is not appropriate.
5. Most businesses have no idea where to seek help and where to start in social networks and as a result can get into trouble early on.
6. Of the small businesses … using social networking successfully most spend on average over 2-3 hours per day in key social networks … most have no clear separation between business and personal use of social networks.

On the other hand, the Maryland research shows that technology adoption rates (the take-up of new forms of communication, in this case) in the USA have doubled 12 months from 12% to 24%. Its conclusions are quite different:

1. One in five small business owners are integrating social media into their business processes
2. 45% of surveyed respondents … believe their social media initiatives will pay off financially in 12 months or less.
3. Small business owners … believe social media can help them on the lead generation front, and that is the primary motivating factor for engaging in these new customer service channels.
4. [Despite] half of surveyed respondents [finding] the time it takes to use social media sites more daunting than expected, 61% are still putting in the hours and making active efforts to identify new customers.

Conclusions

• Some businesses are coping well with social media, and are managing to do this engagement in-house without having to separate out work/social engagement. This suggests that entrepreneurial businesses with a more relaxed workplace environment and less focus on demarcation of responsibilities are probably taking social media in their stride. Those with more hierarchical structures and classic boundaries between personal and business lives are more likely to be struggling to integrate social media in their marketing and PR.
• Finding new business leads is likely to be a key area of focus in social media strategies, but understanding the difference between engagement (communication) and promotion (outreach only) may be something that small businesses need help with.
• Having social media strategies will prove useless unless somebody in a small organisation is given the freedom and opportunity to build social media links that are meaningful in driving business. That opportunity needs to be measured, both for profit creation and for brand management – there have been enough scare stories of an intern or departing staff member using social media to tear a hole in a business’s carefully constructed image for even the smallest enterprise to know the risks.

Twitter addiction image courtesy of carrotcreative

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