Here's Guy Kawasaki on what he learned from Steve Jobs:
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 firsthand what it was like to work with him. I don’t 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.
Experts -- journalists, analysts, consultants, bankers, and gurus -- can’t “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 don’t 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 Steve’s brain talking to the left one. If you ask customers what they want, they will tell you, “Better, faster, and cheaper” -- that is, better sameness, not revolutionary change. They can only describe their desires in terms of what they are already using -- around 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 use -- that’s 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.
. 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 demands -- some shades of black weren’t black enough. Mere mortals think that black is black, and that a trash can is a trash can. Steve was such a perfectionist -- a perfectionist Beyond: Thunderdome -- and lo 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 can’t go wrong with big graphics and big fonts.
Take a look at Steve’s slides. The font is sixty points. There’s usually one big screenshot or graphic. Look at other tech speaker’s slides -- even 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 world’s greatest product introduction guy...don’t you wonder why more people don’t copy his style?
COMMENTARY: I like picking on Guy Kawasaki, and have had a few runins with him or someone impersonating him on Twitter. I have never found anyone so in love with himself. He has written the same book ten times under ten different titles. This is my opinion after reading four of his books, and coming to the inescapable conclusion: "Hey wait a minutes, didn't I just read this before?"
I found it most revealing when Guy Kawasaki openly states,
"I lived in fear that Steve would tell me that I, or my work, was crap."
What's this cockamaymee fear of someone. You should welcome the challenge of taking things right to the edge. Walk the line of fire. The fight of the mongoose versus the King cobra. Getting fired is a defeatest attitude of many bosses. They don't want to make the effort to learn from you or learn how to deal with you, or lack the mental fortitude to change their management style, so their solution is fire you. I would've told Steve, add Adobe Flash to the iPhone and iPad because without it, they are truly not really magical devices.
"I lived in fear that Steve would tell me that I, or my work, was crap."
If you walk around fearing somebody, then you will be a mental cripple for the rest of your life. In short, Guy Kawasaki is a still stewing after all these years. He wished he would've told off Steve Jobs. I will bet you $100. Now, after the guys dead, he still fears telling the truth about Steve Jobs. Come on Guy, say it: Steve Jobs was an arrogant, cold, ruthless, raving SOB. A visionary and creative genius, but a SOB never the less. Fact: you can be an icon and be an asshole.
Courtesy of an article dated October 10, 2011 appearing in GreenTechMedia
Very, very nicely done!
Posted by: Hermes Designer Handbags | 11/26/2011 at 06:22 PM