The right man for the JOB! What can you learn from this world-class CEO’s leadership and management skills? [Monday: Marketing Marvels]
Miles Everson’s Business Builder Daily speaks to the heart of what great marketers, business leaders, and other professionals need to succeed in advertising, communications, managing their investments, career strategy, and more.
A Note from Miles Everson:
Hello! How are you feeling today?
We hope you’re ready to start another awesome week.
Let’s begin the day with inspiration from a “Marketing Marvel”—an outstanding person in the business industry or marketing industry. Each Monday, we talk about these professionals and their insights, experiences, and contributions.
In today’s article, let’s focus on the story of a legendary CEO whose life lessons have been imprinted on a leading tech giant’s success.
Continue reading to know more about this person’s brilliant strategies and mindsets that led to the creation of some of the best tech products in the world today.
Miles Everson
CEO, MBO Partners
Chairman of the Advisory Board, The I Institute
Marketing Marvels
“Think different.”
This is the famous tagline of leading tech company Apple, Inc. It was created by advertising agency TBWA/Chiat/Day, and has been widely taken as a response to tech company IBM’s slogan, “Think.”
Did you know “Think different” wasn’t simply a tagline Apple uses nowadays? It was originally a campaign that consisted of a TV ad, print ad, and promotional posters. Upon release, the campaign became an enormous success for the company and garnered numerous awards and accolades.
Additionally, the success of “Think different” bolstered the Apple brand and reestablished the “counter-culture” vibe of its earlier days. It set the stage for the immensely successful iMac and later, the Mac OS X (now named macOS) operating system.
The Right Man for the JOB
Apple didn’t become the company it is now only because of its outstanding products, services, and marketing strategies. It also achieved success as one of the leading tech giants with the help of this person’s management and leadership skills:
Steve Jobs!
Photo from Fantastic Facts
Jobs (February 24, 1955 to October 5, 2011) was the co-founder and former Chairman and CEO of Apple. He was a pioneer of the personal computer (PC) revolution in the 1970s and 1980s.
He and his fellow co-founder Steve Wozniak established Apple in 1976 with an initial goal to simply sell Wozniak’s newly designed Apple I PC. A year later, they gained fame and wealth with the production and sale of the Apple II, one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputers.
Jobs and Wozniak’s next breakthrough came in 1984 with the creation of the Macintosh, the first mass-produced PC with a graphical user interface (GUI). This PC revolutionized the desktop publishing industry in 1985, with the addition of the Apple LaserWrite, the first laser printer to feature vector graphics.
However, in that same year, Jobs was forced out of the company due to a power struggle with its board members and then-CEO John Sculley. It wasn’t the best move Apple’s former leadership and management team made, though.
With Jobs’ absence, the brand’s sales and market share gradually declined. Apple kept doing what it had always done, but it was like a sheep without a shepherd. It produced printers and PCs of all kinds to try to boost sales, but the products’ unattractive and rough designs kept customers away.
Thankfully, the agony didn’t last longer than 12 years…
When Jobs returned to Apple as CEO in 1997, he immediately did a series of steps to revive the company that was on the verge of bankruptcy. He worked closely with designer Jony Ive to develop a line of products that had larger cultural ramifications.
This led to the creation of:
- The Apple Store
- iMac
- iPad
- iPod
- iPhone
- iTunes
… and more.
As a result, he turned Apple from a company in the red to one of the most valuable companies in the world! Today, the company’s market cap is around USD 2.4 trillion.
While Jobs will always be known as the visionary behind all of Apple’s products and software, he should also be recognized for his excellent choices in hiring world-class leaders and talents to execute his vision. He knew saving a broken supply chain needed a team, not just an individual to do all the work.
Below are some of the leadership lessons you can learn from Jobs:
- Taking Responsibility End-to-End
Jobs knew the best way to achieve simplicity for Apple’s products was to ensure hardware, software, and peripheral devices were seamlessly integrated. An Apple ecosystem allowed devices to be simpler, syncing to be smoother, and glitches to be rarer.
Aside from that, Jobs took end-to-end responsibility for the customer experience (CX). From the performance of the ARM microprocessor in various Apple devices to the act of buying those products, every aspect of CX was tightly linked together.
The result?
The approach not only maximized short-term profits but also led to astonishing products marked by delightful customer experiences!
- Engaging with Employees Face-to-Face
Jobs was a firm believer in face-to-face meetings and interactions. He said:
“There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat. That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say, ‘Wow,’ and soon, you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.”
What’s more?
Jobs disliked formal presentations. He was known for gathering his executive team every week to discuss ideas without a formal agenda, and he spent every Wednesday afternoon doing the same with his marketing team and advertising team.
He wanted his teams to engage with him organically, because he believed that’s where the best ideas come from… and this technique truly helped the company!
Apple employees, managers, and executives not only became involved every step of the way but also saw Jobs as a leader they can reach out to, count on, and engage with.
- Knowing Both the Big Picture and the Details
According to Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes, one of Jobs’ salient traits was his ability and desire to envision an overarching strategy while also focusing on the tiniest aspects of design.
Example:
In 2000, Jobs came up with a grand vision that the PC should become a “digital hub” for managing all of a user’s music, videos, photos, and other files. Thus, he got Apple into the personal devices business with the iPod and iPad.
In 2010, he came up with a successor strategy—the “hub” would move to the cloud—and so Apple began building a huge server farm so all a user’s content could be uploaded and seamlessly synced to other devices.
Even as he was laying out these grand visions, he was fretting over the shape and color of the screws and other materials inside the iMac.
This shows as a business leader, Jobs was detail-oriented and keen in making sure every aspect of Apple’s products led to the achievement of his goals.
—
Jobs was a trailblazer, and he helped redefine the world we now live in. His entrepreneurial saga helped transform 7 industries:
- Personal computing
- Animated movies
- Music
- Phones
- Tablet computing
- Retail stores
- Digital publishing
Another important lesson you can learn from Jobs is to love what you do. He said:
“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know it when you find it.”
So, always find passion in your career or one aspect of it. According to Jobs, doing that will make you more driven and enable you to stand out.
We hope you enjoyed reading and knowing more about today’s “Marvel!”
Truly, Jobs belongs in the pantheon of America’s great innovators, along with Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Walt Disney, etc.
None of these people were saints, but even after they’ve passed, history will always remember how they applied imagination to technology and business.
“The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
– Apple’s “Think Different” commercial, 1997
(This article is from The Business Builder Daily, a newsletter by The I Institute in collaboration with MBO Partners.)
About The Dynamic Marketing Communiqué’s
“Monday Marketing Marvels”
Too often, industry experts and the marketing press sing the praises of some brand or company’s marketing strategy.
… only for the audience to later find out that its product was a flop, or worse, that the brand or company went bankrupt.
The true ROI in marketing can’t be separated from the business as a whole.
What good is a marketing case study if one can’t prove that the company’s efforts actually paid off?
At the end of the day, either the entire business is successful or it isn’t. And the roles of marketing and communication are always paramount to that success.
Every Monday, we publish a case study that highlights the world’s greatest marketing strategies, marketers, and communicators.
However, the difference between our articles and the numerous ones out there is that we will always make certain that the firm really did generate and demonstrate earning power worthy of study in the first place (compliments of Valens Research’s finance group) in keeping with a person’s leadership skills in the area of marketing and/or communication.
We’ll also study the greatest marketing fails and analyze what they did wrong, or what they needed to improve. We all make our mistakes, but better we learn from others’ mistakes—and earlier, rather than later.
Hope you found this week’s marketing marvel interesting and helpful.
Stay tuned for next week’s Monday Marketing Marvels!
Cheers,
Kyle Yu
Head of Marketing
Valens Dynamic Marketing Capabilities
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