Gary Hamel: Deconstructing Apple

"Over the past decade, the pride of Cupertino has produced a mind-boggling parade of accomplishments.

– Having been dismissed as a footnote in the personal computer industry, Apple is now the market leader in computers costing more than $1,000. In one recent month, its market share in this segment exceeded 90%.
– Though it was a late entrant into the mobile phone business, Apple currently makes more money from roughly 3% of the global handset market than Nokia makes from more than 30%.
– Within six years of launching its online music store in 2003, Apple had become the world’s largest music retailer.
– Apple’s first physical store opened in 2001. Five years later, Apple’s sparse, elegant shops were generating four times more revenue per square foot than its big box competitors,v and its Fifth Avenue store in New York is thought to be the most profitable retail outlet in the world.
– At $180 billion, Apple’s market value is currently three and half times that of Nokia, and more than 60% higher than Hewlett-Packard’s—a company with three times Apple’s revenue.

So rather than fretting about the prospects for the iPad, clever Apple watchers and envious wannabes should be asking themselves: How in the world could one company have accomplished all this? How do you build an organization that is capable of reinventing not just one industry but four—computing, music, electronics retailing and mobile phones. How do you do the unprecedented repeatedly?


Competitors and business analysts would probably credit Apple’s gravity-defying success to a contrarian strategy that . . .

Focuses heavily on design.
Fuses hardware and software.
Integrates a broad array of complementary technologies.
Locks up customers with velvet hand-cuffs.
Harnesses the efforts of independent software developers.
Leverages the company’s core competencies into new markets.

But as logical as this analysis may seem, it’s also unsatisfying. It reveals something of the “how,” but nothing around the “why.” Why has Apple been able to rewrite the rules in a handful of industries when most companies struggle to do it in even once? Why does the company seem to take such pride in defying conventional wisdom? And most importantly, why is it able to routinely deliver the exceptional?

Nevertheless, I don’t think it’s a particular strategy that makes Apple Apple. Nor can you attribute all of the company’s success to the executive abilities of Steve Jobs. Instead, I believe the company’s extraordinary run of success reflects an unstinting devotion to a particular set of values. Within the universe of inventors, designers and artists, these values aren’t particularly remarkable; but within the universe of Fortune 500 companies, they are as rare as a rose in winter.

It’s not too hard to deduce at least some of the ideals that have propelled the company forward . . .

Be passionate.
Lead, don’t follow.
Aim to surprise.
Be unreasonable.
Innovate incessantly and pervasively.
Sweat the details.
Think like an engineer, feel like an artist.

Apple—but if they aren’t, they should be! For me, the case of Apple is just a convenient and plausible vehicle for driving home a fundamental truth: you can’t improve a company’s performance without improving its values. So don’t get distracted by all the things you hate about Apple. I agree: it’s a company, not a shrine.

With that out of the way, let’s compare and contrast. If the values in the left hand column characterize Apple (or my airbrushed rendering of it), what are the values that characterize your company? I’m guessing it’s something closer to what’s on the right.

Be passionate. Be rational.
Lead, don’t follow. Be cautious.
Aim to surprise. Aim to satisfy.
Be unreasonable. Be practical.
Innovate incessantly. Innovate here and there.
Sweat the details. Get it mostly right.
Think like an engineer, Think like an engineer,
feel like an artist. feel like an accountant.

Unlike Apple, most companies have a lot more accountants than artists. Most are prisoners of Management 1.0—of industrial-age management practices that emphasize discipline, focus, efficiency and alignment above all else. They are bound by the shackles of a management model that is utilitarian, antiseptic and hyper-rational. And that’s why they won’t soon mimic Apple’s success.

But what if Apple’s passions were the norm rather than the exception? What kind of world would it be if the values I’ve attributed to Apple were the values that characterized the world’s leading insurance company, or publisher or shipping company or airline or hotel chain? What if they were the cherished ideals of the paper shufflers at the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Motor Vehicles? OK, now I’m hallucinating. But I still can’t help but dream of a world in which Apple seems a lot less exceptional because every other organization has become more so."


Gary Hamel: Deconstructing Apple - Gary Hamel’s Management 2.0 - WSJ

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Leadership Traits

An excerpt from a HBR Blog on one very crucial aspect of leadership - how to engage people through talking

"Every leader I know has at least one need in common: a need to connect honestly with others. One way to help foster improved connections is by asking good questions. Leaders who excel at asking good questions have honed an ability to cut to the heart of the manner in a way that disarms the person being interviewed and opens the door for genuine conversation.

Whether they are talking to customers, interviewing job candidates, talking to their bosses, or even questioning staff, executives need to draw people out. And so often, it is not a matter of what you ask, it is how you ask it."
Learn to Ask Better Questions - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review

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What is a Linchpin?

I don't know whether the following review of the "book" is a marketing tactics or it is an earnest opinion but it is worth reading.

As Godin says, “a linchpin is the essential element, the person who holds part of the operation together. Without the linchpin, the thing falls apart.”

For much of our lives, we have been trained to be the opposite of a linchpin — an interchangeable part in an industrial machine. Even before the global recession, it often took a career of job hopping to get ahead. In today’s world, companies and customers will show their loyalty only to those who are indispensable. This arrangement, Godin explains, leverages talent and creativity more than it rewards obedience.

However, we are hardwired to avoid this arrangement like the plague.  Our “lizard” brain is what prevents us from becoming a Linchpin, and it orchestrates what Godin calls the “resistance.” The resistance is what prevents us from doing what we say we will do. It prevents us from getting that project completed, those phone calls done, and from stepping outside of our comfort zones. Our lizard brain wants us to remain safe, and at the earliest sign of danger, gives us all sorts of reasons why we can’t accomplish what we set out to do. For instance, it will tell you that people will laugh at your ideas if you hit publish on that blog post, and that you should probably rework that last paragraph to be a little less confrontational. Godin tells the story of a software engineer at Apple who was reluctant to finish a piece of code he had been holding on to because “it wasn’t quite ready,” to which Steve Jobs replied, “artists ship.” So, the only real way to prevent your lizard brain from taking over your life is to complete things even when it feels uncomfortable.

What is clear from Godin’s book is that the world has changed, and you are at the right place at the right time to make a huge difference in your organization and in your life.  Reading this book just might be the kickstart you need to become a linchpin yourself.  I hope you’ll take on that challenge.

Here is what Seth Godin says about being a Linchpin

The minute there’s a map there is no art. Paint by numbers is not art. Paint by numbers is a mechanical activity. There’s a village in China called Dafen… By one estimate, a third of all the oil paintings in the world are painted in this village in China. And what happens is as soon as the sun rises hundreds of thousands of people run outside, set up their easels, and paint as fast as they can until sunset. That’s what they do for a living. No one would claim that these people are artists. They are painters. They are people who put oil paint on canvas. They have a manual. They have a map.

If I told you, step-by-step, what to do to become indispensable, then anyone could do it. And if anyone could do it, it wouldn’t be worth very much. Scarcity creates value. And, this is going to frustrate people, but the emotional labor of work, today — the thing that makes you worth $50,000 or $100,000 or $150,000 a year — is that you can navigate the world without a map. People who need a map, are going to get paid less and less and work harder and harder every day, because there’s plenty of those people, and I can find them with a click of the mouse. Challenge — the only thing I’m selling in this book — is the decision that you will now live without a map, that you will be less obedient, not more obedient; less compliant, not more compliant; and that ultimately, you will do work that matters. And, if I achieve that, with even a hundred people it will be worth the effort.

Seth Godin on What it Takes to be a Linchpin [INTERVIEW]

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Apple & Innovation

"APPLE is regularly voted the most innovative company in the world, but its inventiveness takes a particular form. Rather than developing entirely new product categories, it excels at taking existing, half-baked ideas and showing the rest of the world how to do them properly. Under its mercurial and visionary boss, Steve Jobs, it has already done this three times. In 1984 Apple launched the Macintosh. It was not the first graphical, mouse-driven computer, but it employed these concepts in a useful product. Then, in 2001, came the iPod. It was not the first digital-music player, but it was simple and elegant, and carried digital music into the mainstream. In 2007 Apple went on to launch the iPhone. It was not the first smart-phone, but Apple succeeded where other handset-makers had failed, making mobile internet access and software downloads a mass-market phenomenon."


The above excerpt from an article describes the route Apple has taken to innovate products. It does innovation through "taking existing, half-baked ideas and showing the rest of the world how to do them properly." 


So, innovation does not mean one has to produce an entirely new or unique product.


Another aspect of this innovation is the leadership - "Under its mercurial and visionary boss, Steve Jobs." One of the critical and essential trait of a leader is "he has to be a visionary". This has been rightly described by Allama Muhammad Iqbal, the great philosopher & poet of East in his famous verse


"“NIGAH BULAND, SUKHAN DILNAWAZ, JAH PURSOZ

YAHEE HAI RAKHT E SAFR MEER E KARWAN K LIYAE”

(Supreme vision, Sublime language, sensitive soul

These virtues are pre-requisite for leading the caravan)

Tablet computing: The book of Jobs | The Economist

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