 | This month, the business world lost two giants: Bob Galvin (former CEO of Motorola) and Steve Jobs (co-founder and recently retired CEO of Apple). Both were highly successful businessmen; both founded and/or led high performing organizations; both literally created one (or more) industries; and both left legacies that will sustain for quite awhile. One (Jobs) was highly visible if not somewhat immortalized; the other (Galvin) was a quieter giant – his obituary didn’t even hit the front business page in many US newspapers – but without his contributions, there may not be iPhones today. One single-handedly created the cell phone industry (that was Galvin); one single-handedly revolutionized that industry by creating smarter-phones, “pod” and “pad” technology, the digital music industry, and a new way of watching animated movies (Pixar). Both of them left us with dozens of best practices and many insights for advancing organizational excellence. I’ll give you eight…
- Sell the benefits of your product or service, not just its features and attributes. Think about the ads that Apple has run the last few years. Yes, they show the products themselves, but more importantly, they also capture emotions and show the benefits that come from the using the products. The commercials show people playing games and having fun, dancing in the streets while listening to music, kids reading and learning from educational applications. They show customers doing simple daily tasks (like checking in for a flight or booking a reservation at a restaurant for that evening) – only completing the tasks with more ease by using Apple products. They create a FEELING not just from the products themselves, but by what the products can enable people to do.
- Know what customers want before they do. Both Motorola in the 80s and Apple more recently have developed a keen sense of what the market needs, even before customers could articulate those needs. I guess you could say that both companies have had premonitions of the “voice of the customer!” People didn’t know that they needed cell phones before Galvin’s company created them; customers didn’t know that they needed a place to store music digitally instead of on the hundreds of CDs we all owned, but Jobs did; customers didn’t know they needed smart devices that can do 500,000 things (that’s how many applications are currently in the Apple AppStore), but Jobs envisioned a way to integrate the phone with personal computing, with music and video, with GPS and the Internet, and with personal applications that can do specialized and helpful things. Galvin and Jobs had visions of these solutions before customers did, finding ways to solve problems that customers didn’t even know they had. Stated by Jobs in a 1998 Business Week interview: “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.”
- Make things simple. This was a quote from Jobs in that same Business Week article: “Simple can be harder than complex: you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” Think about how everything at Apple is simple – from product design itself (the simple curves and first-of-its-kind keyless technology of the iPhone and iPad), the simple website (Apple’s site is white, clean, and uncluttered), the simple advertising (“If you don’t have an iPhone, well, you don’t have an iPhone.”). In today’s complex, fast-paced world, less is oftentimes more.
- Take risks and never be satisfied with status quo. Galvin once said: “One of our main thrusts was that our company was always going to be preparing for the next adventure – the next thing. I [Galvin] was always asking the question, ‘What’s the next thing we could be adding, multiplying; what would be good for our future lineup of products?’” Galvin knew that not all products would be successful, but he demanded at Motorola that employees always try to find the next big thing. He insisted on a strong R&D function, and he launched Motorola Labs, a leading contributor to cellular, digital and semiconductor technologies.
- Be creative and innovate. Both Galvin and Jobs were highly innovative: they solved problems by applying proven technologies in new applications. Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple with Jobs in a garage in 1976, said Jobs “had the ability to think out new ways of doing things…to do it in a totally different way that the world would swing toward.” Part of Jobs’ genius was in finding new ways to use existing technologies. According to Jobs in a 1996 interview in Wired: “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something…” He goes onto say that “Picasso had a saying: ‘Good artists copy; great artists steal.’ We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas…” Galvin had a similar philosophy about innovation and change. He said “the absolutely distinguishing quality of a leader is that a leader takes us elsewhere.” That’s visionary leadership.
- Strive for perfection. When you think of Six Sigma, you may think of Jack Welch, former CEO of GE. But it was Bob Galvin who first launched Six Sigma nearly a decade earlier in Motorola: January 1987. Building off the work of two Motorola employees (Baldrige National Quality Award in 1988, partially because of their superior product quality. Steve Jobs, too, demanded perfection. iPhones just don’t crash (well, not frequently). And it’s Apple’s reputation for nearly flawless manufacturing, along with its sophisticated engineering, that allows it to make premium pricing look like a value purchase. While much of Apple’s and Motorola’s success can be attributed to innovation, a great deal of credit has to also go to its high quality production.
- Build an environment for employees to succeed and for the organization to achieve high performance. “The most important thing that Bob [Galvin] did was create an environment that gave people the freedom and stimulus to do great things,” says Martin Cooper in Quality Digest, former Motorola vice president and division manager, who during the 1970s led the team that developed the handheld mobile phone. “He also set the tone from the top—no compromise on ethics—and emphasized objectivity in decision making by taking the personal issues out of the discussion and deciding based on doing what was right. His skills were not technological, but no one could pick and motivate people better than he could. He also made sure everyone in the company has the same tools and incentives to excel.” Galvin was so tuned into the needs of his employees that he created Motorola University, an in-house training and development center that still stands today, some 25 years later.
- Be passionate about what you do. Both Galvin and Jobs were driven. They both had a vision for not only what was possible, but for what would change the world. Even after Job’s illness in 2004, he kept driving the company forward because he believed what he was doing was important work. According to Jobs in the Wall Street Journal: “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.”
Those eight tips could help us all improve our careers, our leadership effectiveness, and our organizations’ performance. But I’ll add a ninth that may have less to do with business than it does with life itself. Jobs, in a very powerful commencement address at Stanford University in 2005 (a year after he was diagnosed with cancer) said:
“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. …Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.”
In other words, be your own person. Live life to its fullest and be true to yourself. If you live life with passion, with purpose, with creativity…if you take risks and continue to learn…if you maintain ethics and respect people, you’ll not only be successful in your life and in your career, but you may just leave a legacy. Thanks for your contributions, Bob Galvin and Steve Jobs.
Yours in Improvement,
Brian S. Lassiter President, Minnesota Council for Quality www.councilforquality.org
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