Steve Jobs

Knowledge sharing

Good communication is essential for conveying expectations, providing feedback, resolving conflicts, and fostering a positive work environment. Leaders and managers should be able to communicate clearly, actively listen, and adapt their communication style to different individuals. I think the biggest communication problem is we don't listen to understand we listen to reply. Contact me via e-mail for an evaluation of your interpersonal communication skills.

““The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller.””
— Steve Jobs

Design goes hand in hand

The products are extremely good, but Apple doesn’t make the best computers or telephones by any stretch of the imagination, but they sell because people associate an aspirational identity with their products and the desire goes through the roof. There’s no mention of screen resolution, memory or how many gigabytes and that’s because it doesn’t matter. It’s all about what’s inside the box, and you just have to have one as people buy into something that is deeply felt, and that is identity.

“Design is a funny word. Some people think that design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works.”
— Steve Jobs

I agree wholeheartedly with Steve Jobs and think it’s not so much the aesthetics as it is about the mechanics. Now when you apply that thinking to Apple, then you can really see how this makes sense.

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Opportunity identification

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Customer experience (CX) is the overarching feeling or opinion that customers have about your business based on their history of interactions with your company throughout their customer journey. Customer experience is not made up of a single interaction, but rather a series of interactions that include researching your business, buying and using your products or services, getting support, and providing feedback. CX design is the process design teams follow to optimise customer experiences at all touchpoints before, during and after conversion. They leverage customer-centred strategies to delight customers at each step of the conversion journey and nurture strong customer-brand relationships.

“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around”
— Steve Jobs

One customer’s CX can be influenced by multiple communication channels, several different departments and agents, separate brick-and-mortar locations, and their experience with multiple products or services your business offers. Every interaction is an opportunity to delight your customer and grow your business, together with you, I’ll design, build and deliver valuable and meaningful end-to-end experiences for your organisation.

Accessible and pleasant

It’s a no-brainer, all organisations would like to increase revenues, reduce costs and improve culture. Customer Experience (CX) is an investment, an ongoing improvement project as organisations have a moral obligation to create value. The pandemic has hopefully taught us that we don’t need more stuff and what we want are meaningful experiences with our colleagues, friends, and family.

 

First, you must get customers to trust you. Once they trust you, then you need to communicate that you care about them and value them. Then, after all of this, when you make them happy, it is the kind of happiness that drives customer loyalty and, perhaps more importantly, customer-driven growth. Take 60 seconds and watch Steve Jobs explain why Apple always put the CX first.

Always be learning

Are you leading an organisations where there are islands of activity? Where finger pointing at who’s doing it wrong in sales, marketing, production or R&D is a common occurrence. It takes strong mental strength to step back and say what is the best thing that I can do as a team to build trust. Are you really spending enough time trying to understand what your team needs are or are you just feeding them information and data?

 

I think confidence is believing you are able, and competence is knowing you are able. Steve Jobs surrounded himself with A+ players, people who were smarter than himself because he wanted to learn, evolve, and grow. He put his faith in his people, not in technology, which for him was just tools that either worked or didn’t. He believed that people were basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them. What are you doing to move the needle forward?

In the face of rejection

Illustration by Dawn Kim

Illustration by Dawn Kim

Have you ever been told that you are not good enough or that you are not the right fit for our organisation? Whether the rejection we experience is large or small, one thing remains constant - it always hurts, and it usually hurts more than we expect it to. Facing rejection requires courage to stay focused on the bigger picture as most rejections, whether romantic, professional, and even social, are due to “fit” and circumstance.


It’s easy to stop when the world slaps you hard in the face and says, we don’t want you. It’s not what they say about you that limits you the most, its that you may believe it and start saying it to yourself. Steve Jobs said in his famous Stanford University commencement speech, "Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”


I am a person with more than one gift, I am a person with more than one talent and I am a person with more than one pursuit. There is more in you than your job, there’s more in you than what you do and it’s your duty to yourself to discover your potential and explore all of these possibilities. I encourage you to explore yourself, I encourage you to explore your world and articulate this to your audience.

Looking back to the past

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The late, great Steve Jobs said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”


I think in the future when we look back at our careers the leaders that we remember will be the ones who:

1. Provided us a safe space to grow

2. Opened career doors

3. Defended us when we needed it

4. Recognised and rewarded us

5. Developed us as leaders

6. Inspired us to stretch higher

7. Led by example

8. Told us our work mattered

9. Forgave us when we made mistakes

10. Contact me via e-mail to arrange a meeting.