Peter Thiel, paraphrased:
It’s fairly difficult to overestimate how uncertain people are and how much they don’t know what they actually want. Of course, people usually insist that they are certain. People trick themselves into believing that they do know what they want. At the obvious level, “Everyone wants what everyone wants” is just a meaningless tautology. But on another level, it describes the dynamic process in which people who have poorly formed demand functions just copy what they believe everyone else wants.
Less than a year as CEO? With only two product updates under his belt?
Tim Cook’s got a long way to go to prove himself.
Let’s go down the list one by one:
“Started a charity program at Apple”
Word on the street is Steve Jobs deliberately shunned charities in both his personal and corporate life. And I’ll admit that it’s a nice change seeing Apple open up to philanthropic causes, especially given their cash balance and huge success to date.
But it should almost go without saying that (emphasis on almost or I wouldn’t be writing this, yes?) just because a company has a charity program doesn’t mean it’s run well. The benevolence of a person says nothing of their ability to manage a large organization like Apple.
“Increased employee discounts on Apple Products”
Same as the first, except the benevolence is instead directed towards Apple employees. Is this a good managerial technique to motivate employees? Perhaps. But Steve Jobs certainly didn’t need it to make Apple’s awesome products.
“Was ranked the highest rated CEO with a 97% approval rating. [Glassdoor]. That’s two percent above Steve Jobs.”
If you suddenly gave me bigger discounts to Apple products I’d vote for you, too.
But since when do employee approval ratings have to do with the health of a company, and more specifically, the ability of its CEO? When Ben Horowitz was turning around Opsware he had to do 3 separate rounds of layoffs, totaling 400 people. Do you think his approval rating was shot to hell during that time? But was it also a bold and necessary move that helped save the company
The point is just because your employees like you doesn’t mean you know what you’re doing.
“Initiated a dividend share & repurchase program for shareholders. This program will spend $45 billion over the next three years.”
When I heard what Apple plans to do with some of their cash my knee jerk reaction was to fill sick to my stomach. I realize Apple’s a business and they do “corporate things” now and then, especially as they’ve grown and become more powerful. But until recently they’ve always felt like the underdog and I definitely subscribed to the “think different” mindset.
Doing a buyback feels like such a “me too” move. Definitely not Apple style. Is it inherently bad? No. But issuing a dividend definitely shouldn’t be considered a sign of a capable CEO or a great company.
“Created a new type of Apple announcement. Mountain Lion wasn’t announced at a special event, but still received good press coverage.”
This is likely the most unique change to the actual business Tim has made thus far. It might be a way of getting around the infinitely high expectations we all (myself included) now have of Apple’s events. And the fact that no one really knew about it before it was announced is impressive.
This at least shows that Tim and the team has marketing chops without Steve, which is a relief. But it’s only one element of a much larger business puzzle.
“Responded actively to allegations about poor conditions in China factories. This included commissioning third-party factory audits, raising pay at factories, reducing factory work hours, and making a personal visit to the factories in China.”
Good PR maybe? Apple definitely infuriated some by keeping quiet (and, arguably, lying) about Steve’s health.
But the point is the company still flourished no matter how pissed off reporters were about Apple’s secrecy. The stock price continued to rise and, more importantly, the company continued to release amazing products.
Which brings me to my final point: Apple is a product company. Insanely great products is its oxygen, and without them Apple will suffer the same fate Sony did.
This cannot be overstated. If Tim cannot lead the company to continue creating insanely great and revolutionary products Apple will become irrelevant.
And this is why Tim has yet to prove himself. Whatever line of products Apple has in the pipe from Steve need to be fleshed out. As time passes Steve’s powerful individual taste and attention to detail will eventually disappear. I don’t think Apple needs another Steve Jobs to be successful, but whatever he did that created such great products must remain intact.
Steve Jobs himself said that Tim Cook isn’t a product guy. He’s an operations man. He’s freaking good at it, but he does operations nonetheless, and it’s not what makes Apple special. He might manage well, but can he lead the design of new products that are up to the standards of Apple?
We’ll need more than 230 days to know the answer to that.
The past 3 weeks I’ve worked part time for the State of Utah, helping out with some accounting and bookkeeping work to hold them over until they find someone who’s more interested long term (background: I’m happy to do accounting sidework, but it’s not my career focus.)
Actually, that sentence should have started with “The past 3 weeks, I’ve tried to work” for the State of Utah. Getting on board, and getting setup with my computer, email, EIN, payroll, and access to the plethora of state systems has been nothing short of a nightmare. Every time I think I’m all ready to go and actually work, I stumble into a new bottleneck. My answer so far? Immediately stand up and go to the IT manager and get help (who unfortunately splits time between us and another agency). If he’s free, he’ll come over and look at my problem. Sometimes he’s able to fix it in 15-30 minutes, other times he says he needs (fill in the blank) and that it won’t be available until tomorrow.
Okay, I say. And until then I get as much work as I can done, but just imagine how much work I can do without email, access to internal accounting systems, and a working computer. Ha. I just laughed to myself because it reads like a joke.
I should take a moment to add that I don’t believe in excuses and I take the blame for not making things happen when the buck falls to me. But in this case I truly don’t know what else I could do. Escalate the issue to my boss, which I have done, perhaps. But even then, who can he talk to that individually has the power to fix this mess?
Maybe the biggest problem is there is no owner to the onboarding process. There are a dozen little pieces that have to fit together as quickly as possible, but instead of someone who’s job it is to figure all that out, I’ve had to do it myself as I’ve started.
The kicker is that the people I work with all know how to do their jobs, individually. They’re capable and have the right skills. The reason it all falls apart is because, at least from my 3 week experience, there is no setup process, with checklists and steps and methods to get newly hired employees setup and on their productive way.
Growing startups see this problem all the time. To capture the most value as they grow into profitability investors even sometimes bring on a new CEO to manage the creation of organizational processes. Creating processes doesn’t mean you have mediocre people; it’s just a necessary evil to increase efficiency and not waste the value your organization is trying so hard to create.
The more I hear and read stories, the more I think the most important characteristic to become a successful entrepreneur is persistence.
Over an hour but full of gems.
My favorite topics:
Generalizing startup advice is “idiotic.”
Private markets are inefficient and so it’s too easy to make money.
As information continues to flow more freely our reputations will follow us everywhere. This is a very good thing.
I first saw this at jkhowland.me. Derek Sivers is worth reading any day.
Why does Apple sell a warm iPad?
Since Steve Jobs resigned as CEO and especially since he died, I’ve wondered what an Apple on the downward decline would look like.
Try this thought experiment: if we gave the 1985 Apple to Tim Cook, how long would it take us to realize things weren’t going well? Or, imagine giving the current Apple to John Sculley. How many years would we need to see he was screwing up?
Because Tim Cook took the reins of Apple at its peak of peaks it will take much longer for the market to reflect how well Apple is under new leadership. We can expect to see 2–3 years of products that Jobs had some influence on, but even if the products themselves aren’t spectacular, the powerful Apple brand will continue to carry sales for a while.
So how do we know?
Our initial reference point should be Apple the first time it lost Jobs, from 1985–1997. He was first replaced by John Sculley, a PepsiCo marketing guy. After Sculley was Michael Spindler and finally Gil Amelio. None of them were product guys. Apple had a few successes, like the PowerBook, but mostly it created vanilla products. Apple tried its hand in a lot of products categories: cameras, video game consoles, PDAs… you name it. Some of them were good but nothing was great. None of those CEOs were product guys, and that fact was reflected throughout Apple.
Tim Cook has an operations background and Apple’s supply chain is phenomenal thanks to him. But a great supply chain isn’t the core to Apple. Phenomenal products are. And even Steve Jobs in his biography said that Tim Cook is “not a product person, per se.”
This all came to me because of the new iPad. The original iPad and iPad 2 didn’t show any temperature changes at all. Heat was a non-issue.
Which is why I’m a little worried. Would Jobs have shipped a hot or even warm iPad?
But the next time you hear a product announcement from Apple, just stop to think: would Steve have liked this? When you start answering “no” too many times, you might need to conclude that the all-time great product company is on a downward decline.
Today I learned… everything goes back to a human.
Example: today I was filling out a lengthly accounting document for a grant my employer received from the federal government. It’s ugly, complicated, and a pain to figure out.
I could have spent an awful chunk of time trying to figure out everything on my own. Second guessing myself and wondering if I was doing it right.
OR, I could contact the person who would review the form and ask them. Sounds simple, but so often we talk and talk and talk and don’t PICK UP THE PHONE to call someone who can actually make an impact.
Entrepreneurs and developers do this all the time. Instead of asking customers what they want, they build a prototype while locked in room for 4 months. Then when they come out and try to sell it they realize they were building the wrong thing the whole time. They didn’t reach out to the people who have the information.
Thankfully today I contacted the reviewer and they steered me straight. Rules and writing on paper only takes you so far. Talk to the person you’re targeting and they’ll let you know what actually counts.
Jason Fried from 37Signals:
People get used to the way things are. Even things that are broken or complicated become things some customers want to protect from change because they’re familiar with the intricacies of how those things work.
That’s why when you go to a business and ask “what problems and inefficiencies do you encounter” they often won’t be able to give you an answer. We become so comfortable doing things they way we’ve always done them that we don’t see how the “new” way can be so much better.
Last weekend I participated in the coolest weekend of recent history: Startup Weekend – Salt Lake City.
100 developers, designers, and business guys showed up to create 14 products, from scratch, in 2 days. I learned a ton, met really great people, and didn’t even get too tired.
Alex Lawrence asked me to write a round up for his entrepreneur blog, StartUpFlavor.com. The summary contains advice for entrepreneurs based on everything we learned from Startup Weekend.
Next time you should come, too.