deal architect

Saving Private Steve Jobs

In a touching scene in the movie, a much older James Ryan asks his wife “Tell me I have led a good life”. “Tell me I am a good man”. Earlier in the movie, when Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) is given orders to risk his men and go find Private Ryan he says “He better be worth it. He better go home and cure a disease, or invent a longer-lasting light bulb.”

I say this because Steve Jobs invented much more than a better light bulb, but we seem afraid to say he was a “good man”. I spoke to someone yesterday who called him an “assxxxx”. Time magazine reviewing Walter Isaacson’s recent biography paid him a left handed compliment “The strange, sad, triumphant life of Steve Jobs”. This Business Insider blog gives 16 examples from the book of Jobs being a “huge jerk”. I asked my 18 year old son as he was flipping through Isaacson’s book if he had a preconceived view of Steve and he said “he was an assxxxx. Not very nice to people around him”.

So, I told my son to also write down positive stuff about Jobs as he read the book. And I have written below some of the things I found admirable in the man.

To start with even though there is plenty of Apple in my next book, I am far from an Apple “fan-boy.” I was scarred in the mid 90s. My employer, Gartner was an Apple shop but because it was then considered a dying platform, our hardware and applications were old and un-flattering to the Apple of today. I was also unimpressed that Apple, so fussy when it comes to design and other operations, had tolerated its partner, AT&T’s poor network around its iPhone and its onerous roaming, early cancellation and other economics.

But credit where it is due:

Jobs as a management philosopher: No he did not pretend to be Peter Drucker or Jack Welch, but the more we learn about his philosophies, the more he will see his influence on corporate executive behavior. His emphasis of good design driving engineering regardless of the economics, his unwillingness to let deadlines compromise excellence, his ability to cut through silos. The last point is particularly poignant. Think of Sony – even with its Walkman, its studios and labels, and so many other Hollywood connections could not get organized even after years to cut through its silos to challenge the iPod and iTunes. Think of Microsoft and how its infighting prevented it from leveraging a multi-year lead in tablets compared to the iPad.

Jobs and his insatiable curiosity: Against the lily-white, hypocritical politicians of today, it is refreshing to read about Job’s weird diets, his interest in Buddhism, his experimentation with drugs. He may have been opinionated but he knew more about music, movies, publishing, even marble and glass from designing his stores and office complexes than even many experts in those fields  (I thought it was hilarious in an episode in the book the CEO of Corning had to tell him to shut up and listen to someone who knew a bit more about glass)

Jobs and long-term relationships: If he was so difficult with people, how come he managed to work with some of the most talented people in the world for 5-10-15-20-25 years? Jonathan Ives, John Lasseter (now with Disney), Ron Johnson (now CEO  of J.C. Penney), Tim Cook, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, John Doerr and more. Most of us would give a limb to have a fraction of his rolodex. And then there was a marriage for over 2 decades, While his wife Laurene Powell deserves more than half the credit there in a society where the average marriage barely lasts a decade. let’s give the man credit.

Jobs as amazing fighter: The remarkable thing about his last 8 years was how productive he was in his innovation while undergoing so many invasive surgeries and debilitating treatments. As I have gone through my own recovery I sent him an email earlier in the year saying I was inspired by his zest for life. Whatever his faults, at least from a distance, I think he inspired many like me with health hiccups.

I don’t expect my son even after he reads the book to say “Steve was a good man”. But when he reads that his iPod like Steve’s was filled with Dylan and The Beatles, I hope he at least says he was a “cool dude”.

Laurene Powell Jobs must be one heck of a lady

I have admired the pillar of strength my wife Margaret has been through my last year of recovery. I had seen the ups and downs she went through as she lost to cancer the sister she was closest to. And doing so while raising two wonderful children.

I cannot imagine what Laurene has gone through for 8 years – the highs as Steve recovered from various treatments and the lows as they moved from one drug regime to the next. And doing this while raising and sheltering three young ones from the relentless scrutiny that Steve attracted.

As we celebrate Steve and his amazing achievements,  I hope we also give Laurene her due.

Steve Jobs: A thousand “nos” and ten gutsy “yeses”

I recently submitted the first draft of my manuscript for my next book. It’s about what I call “technology elite” companies and it has 21 chapters most of which talk about attributes of what makes them elite. They include elegance in product design, malleable when it comes to business models, very aware of the power of the physical presence and touch even in our digital world, global when it comes to supply chain etc etc.

Honestly, when I started writing it I had Apple prominent in every chapter. I mean how can you ignore Jonathan Ive when you are talking product elegance? How can you ignore Apple’s masterful retail strategy when it comes to physical presence?

In the manuscript I ended up submitting Apple still looms large, but the book  is much more balanced. It has 17 case studies including UPS, 3M, Corning, Boeing, Virgin America, Google, Facebook, HP and of course, Apple, and 4 guest columns from CIOs and IP attorneys and professors as a companion to each of its 21 chapters.  

Here are some excerpts from my Apple case study

• “In a 2004 BusinessWeek interview Jobs said “And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don't get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We're always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it's only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.” That ‘saying no to 1,000 things” has become part of the lore around Jobs and Apple. But Apple’s saying yes to plenty of gutsy, even maverick decisions is what really defines Apple’s success.”
• “While Apple did not invent MP3s, it dragged the music industry with iTunes to make it a big business. Over 15 billion songs – most of them singles - have been downloaded via iTunes and many more through other channels like Walmart.com. Even today, though, many music executives long for the return of albums, ignoring the “long tail” phenomenon – users buy many more “one-hit wonders” than they would if they were not unbundled.”
• “Apple has stayed loyal to Foxconn through multiple releases of iPods, iPhones and iPads in spite of sweatshop accusations, employee suicides and factory explosions in its Chinese facilities. Most companies like to diversify between company owned and outsourced plants and certainly across geographies. Apple has been willing to take the risk of putting its eggs in the Foxconn basket and taking plenty of jabs from China bashers (though Foxconn has recently been looking at a significant diversification to Brazil)”
• “When Apple opened its first retail store in 2001, an observer commented “"I give them two years before they're turning out the lights on a very painful and expensive mistake,"Apple dealers were not happy. One of them said “Apple might do just well enough to really hurt our business. They've also done a...poor job telling us how sales and service will work when an Apple Store opens nearby," Others questioned the timing in 2001 with the tech industry in a severe downturn and drawing parallels to PC maker Gateway's struggling retail effort.”
• “When Apple introduced the iPad in 2010, it tried to reverse “more than two decades of (industry) attempts to get tablets right–none of which really succeeded, and some of which failed on a monumental scale.“
• “Amazon has over the last decade become a dominant player in the book market. As eBooks started to grow in popularity over the last couple of years, Amazon had driven the market towards a $ 9.99 price point. At the iPad launch, Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal asked Steve Jobs why people would pay more for the same book on an iPad. Jobs’ response was “The prices will be the same” Apple had no intention of keeping prices that low even though it was a trivial player in the book market compared to Amazon. Instead it signaled to publishers it would accept an agency model which would give them more control over pricing. That precipitated a show down between publishers and Amazon, and Amazon having to cede pricing control to the publishers. Venturebeat wrote “The ten-dollar e-book may soon be gone, replaced by the fifteen-dollar e-book””
• “While many technology companies use cash reserves to make acquisitions, Apple has on many occasions used large sums of money to secure strategic components. In 2005, “Apple reached long term supply agreements with a number of memory supply companies including Hynix, Intel, Micro, Samsung Electronics and Toshiba. Apple will prepay up to $1.25 billion for flash memory over the next three months. The agreements secure a supply of NAND flash memory through 2010.” In 2011 they announced “During the September and December quarters, we executed long-term supply agreements with three vendors through which we expect to spend a total of approximately $3.9 billion in inventory component prepayment and capital expenditures over a two-year period.”  Apple would not reveal the components or the suppliers but such large commitments not only get them priority in tight markets but also freeze out competitors.”
• “It could be saying no to 1000 things or it could be saying yes to 10 gutsy decisions, or it could be what Marc Benioff, who did a stint at Apple before founding his own very successful salesforce.com, says “Steve Jobs is the best technology leader the world has ever seen.” Certainly, few would argue he is the Tom Cruise “Maverick” - the “Top Gun” of the industry!

Cuppa Joe

It is with sadness that I heard this week of the untimely passing of Joe Vales. As Phil Fersht describes he was a powerhouse in outsourcing circles. 

But I will especially miss him for our personal relationship. Our paths did not cross when we were both at Price Waterhouse in the 90s, but we made up for it in the past decade. Before I set up my consulting firm, I talked to him and he coached me patiently. Over the years, I quoted him several times on this blog and he interviewed me for his series for HRO magazine titled “Cuppa Joe” which always had wise words on happenings in outsourcing.

He would send kind me emails at every holiday – and an occasional sharp one when he disagreed with something on the blog. But it was always polite and always brightened my day.

What I particularly liked about him was how much of a family man he was. When I invited him to write a guest column for the blog he could have written about any number of outsourcing topics, but he wrote about involving his daughter, Kerry Ann in his advisory business.

As I sit down to coffee this morning I raise my cuppa to Joe, the gentle giant.

Peer Praise amidst Peer Pressure

I should have blogged about this when I wrote about the Workday session in August. The fact that co-founder Aneel Bhusri went out of his way to praise Marc Benioff of salesforce.com on several occasions during the day. Aneel is no slouch – he was a very competent lieutenant to founder Dave Duffield when PeopleSoft was doing its meteoric journey in the 90s. Over the last decade, as an investor at Greylock he has an enviable record even as other investors have lost interest in enterprise technology. He has led Workday through the tricky phases of early growth in an early SaaS market. He knows well in the next phase investors and analysts will use salesforce as a benchmark to measure Workday. Yet, he repeatedly praised Marc that day in front of the many influencers in that session. In our hyper-competitive tech world filled with petty jealousies, most peer executive praise is grudging, if at all.

To his own credit, while Marc can be bitterly critical of competitor companies, he is generally nice to executives there. So he mocks Oracle every chance he gets but is usually nice to Larry Ellison himself. And he is particularly nice to executives in consumer tech. Every speech praises a Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg. He is quoted in my book

“ We stand on the shoulders of giants like Jerry Yang [founder of Yahoo!], Pierre Omidyar [of eBay], Jeff Bezos [of Amazon], and Biz Stone [of Twitter].”

I should have blogged about it again last week when I saw Aneel briefly at Dreamforce and he was again lavish in his praise of Marc. Again, there was no need to be, and it was genuine.

Well, Aneel has done it again and praises Marc and salesforce this time on his own blog.  The least I can do is point it out and hope we see more of such generosity from other tech executives in the new year.  

The Marathon Man

SAP is introducing an Innovation Weekend around its annual TechEd event in Berlin and Las Vegas next month. It gives participants a chance to “Gain hands-on experience with some of SAP's coolest and newest innovative technologies, taking an idea from concept to prototype.”

Given my book’s focus on innovation, Craig Cmehil, one of the event’s main drivers has been discussing with me a presentation there. Distracted by all my other book and consulting travel, it only dawned on me last week that I was committing to weekend travel. And he really perked me up when he said “of course we can work around your sleep pattern”

You see it is a 30 hour non-stop event. Yikes!

Craig has been an unbelievable champion for SDN and other community involvement at SAP. That has earned him the title of Open Innovation Manager. But not just Open, he should also have Rapid and Agile in his title. He is big on marathons. For two years in a row he has also run a call-in marathon for Doctors without Borders on his weekly radio show. Again in the spirit of openness he has invited various bloggers and associates to present on a variety of topics, and simultaneously raised money for a worthwhile cause.

So, I asked this insomniac about these marathons:

“ One of the amazing things about my job, various jobs I've had, has
always been the access I have to new and interesting technologies not
to mention many new and cool innovations. The downside was finding
interesting ways of sharing what I had access to on the inside with
those on outside. It was during a few late night projects I began to
think that I need to find a way to give back and to share more, I
always tend to spend so much online and around computers and was never
a stranger to long hours working on different projects and as we began
the Hacker Nights during the SAP TechEd events and the 24 Hour
Marathon during the Friday Morning Report show that I began to realize
that I was not alone and thus this year the Innovation Weekend was
born - a formalized event around things we've been doing for years
already but with a larger goal of reaching out to more people with new
technologies that have not even gone fully out the public yet. It's
exciting to be able to finally bring some of these cool technologies
to even more people in such a public setting - I've always said we
don't lack innovation just a good communication around it!”

Enterprise software moves at a glacial place. Here we are looking at Oracle OpenWorld this week still looking for clues around Fusion after 6 years of development.  Even Craig’s employer SAP has taken years maturing ByD.

Craig is a diamond in that rough. Openness and intensity. Enterprise software can use much more of that.

Selfish Disclosure: I am being generous to Craig with the hope that I get a half way decent speaking slot in those 30 hours. After all the parties at Oracle Open World I will need to hibernate like a bear :)

Marc Benioff’s Playbook

I got a review copy of Marc’s new book – Behind the Cloud – out on the 19th.

It is full of details about his personal and professional philosophies. Organized into 111 “plays” of a little over 2 pages each, it is an easy read.

You get insights into his (and the company’s) approach to philanthropy.

“I did not know this would be the case, but our customers also have greater appreciation for us because of our philanthropic efforts. Customers have rallied behind our cause, arriving at our conferences early to help build playgrounds and paint schools (even in the rain)”

The company gets criticized for its high SG&A, and there is some insight into what they spend it on – and what they do not spend on.

“Typically, 60 to 65% of our account executives qualify for this trip (3 days in Maui).Most companies reward only the top 10 to 20% percent of their sales reps …”

“How many times have you gone to a restaurant based on a giant ad? …How many times, in contrast, have you followed the recommendation of a friend or a positive review in a magazine or newspaper? Unbiased references by experts carry tremendous power”

Some people call Marc egotistical.  What impressed me was how generous he is in the book to friends, employees at every level, customers. If that is egotistical, we need more of it.

OK, so now I feel really bad

Apparently while I was commenting on Tom Siebel’s recent comments about the maturity of the tech industry, he was recovering from an attack in the Serengeti by a 12,000 pound elephant.

Tom, I may not agree with your views, but glad to hear you are recovering from something that horrendous.

Best wishes!

Why I love Om

Oh, he has a great group of writers at GigaOm. And he is fun to get together with to catch up on what’s happening around the world – not just in tech.

But I love him for being the rational consumer. He recently decided to use a Windows machine 2 days a week. But no Ms Office, Google Docs instead. No Google Mail, Apple Mail. Not using the built in AT&T 3G card – instead added a Verizon EVDO card.

I saw him recently Tweet about Apple iTune’s “de-authorization policy” – calling it “kremlin, fricking idiotic”. (iTunes registers and limits number of computers you can access it from but there is not easy way to eliminate old, trashed computers).

And this:“Nokia planning a new line of handsets dubbed C series, where C stands for more confusion."

He is extremely generous where he needs to be, but just as vocal with objections.

So different from so many fan boys and kiss-ass influencers out there.

Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto

Secret, secret ..I got a secret…Styx

Now we know why New York Times has David Pogue write about gadgets and devices.  The man’s a machine:

• “My wife once clocked me at 120 words a minute, and that’s including making corrections.”
• “I have a lot of e-mail folders. I also have a lot of “message rules” that file incoming mail automatically into appropriate folders.”
• “I can be online in a car, in the X-ray line at the airport, on a plane stuck on the runway, and so on. My 3-pound laptop is my main machine, by the way, for the same reason—so that I can be productive during any little blob of downtime.”

Seriously impressive how efficient he is…read more here