The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs: Insanely Different Principles for Breakthrough Success [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

Cross-Posted from my blog - Innovate on Purpose

I have the good fortune to read books on innovation subjects just before they are released. It is actually a lot more interesting than that might sound. On the whole, there is a lot of good stuff being written about innovation - the real question is, will anyone take the time to read all that's out there?

Today I am reviewing a book called The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs by Carmine Gallo. Gallo wrote a well-received book a few years ago entitled The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, and felt a book on Jobs and Innovation was in order. Anyone who has paid any attention lately knows that Apple is held up as a leading innovator, and rightly so, and most people place the locus of that success squarely on Jobs' head, which I also agree with. If Jobs is driving a wave of innovation at Apple, it would make sense to understand what makes him tick, and what we could learn from that.

First, let me get off my chest the annoyance with the focus on "secrets". As I've written before, there really aren't any secrets where innovation is concerned, and if you've paid any attention to the media you'll know much that Gallo is writing about. The sooner we end the mythos that pervades the innovation space the better.

Now that that's off my chest we can proceed with the review. Gallo has done an excellent job rounding up a significant number of people who were present at the beginning of a number of Apple's innovations. He had to use this method to suss out Jobs' strategy, since Jobs doesn't like to talk about it directly to the media. Jobs prefers to announce grand strategies and use the media to reinforce Apple's image as an innovator and a leader, but he doesn't appear too ready to talk directly about the innovation programs or visions. Gallo has done a good job piecing together some of the strategies and insights by talking to a wide range of people who were with Apple during the resurgence.

Gallo argues that there are seven principles that will help you innovate like Jobs:

1. Do what you love
2. Put a dent in the universe - have a big vision
3. Kick-start your brain - use creativity and have lots of different experiences
4. Sell dreams not products - understand what people want to accomplish
5. Say no to 1000 things
6. Create insanely great experiences
7. Master the message

In these points Gallo identifies what makes Jobs, and by extension Apple, a good innovator. Apple is focusing tightly on important and relevant products and experience that impact how we live, especially how we gain and interact with new media and social media. Apple under Jobs has always had an outsized vision of itself and its mission - remember the 1984 commercial? A big vision, tied to excellent strategic insight and the ability to accurately predict trends in the marketplace have put Apple in an excellent position.

But Apple has also been fairly ruthless in its focus. Since Jobs rejoined Apple the number of products Apple offers has actually fallen rather dramatically. Apple places a lot of emphasis on one or two disruptive products a year, and people eagerly await Jobs' next announcement (master the message). Jobs understands probably better than most what it means to offer a "whole product" (the MP-3 player AND iTunes) and masters the messaging better than any of his competitors. Apple doesn't just create a new technology - in fact they are technology laggards - they create a product that works and provide an excellent experience that seems cool. Sony, Dell, Samsung and H-P must cringe everytime Apple steals a march on them, because Apple has a constancy of vision and the ability to deliver experience in a package that none of these other firms have yet been able to match.

All the Jobs stories are here - how he dropped in at Reed College in calligraphy, his time in an ashram, the early glory days, the days in the Wilderness, his return to Apple. All of them seem to have had an effect on Jobs as a thinker and innovator, according to the book. Somehow I doubt that conclusion. While Jobs is the summation of his experiences, he was always an iconoclast, zigging where others zagged. His experiences may have shaped his thinking, but the kernal of what he is was there all along.

You can't innovate like Jobs because he is Jobs and you aren't, but that's OK. We only need a few Jobs' to set a standard. You can learn a lot about Jobs and his different perspectives, and begin to apply these ideas in places that are far different from Apple. However, you can't simply change a culture of any firm to align it to Apple's thinking, or Google's structures, overnight, and it would be difficult and distracting. What you can do is identify the iconoclasts within your firm and begin to encourage them to think different. Therein lies the genesis of innovation success. Demonstrating that people with unique insights who want to create great change can work within a large, staid organization successfully, rather than having to create a completely new company.

This is a good book, well organized and well written that reminds and reinforces our image and knowledge of Jobs. At the end I am left with the fact that some people are so unique and different that we can't hope to copy them, but even pale imitations may take us a long way. The real question is how many people have the courage to try.

I don't know the author of this book. The only reason I bought the book was that these days I am doing a research on Apple's and especially Steve Jobs' business philosophy. Hence the title obviously attracted, together with five 5-star reviews. I learned that the author is a well-known business reporter but I can confidently say that he does not have a faintest idea about innovation. None at all. I suppose his previous book on Steve Jobs' Presentation Skills was successful, so he wanted to exploit that succeess by writing another stuff on Jobs and chose the subject of innovation.

I read the book cover to cover. Here are my comments:

1. The book is to a very very large extent based on Steve Jobs' presentations and interviews in the press. No original research And my god, the guy believes he could mine the SECRETS of Jobs' innovation philosophy from these published stuff. What a naive approach and what a lousy result.
2. His so-called innovation secrets are mereley romantic mumbo-jumbo like "Sell dreams, not products (woooow), Do what you love (if you love your job then you can innovate!!!!), Put a dent in the universe (yeah, but how?), Kick start your brain.
3. I particularly liked this Kick start thing (Doug Hall's Jump Start?). Apparently Steve Jobs took a calligraphy class at college and visited India before Apple. These two things gave him EVERYTHING that he needed on his succesful route to innovation. One of the foolish things I have ever heard. If one is interested in that subject, Frans Johansson's book The Medici Effect is a lot more valuable. But stil event that kind of thinking, that is connecting&creativity is not enough for corporate innovation.
4. I must warn you on one other thing too. Please don not get fooled by the title and assume that this is a book on Apple. Not at all. It is about first introducing a childish and romantic principle on innovation, followed by some quotations from one of Jobs's presentation and/or press interviews, and then going on to cite examples from all sorts of companies like Target, Geek Squad, Zappos, Apt Electronics etc., i.e. the usual innovation example stuff you already see everywhere. You will be surprised to find more stuff on companies other than Apple. For example, you won't be able to find any detailed Apple case as the Zappo case. All case studies are detailed but all Apple stuff is based on what Steve told in his presentations. If you don't believe me just buy the book and see it yourselves.
5. The guy does not have the faintest idea about innovation. I believe he runs a PR Company and thinks that the subject of innovation is as easy as PR. I am sorry but innovation is a very serious subject the theorization of which is certainly out of the realm of PR people.
6. In the book, you will also love the so-called Jobs' 7th principle: Master the Message. This is apparently a summary of his Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs book. In that chapter you learn that if you can prepare effective PowerPoint presentations and you are good in communicating your messages to people, then you have the capability to innovate. Such a B.....

This is a ridiculous book about innovation and it hardly has any Apple-and-Steve Jobs' related hard evidence. It is good read though, if you do not mind the shallowness of the approach and childishness of the principles. I just laughed when I finished the thing. Just laughed.

Actually, what Carmine Gallo examines with both rigor and eloquence are no longer "secrets," nor are they insights of proprietary significance to Steve Jobs. On Pages 10-11, Gallo identifies and briefly discusses the seven principles in his book. For example, #1: "Do What You Love," a portion of Teresa Amabile's admonition expressed in an article that appeared in Harvard Business Review, "do what you love and love what you do" (1993); as for #3, "Kick-Start Your Brain," Doug Hall wrote a book, Jump Start Your Business Brain, that was published in 2001 and he claimed no authorship of that admonition.

My point is, the value of Gallo's book is not based on any the head-snapping revelations it provides; rather, on the analysis he offers of a truly unique person who co-founded a truly unique organization, and who then established and nourished a culture within which innovative thinking continues to produce, in Jobs's familiar words, "insanely great ideas." Ironically, it is possible but unlikely that Jobs and Apple would have succeeded to the extent they later did were it not for the "insanely great ideas" that he and Steve Wozniak encountered during a visit to Xerox PARC in 1979. Long ago, Thomas Edison observed, "Vision without execution is hallucination." An "insanely great" idea will not achieve "insanely great" breakthrough success without "insanely great" execution.

I also presume to assert that, with all due respect to Jobs, credit for the extraordinary success that Apple has achieved thus far must be shared by hundreds (if not thousands) of people who have been or are now centrally involved at every management level and in all areas of operations. It comes as no a surprise what the principles are that have driven Jobs but they have also served as also the values of the company's culture. Gallo devotes a separate chapter to each of these principles/core values -- citing hundreds sources and real-world examples - that reveal their impact on what is done and how it is done throughout the entire Apple organization. He concludes each of Chapters 2-15 with three "iLessons" that emphasis key points in the material just covered. For example, here are two sets:

First, Chapter 6, Seek Out New Experiences

1. Use analogies or metaphors to think about a problem. By finding the similarities between two things that are unalike, your brain makes new and sometimes profound connections.

2. Leave your comfort zone from time to time. Doing so is critical for the creative process to thrive.

3. Don't live in fear of the new. Embrace change. Embrace diversity of opinion and experience.

Next, Chapter 14, The World's Greatest Corporate Storyteller

1. Tell your story early and often. Make communication a cornerstone of your brand every day.

2. Make your brand story consistent across all platforms: presentations, website, advertising, marketing materials, social media.

3. Think differently about presentation style. Study Steve Jobs, read design books, and pay attention to awe-inspiring presentations and what makes them different from the average PowerPoint show. Everyone has room to raise the bar on delivering presentations, but rising to the challenge requires a dedicated commitment to improve and an open mind.

Note: In this same chapter (i.e. #14), Gallo also identifies and discusses "Three Keys to Communicating Value" and "Seven Guidelines for Selling Your Ideas the Steve Jobs Way." Of course, potentially valuable as this and other material throughout the book may be, it remains for those to read it to summon or develop the skills required to put it to effective use.

I also recommend Gallo's The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience, Alan Deutschman's The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, Leander Kahney's Inside Steve's Brain, Expanded Edition.