Cameron Herold presents ten leadership and product/organizational principles Apple used under Steve Jobs — framed as actionable 'think ___' imperatives (think brutal, small, minimal, motion, iconic, phrasal, casual, human, skeptic, war). He explains each with examples and short anecdotes and argues they’re applicable to organizations of any size.
Chapters
Everything that we do in business is a bit of a battle and you have to approach it with a bit of that battle like environment. If you don't, the competitor is going to out beat you, right? Think about this, that somewhere right now someone is practicing and when they meet you in head to head competition, they're going to beat you. I'm going to give you 10 core principles that Apple used to scale their organization under the leadership of Steve Jobs. And there are 10 principles that you can absolutely use to in your company today, regardless of if you're 10 employees, 100 employees, 1,000 employees, 10,000 employees. These 10 principles that Steve Jobs used at Apple will absolutely work inside of your business. Number one, think brutal now. Brutal meaning brutally honest. Show up at work every day being gut wrenchingly honest with each other. This is an area where Steve Jobs is often misunderstood. He'd walk into a meeting and be like, why are you here? He actually meant it. He didn't mean it to be rude. He kind of meant we invited the core people we needed. Your time is probably better spent on other projects and instead of sugarcoating it and letting people show up for things, he was brutally honest, brutally honest with his feedback, brutally honest with comments. It's kind of the way that we have to be inside of our company. Number two, think small. Small groups of people, small project teams, small decision making teams. I think it was Jeff Bezos at Amazon said that if however many people are coming to a meeting, have to be fed by a maximum of two pizzas, I think Steve Jobs would have probably done one pizza. So think about having smaller groups involved in all the decisions. You have to get good at saying no to people and saying that you don't need them to be there. They can go back to their work and being, you know, again following that first principle of being brutally honest. But you need to actually control how, how many people are showing up at meetings and how many people are being over involved. When you start calculating the time involved by having too many people involved in everything, it really actually builds a lot of bureaucracy and a lot of waste inside of an organization. Number three is, think minimal. We've heard the term minimum viable product. I call it minimum viable everything. Get it done and get it out the door. Remember this iPhone is probably on version, I don't know, 15 right now. If they waited to have everything perfectly done, they'd be waiting for years to get version one still out the door. So think minimal. What's good enough to get it done and get it out the Door because momentum creates momentum. Number four. And it's really tied into that think motion. It's all about getting that momentum going, getting out to market, getting people talking about it, creating the raving fans, getting that flywheel happening. It's one of the reasons why Steve Jobs was able to get rid of 75 of the products when it came back to Apple. 70, 75% of the products, because he focused on the critical few number of products and got the flywheel going and the momentum going around those. Number five is think iconic. How do you build something that is going to be around for a number of generations? How do you build something that people are going to talk about for a number of generations? When we were building one, 800, got junk, Brian and I read the book the 22 Immutable Laws of Branding. And it was one of the big reasons why Brian even chose the name got junk and 1, 800 got junk was to build that kind of iconic name that was tied to a phone number and tied to a way that you would get a hold of people. And it also asked the question of what we're looking for. When I created the COO alliance, I want to have this iconic organization that is global in its reach and we have members of companies all over the world that are these coos. I don't want to water it down by doing stuff for CEOs. So try to think iconic. When you're building what you're doing, think phrasal. Phrasal meaning come up with little sayings that you put inside of your business. It's one of the things that cults do really well and churches do really well. And any organizations that are a little bit more than a business and a little bit less than a religion, they have mantras and sayings and phrases. At 1, 800 got junk, we had stuff like the 1, 800, got junk way and who's doing what by when and what are your top five? So think about putting those kinds of sayings inside of your business. You can also create little acronyms that only people inside of your company are going to understand. But those phrasal ideas and phrasal comments inside of your company create that cult like environment. And then the phrasal comments like I think it was 10,000 songs in your pocket. Those little phrases allow people to attach themselves to your brand and be excited about your products and to be able to repeat it to other people. Think casual. We can really build incredibly build businesses or big businesses, but we don't have to build big corporate environments. Inside of Starbucks. And I used to be mentored by the CEO at Starbucks. On one of the big walls inside of their office building there was a huge saying and it said grow big, act small. And I think that idea of thinking casual and thinking of how do we actually stay in a more entrepreneurial environment, you can allow yourself to get too bureaucratic if you don't think small or think casual. Another one is to think human. I remember years ago we had a woman working for us at 1-800-got junk and anytime that she would stand up to speak, her voice would change. She would almost put on this like professional voice and like, hi, I'm so and so and I'm running this part of the business. It seemed weird. If you actually just use your normal voice, you're going to resonate more with the people that are listening to you and the people that you're interacting with. Especially if you're doing things like speaking events or talking to the media. If you try to be all polished and have this professional tone, you're going to come off in the wrong way. It's one of the things that's probably made me such a strong keynote speaker globally is I just stand up and I start speaking and I speak in the same tone that I'm talking to you now, that I talk to my kids with, that I talk to my wife with, or that I may be talking to the media with. It's always that same tone. It's that same human voice that I've always been using. Another one is to think skeptic. So I think what Steve Jobs was really good there was to always challenge the status quo, to inspect what he expect and to really kind of lift off the covers and see what was really there. I had to learn that in a number of different situations over the years in business where the things that I assumed were happening inside of business areas weren't necessarily happening. But by me being a little bit skeptical and going in and looking, I was able to uncover what was really going on inside of the business. So think like a skeptic. And the last one is think war. Everything that we do in business is a bit of a battle and you have to approach it with a bit of that battle like environment. If you don't, the competitor is going to out beat you. Right? Think about this, that somewhere right now someone is practicing and when they meet you in head to head competition, they're going to beat you. I think it was Andy Grove at Intel said only the paranoid survive. And that warlike environment is really powerful. Anyway, those are the top 10 things that I've learned from Apple over the years of how they've actually brought those simple systems into their organization and you can actually do them today.
