Apple

The World’s Most Admired Company Is…

March 30, 2016

The World’s Most Admired Company Is…

According to Fortune’s 2016 report of The World’s Most Admired Companies, which surveyed over 4,000 executives, directors, analysts and business insiders; Apple again commands the top spot on their list, for the 9^th consecutive year! It’s followed closely by Alphabet (Google), and Amazon. With a track record like that, we’ve got to understand the ingredients to their success.

First, it’s important to know that the attributes used to determine this ranking include quality of products, quality of management, innovation, long term investment value, talent attraction, financial soundness, corporate asset use, social responsibility, and global business. A well rounded set of criteria that considers all facets of the business.

Apple CEO Tim Cook was interviewed by Adam Lashinsky to get his take on their phenomenal achievement, as well as how they’re handling criticism of recent fiscal first quarter performance, which was strong, but missed investors’ revenue expectations. His response provides several tips as a good reminder for leaders in any organization.

Block out the noise.

Analysts, media, shareholders, and others will always have some comment or critique about your products or services, but be selective about who you’re listening to. You can’t react to every question or criticism. You can’t be all things to all people. A prime example is their recent issue with the U.S. government on providing access to encrypted information on an iPhone. Whether you agree with Apple’s position in this situation or not, overall, you must evaluate every option and potential product or service based on the next point.

Focus on your mission and vision.

Cook talked about staying focused on “making the best products that really help people enrich their lives in some way.” So do your mission and vision inspire and excite employees and customers? Does your product or service continue to align with your purpose and the areas where you’ve been successful? Or does your company get distracted by what I like to call shiny objects alongside the road. You know, getting caught up in the latest trend, trying to do what other companies are doing, or letting financial goals be the primary driver to all decisions. Which leads to point three.

Identify balanced metrics

Cook says he’s driven by the data that shows his customers are happy. And while recent sales didn’t meet analysts’ expectations, they still sold 74 million iPhones at a profit of $18 billion. The temptation to chase profits is HUGE, but most businesses need to take the long view and invest in their future, build a strong internal and external brand, and be known for the quality of their products and services; along with maximizing performance in the immediate term. What metrics best reflect your organization’s goals, market positioning, customer and employee needs?

Explore the possibilities

Apple has a primary focus on innovation and is widely rumored to be working on a car project. While Cook would neither confirm nor deny that, he did admit that the DNA of the company includes curiosity around a variety of product options that align with their mission, and deliberately selecting a few to pursue. Their cash position makes this easy of course. But they approach it from a perspective of exploring technologies and different ways to use them to align with the focus on making great products that help people.

How Can You Become Most Admired?

So your company or team may not be quite as big as the 1,500 that were considered for this top 50 list. But you can still be greatly admired by colleagues in your industry, geography, or organization. Consider the following questions.

What are you doing to ensure you are a great place to work, and have the best talent for an organization of your size, geography and industry?
Do you have the right management team to lead you to the next level, or are you prioritizing loyalty, mediocrity, or family members above talent?
How are you ensuring high quality products and services?
How does your organization leverage its head, hands, and heart to support social causes?
What is the global impact of your products and services?
How are you innovating? What are you exploring that will make a substantial difference in your business or its operations?
Are you making decisions that will ensure the financial stability of your organization?
How are you managing and maximizing your corporate assets?
What are you doing that would make others want to invest in you and your organization?

Addressing the items on this list may be a challenge for some organizations, but doing so is a reflection of implementing a level of organizational discipline necessary for success. And success is what is most admired.

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Korn Ferry was Fortune’s survey partner for this project.

To read the interview of Tim Cook, go to http://fortune.com/tim-cook-apple-q-and-a/

From Irritation to Innovation

June 30, 2014

Priscilla Archangel

Inspiration, Leadership, Results

From Irritation to Innovation

Elizabeth Holmes hates needles. To her, the idea of being poked by a needle and withdrawing blood is more than just unpleasant. When she knows that she has to give blood, she becomes consumed and overcome with the thought until it’s finally over.

So it should be no surprise that at age 19 she founded Theranos, a ground-breaking blood diagnostics company that 11 years later is worth more than $9 billion. The company has patented its secret technology of performing 200 different blood tests (soon growing to over 1,000 different tests) without using a syringe. They use a few drops of blood drawn using a finger stick to minimize discomfort, and collected in a “nanotainer”; a container the size of an electric fuse. Her board is stocked with powerful blue chip members including former cabinet secretaries, former U.S. senators and former military brass. Theranos’ innovative technology is poised to transform health care technology at no more than half the cost of similar tests using current technology.

Holmes leveraged a process that irritated her to innovate a new method of getting it done.

Productive Dissatisfaction

Tony Fadell was building a vacation home for his family. One of the seemingly mundane decisions was selecting thermostats, but he wasn’t satisfied with his choices. So he developed the Nest Learning Thermostat, a digital and WiFi enabled device that conserves energy by learning its owners’ habits. He also designed the Nest Protect which uses new technology to detect smoke and carbon monoxide.

Fadell’s real goal is to use technology to redesign and control all technology in the home. He was successful in raising startup capital as a result of his Apple pedigree, and extensive connections in Silicon Valley. He previously led the team that created the iPod, thereby rejuvenating Apple and transforming the music industry (yes, I love iTunes), and assisted in the development of the iPhone. Fadell left Apple in 2008 (along with his wife who was an HR executive there) and his thermostat irritation became the epiphany to innovate his next career move. As evidence of his success, Nest was purchased by Google earlier this year for $3.2 billion.

Innovation Mindset

Holmes and Fadell were irritated by processes and technology that others accepted as status quo. Obviously this wasn’t just a minor irritation either. Most of us would have dismissed it, avoided it, complained a bit while it was on our minds, then moved on to what we believed were more important things. We would think that change wasn’t needed, or that technology couldn’t effectively be applied to it and scaled for use. Instead, they saw it as a challenge and took the opportunity to do something about it. They had a mindset for innovation that they applied to their environment.

At the time, Holmes was a sophomore at Stanford, and according to her chemical engineering professor, viewed complex technical problems differently than other students. She dropped out shortly thereafter and persuaded her parents to invest her education fund into the business start-up.

Fadell’s tenure at Apple was distinguished by asking lots of questions, challenging Steve Jobs, and building his network in the “valley” outside the company; something normally reserved for Jobs himself. He didn’t conform to the typical concept of the Apple executive.

The Key to Innovation

So what is the key to your innovation? What is it that irritates you, but you find it difficult to simply walk away or ignore it. Instead, you keep trying to figure it out. This may be your opportunity to move from irritation to innovation; to find new approaches to address old ways of doing things. Though Holmes and Fadell applied innovation on a large scale, you can easily do this within a smaller sphere of influence; in your work team, organization, community group or family. Here are a few simple steps.

Tap into what’s irritating you. What problem needs to be solved? Chances are it’s right in front of you.
Find the benefit. Who will it add value to? Identifying your stakeholders will help you to target what action to take, and encourage you to stick with it for their benefit.
Ignore the naysayers. What do you believe is possible? If you don’t have faith in yourself, no one else will either.
Identify all the assumptions associated with the status quo. Why do people do it this way? Calling them out individually helps to break the innovation opportunity down into workable sizes for better analysis.
Methodically challenge each assumption. Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? By the time you’ve asked “why” five times, you’ll uncover some suppositions that really don’t have a strong foundation.
Think of a new approach. What if we did it this way instead? Then think of another different approach. This practice gets you into the mode of change.

If you’re really irritated, true innovation will typically involve transformation, not evolution. It will yield a totally unexpected outcome that represents a leap ahead, not just a step forward. So embrace that impatience and exasperation with the current situation, and press forward to a new mindset of innovation.

Read the articles on Elizabeth Holmes and Tony Fadell in the June 12, 2014 issue of Fortune.

Photo courtesy of iStockphoto

Who’s in Your Garage?

March 31, 2014

Priscilla Archangel

Capability, Leadership

Who’s In Your Garage

There’s a story that someone once asked Bill Gates where his greatest competition was. The expectation was that he would mention another major high tech company competing for the same business. Instead, Gates said he was more worried about two guys in a garage; quite the antithesis of the presumed response. Why should he be concerned with two guys in a garage?

Because there are people like John Nottingham and John Spirk, who founded their namesake company in 1972, in a garage (several years before Microsoft was born). After graduating from the Cleveland Institute of Art, they declined offers from well-respected and established companies to instead strike out on their own and form their namesake company. Their objective was to design products using a different business model. Instead of creating products and then trying to sell them to other companies or customers; they invited companies to bring their product predicaments to the Nottingham Spirk Innovation Center. They then engineer solutions for these companies and receive payment in the form of royalties on sales, or a flat rate up front.

Today they’ve moved from the garage to a converted church building in Cleveland, Ohio, where with a small team of 70 people, they’ve amassed over 900 patents to their credit. This includes repackaging Purell hand sanitizer, developing the Twist and Pour paint can for Sherwin Williams, developing Dirt Devil products, Scott’s Snap Lawn Spreader, the Unilever Axe Bullet, Swiffer SweepVac, and the Crest Spinbrush.

Garage Thinking

One obvious question is why companies like these weren’t able to solve their product dilemmas internally. My guess is that they needed an external perspective and focus; literally, someone to help them think outside their corporate box or mindset. They needed to be able to think like they were in the garage by starting from the beginning and taking a fresh and different approach.

Think about it. As leaders, how many times have we had a product or process dilemma where we needed a simple, but elegant solution? We come at it from every angle we can think of. We brainstorm, use mindmaps, and other elaborate problem solving techniques. But when we casually mention the issue to someone totally unconnected to our organization, they quickly come up with a new perspective on how to solve it. Sometimes their suggestion is so simple that we initially dismiss it, because after all they don’t understand the complexities, rules and processes of what we do. But in reality, the customer needs uncomplicated answers, not encumbered by the back office complexity of how we got there.

Sometimes we find a need for this in our personal lives. How many times have you been thinking though a major decision, or wondering how to handle a situation. You labored with it, until one day you mentioned it to a friend, loved one, coach or even a total stranger. Maybe they only asked you one question, but it was so perceptive and insightful that almost instantly, you had the answer. You knew what to do.

The Magic of a Garage

So back to the two guys in a garage. There’s a slew of companies that started out in the proverbial garage like Amazon, Disney, Apple, Hewlitt Packard, Google and Harley Davidson. A couple of guys and gals, slogging through a problem that no one else perceived as a problem or took the time to resolve. They took risks because at that point they had nothing, so there was nothing to lose. They had few predispositions as to how their project should operate because it had never been done before. There was no bureaucracy or lengthy decision making process impinging on their activity. The boundaries of imagination were wide, and the possibilities for development and integration of technology were unlimited.

Sometimes, in the midst of all the business challenges and demands on our time, we need to find time to become two guys in a garage. Find that spot where we can innovate, concentrate, create, and view situations from the perspective of a learner to come up with an answer. Or find a few people on our team who can work on the issues without being encumbered with an expected solution; who can innovate, inquire, and integrate to arrive at the best answer. So who’s in your garage?

Read the Forbes article for more information on the Nottingham Spirk Innovation Center

Photo courtesy of IStockphoto

Visionary Leadership

September 22, 2011

Priscilla Archangel

Faith Based Leadership

Visionary Leadership

Steve Jobs recently announced that he was stepping down from the role of CEO of Apple, the company he co-founded in 1976. Given his ongoing and unfortunate health challenges, this may not have been a surprise to employees, shareholders, and customers, but it was certainly a disappointment. Jobs has been the creative force behind successful technology including Macs, MacBooks, IMacs, iPod, iPads, iPhones, and iTunes. His latest is the iCloud, which according to a September 8, 2011 article in Fortune Magazine is “a set of online services designed to tie all of Apples products together and make it easier for millions of people to access music, photos, files, and software across devices”. A short time ago he unveiled plans for a new headquarters for Apple in Cupertino, CA that will house 13,000 employees. The building’s ring shape design has led some to call it the iSpaceship. He also created Apple University as a tool to train mid to senior level managers on their management principles, vision and way of doing things. Thus employees have no doubt what Apple stands for.

IStockPhoto

Jobs created a legacy that has impacted the way millions of people across the planet communicate and interact. He utilized technology applications to enhance the way individuals live and work. He is quite literally a visionary. Though well known for his demanding and somewhat aggressive personality, he has the ability to communicate his image of the future in a manner so compelling that others rally around it. His creativity is undeterred by naysayers, and his focus is uninterrupted.

Traits of Visionary Leaders

As I reflect on the visionary leadership of Steve Jobs and others like him, they have several traits in common.

Visionary leaders have faith in their ability to create a different tomorrow.
Visionary leaders see a future that is unlike the present.
Visionary leaders convey a compelling picture of the future to others.
Visionary leaders push the boundaries of the expected into the unexpected.
Visionary leaders motivate people to perform beyond their normally demonstrated capabilities.
Visionary leaders listen to their inner voice of confidence, and ignore the external voices of doubt.
Visionary leaders see new products, processes, people and perspectives.
Visionary leaders have strongly held beliefs, determination and focus.

Are YOU A Visionary Leader?

In a similar manner, God has a vision for our future that is far greater than what we could attain on our own. He sees a future for us resplendent with blessings as we walk in His way to achieve His great plans for our lives. You can be assured that God’s vision is accompanied by the same creative powers He displayed when He formed the universe.

Each of us may have an aspect of our lives where we have the potential to become visionary leaders. Whether the vision is for our children, our spouse, our organization, our community, our business, our government, or our selves; God can give us the vision to see far into the future and visualize possibilities that others might consider almost improbable. The question is, will we glimpse that future and fall back in fear, or look boldly forward and step toward it. Will we meditate on our lack of _______ (fill in the blank) to accomplish that vision, or will we move forward undeterred by all the signs that point against it.

Just as Steve Jobs vision impacted the lives of millions of people, God’s vision for you can change lives as well. Whether it effects a few or many people, it’s no less important. So seek God’s vision for your life. His vision, His eye is guiding you into His greatness.

I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will guide you with My eye. Psalm 32:8 NKJV

The World’s Most Admired Company Is…

The World’s Most Admired Company Is…

From Irritation to Innovation

From Irritation to Innovation

Who’s in Your Garage?

Who’s In Your Garage

Visionary Leadership

Visionary Leadership

Leadership Tips