“A steady stream of revolutionary products. Swarms of devoted fans. Advertising that laughs at the competition,” Chris Morrison writes for BNET. “How does Apple do it?”
“Apple has plenty of mystique, but what looks like magic is something a lot more calculated. What works for Apple can be distilled into principles of sound management that could (in the right culture) flourish elsewhere too. The company recognizes its most valuable employees and coddles them. (Shouldn’t yours?) In the realm of product creation, it gives design an equal seat at the table with engineering (no magic there), and assures its products that distinctive look by insisting that all designers work from the same minimalist playbook. (No reason you couldn’t do something similar.) To be sure, Apple is one of the world’s best at leading its customers rather than following them,” Morrison writes. “But it has no patent on the process.”
Morrison writes, “We’ve pored through Apple’s storied history, took the measure of its successes and its failures, and with the help of experts who’ve followed the company for years, parsed the Apple mystique into a handful of how-tos and a few reliable principles that you can use in leading your own team. Will these axioms turn you into Steve Jobs overnight? No. Will they help you use the example of one of the world’s most inspired companies to add some inspiration to your next project?”
The Science Behind Apple’s Magic:
• How to Innovate Like Apple
• Four Principles of Apple’s Successes (and Failures)
• Insanely Great Marketing
• The Apples of Other Industries
Readers also are asked to vote in an online poll that asks, “What is Apple’s Achilles Heel?”
Full article here.
Sheesh.
@ Rob : Thanks for smart comments = )
“Government is not a solution to our problem, Government is the problem.” – what a load of bulls..t!
Apple’s Achilles heel? One word: China.
If anything disrupts the product pipeline, if the exchange rate turns against them, or if the contract manufacturers it relies on besmirch the Apple brand, it could be seriously impacted.
@Handsome Smitty:
I doubt very many people consider Apple a “niche” company, their 10% market penetration notwithstanding. And besides, what’s wrong with niche?
Niche- Walmart, Sears, Chevrolet, Dell
Not niche-Bergdorf Goodman, Van Cleef & Arpels, Porsche, Apple
Which do you suppose offer the best shopping/use experiences?
@Ed
If the regulators HAD acted to whip Valuejet into shape before their crash, you and the other free-marketeers would have howled that the government was restricting valuable efficiencies that make markets competitive. That’s what always happens, but the point is to intervene BEFORE catastrophe.
Grover Norquist and others have been working the following plan for twenty years:
Step 1) Do whatever you can to cripple an Agency A’s functioning, whether that’s restricting their scope or authority, or just cutting funding.
Step 2) Express outrage that Agency A does such a crappy job now that it’s been denied the resources to do a good job.
Step 3) Cut Agency A’s funding, since such an ineffective operation doesn’t deserve the tax payer’s money.
Step 4) Repeat until Agency A truly is as pitiful as your iedology requires. Eventually maybe you can argue for it’s abolishment.
Only step 1 is difficult- after that it snowballs naturally.
The radical right also loves to bring up any failures in government systems, as if imperfection = total irrelevance. It’s an obvious fallacy that even a Republican should be able to spot: I’m mostly productive and add a great deal of value to my company, but sometimes I do effaround and respond to dense posts on MDN. I suppose that because I’m not 100% effective 100% of the time, I might as well just put my feet up and not even try to get work done. Similarly, why bother to use a condom, since they fail 3% of the time!
How many plane crashes do you think have been avoided by regulation? For that matter, how many poisonous products? How many epidemics? Work place deaths? How much worse a financial crash could we have suffered without regulation and intervention? For that last one, we have a case study:1929. Oh, yeah, we have case studies for all the others, too, all from before regulation existed: medicines that were worthless or worse (heroin and cocaine were common ingredients), child labor, flu pandemic of 1912, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, etc, etc, etc.
Republicans like to see their “Free Market” ideas as radically new thinking, but they’re not. They’re old. We tried them already, and when they had killed, injured, sickened, and degraded enough people, we decided to abandon them in favor of reason and humanity.
“Free Market” is a ridiculous fallacy in itself: markets are created by agreeing on rules by which to trade. There is no capitalism without those rules. So now the question is only how will the rules work and what’s their aim?
@ Nathan
100% correct. I could not have said it better myself.
“Apple is one of the world’s best … But it has no patent on the process.”
And …
Plato had no patent on Philosophy
Mozart had no patent on Music
Picasso had no patent on Painting
Shakespeare had no patent on Theatre
Hitchcock had no patent on Film
Cronkite had no patent on Journalism
Groucho had no patent on Comedy
cummings had no patent on Poetry
etc etc
God Bless ’em
Some Folks will probably never “Get It”
Think Different™
BC