My Favorite Steve Jobs Quote

Tons of newsprint and an enormous number of megabytes have been dedicated in recent months to the wisdom of Steve Jobs. Every article seems to include the word “genius” at least once, and every utterance has been poured over looking for significance.

There are websites devoted to his wisdom, and several lists of his most famous quotes as the high-priest of technology. My favorite quote, however, comes from a more distant past; before his successes with the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. My favorite is also directly relevant to small business management.

Let's go back to the mid- 90's, and remember how the computer industry was structured at the time. The top players in the industry were:

• IBM, run by Lou Gerstner, a marketer with great credentials from his time at American Express and RJR Nabisco, the tobacco / snack food giant, and
• Compaq, run by Eckhard Pfeiffer, the former financial controller at Texas Instruments.

These were the biggest players in the industry, and had the lion's share of the business computing segment. Steve Jobs wanted to make the point that business buyers were best served by dealing with companies that had leading edge technology, comprehensive software-hardware integration, and leadership that would create great products both today and in the future.

While speaking to a conference of business leaders, Jobs said:

"Never buy a computer from a company where the CEO can't do the product demo."

(Note: I couldn't confirm these words in my on-line research, but that is how I remember the line.)

I was blown-away at the time with the wisdom and simplicity of the concept, and it applies today to every business, not just computers. Here's why: To do a competent product demo to a customer, you need to know

• The product, and how it compares to the competition, and
• The customer, how he uses the product, and what he wants to accomplish.

If you don't have both sets of knowledge, you won't deliver a compelling demonstration.

And if the leadership at the top of an organization isn't equipped with both sets of knowledge, the company won't have the focus needed to deliver long-term benefits to their customers. It doesn't matter which industry you pick, the concept is the same. For a company to succeed, the leadership needs to understand the product, the competition, and the customer. It also needs a vision about where each of these three components is headed.

I just finished a great book: Car Guys and Bean Counters, by Bob Lutz, certainly a “genius” in the automotive industry. He must be a genius; He agrees with me on this issue.

In a section discussing the decline of General Motors, he describes how car design decisions were being made by marketing types that had earned their reputations selling laundry soap at Proctor and Gamble.

He writes, “Shoemakers should be run by shoe guys, and software firms by software guys, and supermarkets by supermarket guys.” And, obviously, car companies should be run by car guys.

It doesn't matter what industry you are in, if the boss hasn't got in-depth knowledge of both the product and the customer, you will see that reflected in poor product development and weak marketing decisions.

Here's a great BusinessWeek article on the book.

Practical Tip of the Day:

How far down in your organization do you need to reach when its time to give a great demonstration to a new account? If the head person can't do a compelling demo, that's a sign of major organizational weakness.