I read this biography while flying back and forth to meet with senior executives of a Canadian Bank. On the late night flight to Raleigh, I sat next to a young, napping woman who awoke as the plane touched-down, checking her iPhone immediately. Wanting to share my thrill of the biography, I offered “if you like the phone, you’ll probably enjoy this biography.” She stared for a split second and replied, “Apple has changed my work completely. The products allow me to do my work.” “What do you do?”, I asked. “Designer. Used to work for Nokia but they never believed that design mattered first. Engineering came first. Now I work in Berlin and visit Raleigh to help with a local agency. Some of the founders of FROG (Apple’s own design firm) founded this agency.” (BTW, how Helmut Esslinger of FROG remembers Steve Jobs). “Oh,” mumbled the stunned Christopher, trying to imagine if in 45 seconds such an honest, spontaneous exchange of personal, public and historical information could ever take place between clients of other consumer electronics products.

Initial conclusions upon finishing the biography: 1) why doesn’t Apple’s iBooks let one gift an eBook as I’d give 10 away today?! 2) Steve Jobs was weird and weirdly unique and there will never be another like him — and this is not all bad. How’s that!? from a fanboy. As my Apple friend informed me, “yes, there has definitely been a shift at the company over the past three weeks and maybe we can use the change to better operationalize some of the success and processes as we are bursting at the seams with systems catching up to creative and physical output.” 3) it’s up to us to carry-on in some manner, in some small way what Steve Jobs accomplished in so many significant ways. Of course, behaving different is hard. Maybe I should try it.

Over the past 18 months of speaking with banking executives of many sizes and risk profiles, nearly all react positively to the Simon Sinek description of why Apple is so successful…because they know Why they do things; they know what they believe. Below is an excerpt from the biography where Tim Cook offers his description of what Apple believes in.

“We believe that we are on the face of the earth to make great products, and that’s not changing. We are constantly focusing on innovation. We believe in the simple not the complex. We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products that we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution. We believe in saying no to thousands of projects, so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us. We believe in deep collaboration and cross-pollination of our groups, which allow us to innovate in a way that others cannot. And frankly, we don’t settle for anything less than excellence in every group in the company, and we have the self-honesty to admit when we’re wrong and the courage to change. And I think, regardless of who is in what job, those values are so embedded in this company that Apple will do extremely well.”
Tim Cook Apple CEO pg 488 Steve Jobs by WalterJacobson.

Mourning is over. Time to get busy.

19 October 2011 Remembrance Celebration at Cuppertino Campus

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” Stanford Commencement 1995 (he did not graduate university).

Steve Jobs voice-over in 1997. Released commercially with VO by Richard Dreyfuss.

Mr. Jobs made no secret of his focus on design; in a Jan. 24, 2000, interview, Fortune magazine asked if it was an “obsession” and whether it was “an inborn instinct or what?”

“We don’t have good language to talk about this kind of thing,” Mr. Jobs replied. “In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.” From 10/8/2011 NYT article.

Final statement of personal mourning: The Onion had it right, nearly perfectly so. It’s funny, I don’t care who you are (thx 2 LTCG).

“Steve Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple Computers and the only American in the country who had any clue what the fuck he was doing, died Wednesday at the age of 56. “We haven’t just lost a great innovator, leader, and businessman, we’ve literally lost the only person in this country who actually had his shit together and knew what the hell was going on,” a statement from President Barack Obama read in part, adding that Jobs will be remembered both for the life-changing products he created and for the fact that he was able to sit down, think clearly, and execute his ideas–attributes he shared with no other U.S. citizen.”

Time to get busy in honor of this important man.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=sOlqqriBvUM
Jobs speaking about NEXT.

New York is overwhelming which is why everyone from everywhere is eager to see it. Over the 8 days in my Hilton pied-a-terre, I visited the Statue of Liberty, shared the same corners of Mid-Town as the President of Iran, toured the USS Intrepid Museum as well as the opening of IBM’s Think and MOMA’s Talk to Me exhibits in addition to a birthday party at BowlMor, several delicious dinners and sights of fashion and individuality that I could not see in a lifetime in Durham. Yet, I was completely amazed by the falafel truck owner who sold 1,000s of meals per day to nearly every market segment imaginable: tourists, school groups, financial execs, visitors, hometowners, even other food-truck vendors. The lines were so long, like 150 people, that I asked a chowing-down limo driver “what is he serving?!” He replied, “the lines are usually longer…all of the way down the block.” OK! The Unstoppable Power of a Good & Well-Executed Idea. Over a couple of days, I observed this food-truck’s supply chain of mini-vans and cars bringing to him vats and cartons of chick-peas and tomatoes and utensils. Meanwhile, Kodak is down to its last couple of hundred million because it never figured-out how to compete with the digital camera marketplace that it invented (you could look it up).

Of course, what is impressive about New York is all of the things that you can do and still be disappointed by what you didn’t do or even know that there was to do. The more that I visit, the more that I realize how segmented is its geography and neighborhoods. Mid-Town is far from East Village, although only a $15 cab ride; 6th Ave and 53rd is a long way from Pier 82, although only a 25 minute walk. Seeing one’s world through the eyes of a visitor is recalibrating. We, me with my Swedish and Lithuanian guests, hustled on Sunday morning for the ferry to the Statue of Liberty. First, underground on the #1 train to the base of the Island, aka Battery Park. Out of the subway tunnel into the open space of the Park; into the Homeland Security tent then on board a jam-packed ferry to the Statue of Liberty. That one has to nearly undress for security purposes in order to visit the Statue could be thought provoking. Happily, the symbol of America’s premise elegantly inspires as we discussed the chaotic and had-to-be dangerous journeys that awaited the immigrants for whom Ellis Island and the Statue meant so much in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. My Swedish friend mused ‘why did we select Minnesota as our rallying point?! Couldn’t they have chosen Florida?!” Last week, Hewlett-Packard fired and hired its 4th and 5th CEOs in 6 years now favoring the former CEO of eBay. Perhaps there is an auction in the works.

We were all impressed by the size and capabilities of the USS Intrepid, a World War II vintage aircraft carrier. More impressive to my corporate guests was that this enormous and enormously complicated ship was built in about two years. Such a feat combines examples of motivated teamwork, fearful necessity and bottomless budget. During our own planning discussions, we laughed a couple of times about ‘getting it (our tasks) done’ in less time than the construction of the Intrepid.

Our Innovation Workshop concluded with a visit to IBM’s Think Exhibit at Lincoln Center. This venue intends to celebrate IBM’s Centennial, promote its interconnection with the global economy and to relate itself to the simply brilliant and brilliantly simple discoveries in astronomy, medicine and communications over recorded history. I’m stuck recalling a video clip of President John Kennedy announcing The Moon Program at Rice University.

“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

Could you imagine, don’t you wish that we would exhibit such political conviction and collective fortitude in the face of the challenges and opportunities of our time by asking not what our country can do for us….

COMING APART After 9/11 transfixed America, the country’s problems were left to rot. by George Packer Download NYer PDF

I grew-up in New Orleans and my wife grew-up in Mount Airy, North Carolina. We sometimes amuse ourselves during cocktail hour by reciting the differences in our social and cultural circumstances, always marveling that we found enough in common to want to marry. We could never imagine that a New Yorker article would connect our hometowns.

We both moved away from our hometowns for a reason and we remain attached to each of these spots on the map: one on a river and the other at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The troubles of our hometowns were a long time in coming and will take a while to fix. Certainly, such is the nature of civilization: people try, succeed and fail in one location then move to start-over in the next. Right now, we’re all caught-up in something that seems much larger than us – is the population too large? do we use too much gasoline? is the government to blame? – where we’re not sure what to do or even if we’ve hit the bottom yet.

I wonder if our nation’s decline is represented by these two uniquely charming locations or are their declines better represented by America’s?! Certainly New Orleans is not the city that it used to be – and probably never was any way. Its mythical gentility and creativity was perpetrated while those in authority neglected nearly every fundamental civic responsibility. Katrina washed away this veneer.

The folks in Mount Airy have made do since they settled the area prior to the American Revolution. They display a strong sense of self-reliance coupled with a short horizon to the world at large. As I think about it, this is pretty much the opposite of how New Orleanians have seen themselves and their world.

Now both communities share the understanding that as any semblance of reliable, centralized leadership is in dangerous short supply, self-reliance in the day to day is how they will have to survive and to re-construct a future for their friends and families.

As a 14 year old water boy, my wife’s great-grandfather walked from Virginia to Gettysburg in 1863 for the battle. Wounded on the third day in the North Carolina attack adjacent to Pickett’s charge, he was paroled and returned home. He wore his uniform in the annual town parade into the early 1930s. New Orleans surrendered early in the war with barely a fight, never considering itself actually a part of the American South. My money’s on Mt. Airy. Meanwhile, here’s a cut from a recent David Letterman show where the Preservation Hall Jazz Band joins with the country-gospel Del McCoury Band performing I’ll Fly Away. Hope springs eternal!

Complete listing and related article here.

What impels some people to defend others?

Rather than level a broadside at the easy targets of debt-ceiling debates (sic) and big-time college football scandals – are the two related? and can it be a scandal if no one is surprised? – I’d like to introduce two outfits that seem to know what they’re doing. Spotify has wowed Europeans for a couple of years with its music service and the Washington Duke Inn’s elegant note confirming cancellation of a reservation well describes the complete experience at this hotel on the campus of Duke University.

One lived a full life, a life of wondrous opportunity and hard-earned achievement (his father as a Polish noble fought both with the Poles against the Nazis and with the Nazis against the Russians – in the same war); the other lived a brief live punctuated by incredible courage and generous sacrifice. The general arrived in America at age 16 in 1952, a refugee of WWII. Fortunate circumstance and hard work propelled him to the highest rank our Army. The Medic rushed to save a wounded Marine amidst a gunfight in the Helmand Province of Afghanistan. We miss Aaron Ullom because we well understand the depths of his capabilities.

A Navy Corpsman assigned to the Marines as a medic, most respectfully referred to as Doc within their USMC units, who risked and lost his life in a far, far away place so that another may have a chance to live. Seaman Ullom was awarded a Purple Heart and another medal for carrying on the fight against Global Terrorism. He is not heralded for exceptional valor in his moment of death because what he did is what corpsmen are supposed to do. His was not exceptional behavior as his purpose was to save the lives of the Marines in his care.

Men such as Aaron Ullom are compelled to the purpose of the moment, perpetuating the beliefs of our nation, so that men like John Shalikashvili may find a land of refuge with opportunities to fulfill their own destinies. I hope that this is why we’re still over there.

On that same page of the Raleigh News and Observer, Section 12A of Sunday July 24, 2011, with the Shalikashvili headline and the Ullom sideline, there are listed the names of seven other Soldiers and Marines who died in action in Afghanistan between July 9 and July 14. Their ages ranged from 20 to 39. ‘Twenty years old?!,’ I repeated to myself.

Our multiple-threaded, near parallel universes of an economy – state budgets seem on verge of collapse, stock market spiraling into higer orbit – connects me nearly daily with those exploring careers after college, career transition after military service and finding work having ‘lost their situations’ (a quaint British euphemism for personal catastrophe). Curiously, I am aware of several who have improved their professional situations while a significant percentage of us have opted to hunker down waiting for this nightmare of an economic storm to pass.

I have plenty of platitudes and only-if experiences to broadcast to those who ask for career advice and connections. The itemized list will follow. Meanwhile, these thoughts arise amidst the “I cannot wait until it gets here; OMG, it’s here!” attitude towards the sweltering days of July – however, it is rare that North Carolina is hotter than New Orleans (101 vs 91- yacudlookitup) – and by the way, the hottest July 21st in recorded NC memory was in 1952. Take that I Hope That You Are Wrong Predictors of Arrived Global Warming!

I am interested in changes in business communication and personal engagement wrought by this l’enfant terrible, the Internet. I like to believe that despite the multiple aches and pains and some permanent injury to our global economy, ours is an incredibly interesting and opportune time to be alive (what choice do we have really?). Reading the NY Times on Monday, I observed that as old ways of communicating are rejected, habits of excellence are enduring. I observe that Syria and News Corps are reeling because these two entities have tried to rule by controlling the message; hoarding accurate information; and worshiping the only recently desanctified, now false god, Knowledge is Power, in Greece known as Klueles.

Whatever the descendants of Twitter, Facebook, texting or tablet computing and how they may modify our introduction to information, there will be plenty of opportunities for those who help others to know, aka the Roman deity, Kollaborate. Call it scholarship or leadership or experience, the likes of Darren Clarke and Nadeshiko Japan will forever succeed. Clarke’s experienced approach to the amusingly horrible playing conditions of the Open, the golf tournament once known as the British Open, was surprisingly satisfying for its lack of spectacle. He took a measured, confident approach to the course and the pressure of the Tournament by withstanding impressive challenges by Phil Mickelson and Dustin Johnson, the longest of long ball hitters, who at points on the final day seem to convert the dunes, winds and pot bunkers into a sunny round on a local public course (Johnson drove through the green on a 400 yard+ hole!)

In the Women’s World Cup Final, either victor would have been an inspiring winner. The American team earned their way to the final with upset victories over Brazil and France. They also defeated Japan twice this year. In the end, really in the penalty-kick decided tie-breaker, the Japanese team played with courage and conviction recovering from nearly desperate circumstances in both the regular game and the overtime period. Good for our friends in Japan, of course, as it’s been a year of awful setbacks due to compounding natural disasters.

Sports are not governments and playing well at games is not the equal of sustaining businesses. Obviously, Syria and News Corps are trying to hold-on to hollowed models of management. Time is not on their sides even if they retain plenty of fight (I guess Gaddafi could be added this equation). The next orbit of our new world will continue to value calmness under pressure and confidence within circumstance regardless of who else participates.

Each July I catch-up with my roommate from the USS Joseph Strauss. He completed his service, ventured to Wharton for business school and now works with one of the too-big-to-fail banks. Coincidentally, our birthdays are back to back in July which inspires our annual connection. We each have two children with sons the same age in their senior years of college. I guess that he and I are in our senior years just not of college. This is a bewildering concept to reconcile especially when you’ve known a person well before wives were met (or found or discovered or they found us?!) and children defined our daily existences.

We bemoaned the economic climate with the attendant collective failure to ‘take our medicine’. I’m of the opinion that the longer that we wait, the further into the valley we’ll descend making the unavoidable climb back that much more challenging. The camping or backpacking metaphor appeals to me for two of its many valuable lessons: 1. when one is lost, one should stop traveling in the unknown direction as it is hard to help someone who is lost on the move; 2. valuable resources, ie water and dry clothing, must be preserved and protected, really hoarded, especially on unfamiliar trails.

He and I agreed that despite the indications and predictions of a prolonged economic slump that opportunities are and will be available for our sons and their contemporaries if they consider a couple of rules of thumb: 1. keep your costs low; 2. cultivate the attitude and behavior that you work for yourself and always will. This is not intended to be an insult to established organizations and enterprises but an encouragement to develop and to understand one’s unique interests and skills; 3. be able to operate in the larger world with a clear sense of one’s capabilities. I won’t enumerate this entreatment but probably the greatest, unschooled achievement is to marry the right one, the suitable one, the one’s whose family feels familiar.

We concluded our annual update with few ideas for how the economic landscape may look in the spring of 2012 and were nearly joyful in our confidence that if our sons take a perspective and make a related plan for what they’d like to see – do – be over the next 8 to 10 years that can hardly go wrong uncovering the opportunities that will present themselves.

13 July amendment: NYT Op Ed by Thomas Friedman “Differentiate or Die.”