Steve Jobs' Advertising Secret: The Chief Executive As Creative Director

Madison Avenue is heading to the French Riviera this week for the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Advertising’s version of Oscars night.

Marching on the red carpet will be an armada of 10,000 or so creative-types. In addition to art directors and copywriters, the crowd will include management types, account executives, media buyers, a few CMOs, and a potpourri of hangers-on.

And yet, some very important people will be missing from Cannes: Marketer-sideCEOs.

CEOs used to be very involved in the advertising and historically had close relationships with their agencies. Unfortunately, there are fewer companies today in which the CEO takes a real hands-on approach to the agency. Some of this distance reflects the changing nature of the CEO position. In the 1950’s and 1960’s the mantle had passed from the founder class, people like Charles Revson at Revlon who were intimately involved in the advertising, to professional CEOs who delegated the advertising functions to the new class of skilled CMOs.

Companies have changed in other ways: in the last quarter century, Finance and Operations emerged as the smoother path to the corner office. Today there are more CEOs with backgrounds in Finance, Sales or Operations on the Fortune-500 than with a background in Marketing, in contrast to previous trends.

But whether the CEO has a Marketing or a Finance background, I witnessed a pretty consistent phenomenon during my 30-years career with some of Madison Avenue’s leading agencies: When the CEO is involved in the advertising process and lends direct input, the ads tend to be better.

Steve Jobs was intimately involved in the advertising process and relentlessly pushed his agency, Chiat/Day. He even went so far as to write as writing the tag line “Think Different” himself.  Jobs certainly crossed the line between traditional client and agency relationship when he was willing to risk his own personal money to run the “1984” commercial in that year’s Super Bowl, considered by some the greatest ad ever, when the Apple board hesitated.

Of course, that kind of micro involvement can be counterproductive, especially if you don’t have the marketing and design sensibilities of Jobs. But when the CEO gets involved it sends a clear message to the organization – that advertising matters to the success of our company. It creates a culture of innovation and sets the creative standards higher.

(Sources - http://www.forbes.com)

The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs

by Walter Isaacson

His saga is the entrepreneurial creation myth writ large: Steve Jobs cofounded Apple in his parents’ garage in 1976, was ousted in 1985, returned to rescue it from near bankruptcy in 1997, and by the time he died, in October 2011, had built it into the world’s most valuable company. Along the way he helped to transform seven industries: personal computing, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, retail stores, and digital publishing. He thus belongs in the pantheon of America’s great innovators, along with Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Walt Disney. None of these men was a saint, but long after their personalities are forgotten, history will remember how they applied imagination to technology and business.

In the months since my biography of Jobs came out, countless commentators have tried to draw management lessons from it. Some of those readers have been insightful, but I think that many of them (especially those with no experience in entrepreneurship) fixate too much on the rough edges of his personality. The essence of Jobs, I think, is that his personality was integral to his way of doing business. He acted as if the normal rules didn’t apply to him, and the passion, intensity, and extreme emotionalism he brought to everyday life were things he also poured into the products he made. His petulance and impatience were part and parcel of his perfectionism.

One of the last times I saw him, after I had finished writing most of the book, I asked him again about his tendency to be rough on people. “Look at the results,” he replied. “These are all smart people I work with, and any of them could get a top job at another place if they were truly feeling brutalized. But they don’t.” Then he paused for a few moments and said, almost wistfully, “And we got some amazing things done.” Indeed, he and Apple had had a string of hits over the past dozen years that was greater than that of any other innovative company in modern times: iMac, iPod, iPod nano, iTunes Store, Apple Stores, MacBook, iPhone, iPad, App Store, OS X Lion—not to mention every Pixar film. And as he battled his final illness, Jobs was surrounded by an intensely loyal cadre of colleagues who had been inspired by him for years and a very loving wife, sister, and four children.

So I think the real lessons from Steve Jobs have to be drawn from looking at what he actually accomplished. I once asked him what he thought was his most important creation, thinking he would answer the iPad or the Macintosh. Instead he said it was Apple the company. Making an enduring company, he said, was both far harder and more important than making a great product. How did he do it? Business schools will be studying that question a century from now. Here are what I consider the keys to his success.

Focus

When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, it was producing a random array of computers and peripherals, including a dozen different versions of the Macintosh. After a few weeks of product review sessions, he’d finally had enough. “Stop!” he shouted. “This is crazy.” He grabbed a Magic Marker, padded in his bare feet to a whiteboard, and drew a two-by-two grid. “Here’s what we need,” he declared. Atop the two columns, he wrote “Consumer” and “Pro.” He labeled the two rows “Desktop” and “Portable.” Their job, he told his team members, was to focus on four great products, one for each quadrant. All other products should be canceled. There was a stunned silence. But by getting Apple to focus on making just four computers, he saved the company. “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do,” he told me. “That’s true for companies, and it’s true for products.”

After he righted the company, Jobs began taking his “top 100” people on a retreat each year. On the last day, he would stand in front of a whiteboard (he loved whiteboards, because they gave him complete control of a situation and they engendered focus) and ask, “What are the 10 things we should be doing next?” People would fight to get their suggestions on the list. Jobs would write them down—and then cross off the ones he decreed dumb. After much jockeying, the group would come up with a list of 10. Then Jobs would slash the bottom seven and announce, “We can only do three.”

Focus was ingrained in Jobs’s personality and had been honed by his Zen training. He relentlessly filtered out what he considered distractions. Colleagues and family members would at times be exasperated as they tried to get him to deal with issues—a legal problem, a medical diagnosis—they considered important. But he would give a cold stare and refuse to shift his laserlike focus until he was ready.

Near the end of his life, Jobs was visited at home by Larry Page, who was about to resume control of Google, the company he had cofounded. Even though their companies were feuding, Jobs was willing to give some advice. “The main thing I stressed was focus,” he recalled. Figure out what Google wants to be when it grows up, he told Page. “It’s now all over the map. What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft. They’re causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great.” Page followed the advice. In January 2012 he told employees to focus on just a few priorities, such as Android and Google+, and to make them “beautiful,” the way Jobs would have done.

(Source - http://hbr.org)

Steve Jobs resigns as Apple CEO



It was just announced that Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple and...well you know who he is, is stepping down from that position, presumably due to health concerns. Stock trading for the company has been halted pending the news and Tim Cook has taken over as CEO.

CUPERTINO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- To the Apple Board of Directors and the Apple Community:

I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come

I hereby resign as CEO of Apple. I would like to serve, if the Board sees fit, as Chairman of the Board, director and Apple employee.

As far as my successor goes, I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple.

I believe Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it. And I look forward to watching and contributing to its success in a new role.

I have made some of the best friends of my life at Apple, and I thank you all for the many years of being able to work alongside you.

Steve

We're certain the board will keep him on and he'll still serve in some capacity at Apple. Say what you will of the man, he has certainly earned his place in history, making Apple one of the most profitiable and influential companies iin the world. We wish him the best of luck and good health.

Source: Yahoo! Finance