Life issue2

VOL 1 | NO 2

BUSIN SSLIFE I Become

www.businessiq (1955-2011)

THE SECRET OF STEVE JOBS

By Laura Ries www.businessiqnetwork.com

Editorial Keep Your Business

Alive “If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't Settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like ay great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on” —Steve Jobs

L

uckily I was welcomed into this fast changing universe in the late seventies. This is shortly before some smart kids—few adults too—chose to change the way things were done in our home, offices and businesses. Imagine you are reading this in the late seventies, you will be holding in your hands a printed magazine. But I bet you are reading from your desktop, laptop, ipad or smart phone (except if you ordered for a printed copy for your growing library). These gadgets and many more were created by those who probably were inexperienced, but deemed it necessary to excite themselves and change our lives forever.

These whiz kids—grown men now—simply wanted to make significant impact in their fields. Perhaps, some wanted to prove to the world that college dropouts are smarter—and can be richer—than Wall Street mini gods.

However, the lesson you should take from these guys, who went on to build virtual businesses (brick and mortar businesses too) is that the surest way to keep your business alive in this information-intensive age is through innovation.

photos, videos, make phone calls, check out maps, read emails (text messages too) and perform other amazing task with just your voice commands.

When it comes to keeping your business alive, you must find unusual ways to always dazzle your customers or you will lose them to some new youngsters who are becoming extremely innovative just for the fun of it. As a business person, look at your business with the eyes of a god and ask yourself “what is that one thing I need to do to hypnotize my customers?” If you continually trouble your quiet mind with this question, in no time, the answer will come to you.

Alfred Ade-Ijimakinwa

BusinessIQ Life is published monthly online

by Tri-Planetary Solutions (c)2014 Tri-Planetary Solutions.

All right reserved.

Just what is business innovation? It is simply finding a better way of doing something. It is finding a better solution that should meet the need of your existing market. Like the way Mark Zuckerberg, through Facebook, changed the way we socialized. Or like the Google Glass that leaped out from our science fictions, a wearable computing device that can help you capture

How To Reach Us send enquiries and contributions to: info@businesiqnetwork.com To advertise in BusinessIQ Life, email: advertise@businessiqnetwork.com

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The Life of

Steve

Jobs S

teven Paul Jobs was born on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, California, to Joanne Schieble (later Joanne Simpson) and Abdulfattah "John" Jandali, two University of Wisconsin graduate students who gave their unnamed son up for adoption. His father, Abdulfattah Jandali, was a Syrian political science professor and his mother, Joanne Schieble, worked as a speech therapist. Shortly after Steve was placed for adoption, his biological parents married and had another child, Mona Simpson. It was not until Jobs was 27 that he was able to uncover information on his biological parents.

I had designed many computers so I was way ahead of him in electronics and computer design, but we still had common interests. We both had pretty much sort of an independent attitude about things in the world. ..."

After high school, Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Lacking direction, he dropped out of college after six months and spent the next 18 months dropping in on creative classes. Jobs later recounted how one course in calligraphy developed his love of typography.

As an infant, Steven was adopted by Clara and Paul Jobs and named Steven Paul Jobs. Clara worked as an accountant and Paul was a Coast Guard veteran and machinist. The family lived in Mountain View within California's Silicon Valley. As a boy, Jobs and his father would work on electronics in the family garage.

Paul would show his son how to take apart and reconstruct electronics, a hobby which instilled confidence, tenacity and mechanical prowess in young Jobs.

In 1974, Jobs took a position as a video game designer with Atari. Several months later he left Atari to find spiritual enlightenment in India, traveling the continent and experimenting with psychedelic drugs. In 1976, when Jobs was just 21, he and Wozniak started Apple Computers. The duo started in the Jobs family garage, and funded their entrepreneurial venture after Jobs sold his Volkswagen bus and Wozniak sold his beloved scientific calculator.

While Jobs has always been an intelligent and innovative thinker, his youth was riddled with frustrations over formal schooling. A prankster in elementary school, Jobs's fourth-grade teacher needed to bribe him to study. Jobs tested so well, however, that administrators wanted to skip him ahead to high school—a proposal that his parents declined.

Not long after Jobs did enroll at Homestead High School (1971), he was introduced to his future partner, Steve Wozniak, through a friend of Wozniak's. Wozniak was attending the University of Michigan at the time. In a 2007 interview with ABC News, Wozniak spoke about why he and Jobs clicked so well: "We both loved electronics and the way we used to hook up digital chips," Wozniak said. "Very few people, especially back then had any idea what chips were, how they worked and what they could do.

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Jobs and Wozniak are credited with revolutionizing the computer industry by democratizing the technology and making the machines smaller, cheaper, intuitive and accessible to everyday consumers. Wozniak conceived a series of userfriendly personal computers, and—with Jobs in charge of marketing—Apple initially marketed the computers for $666.66 each, and the Apple I earned the corporation around $774,000. Three years after the release of Apple's second model, the Apple II, the company's sales increased by 700 percent, to $139 million. In 1980, Apple Computer became a publicly traded company, with a market value of $1.2 billion on its very first day of trading. Jobs looked to marketing expert John Scully of PepsiCola to help fill the role of Apple's president.

However, the next several products from Apple suffered significant design flaws resulting in recalls and consumer disappointment. IBM suddenly surpassed Apple sales, and Apple had to compete with an IBM/PC dominated business world. In 1984, Apple released the Macintosh, marketing the computer as a piece of a counter culture lifestyle: romantic, youthful, creative. But despite positive sales and performance superior to IBM's PCs, the Macintosh was still not IBM compatible. Scully believed Jobs was hurting Apple, and executives began to phase him out.

In 1985, Jobs resigned as Apple's CEO to begin a new hardware and software company called NeXT, Inc. The following year Jobs purchased an animation company from George Lucas, which later became Pixar Animation Studios. Believing in Pixar's potential, Jobs initially invested $50 million of his own money into the company. Pixar Studios went on to produce wildly popular animation films such as Toy Story, Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. Pixar's films have netted $4 billion. The studio merged with Walt Disney in 2006, making Steve Jobs Disney's largest shareholder.

significantly in 2007: Stocks were worth $199.99 a share—a record-breaking number at that time—and the company boasted a staggering $1.58 billion dollar profit, an $18 billion dollar surplus in the bank and zero debt.

In 2008, iTunes became the second biggest music retailer in America-second only to Wal-Mart.

Half of Apple's current revenue comes from iTunes and iPod sales, with 200 million iPods sold and six billion songs downloaded. For these reasons, Apple has been ranked No. 1 on Fortune magazine's list of "America's Most Admired Companies," as well as No. 1 among Fortune 500 companies for returns to shareholders.

Despite Pixar's success, NeXT, Inc. floundered in its attempts to sell its specialized operating system to mainstream America. Apple eventually bought the company in 1997 for $429 million. That same year, Jobs returned to his post as Apple's CEO.

Early in 2009, reports circulated about Jobs's weight loss, some predicting his health issues had returned, which included a liver transplant. Jobs had responded to these concerns by stating he was dealing with a hormone imbalance. After nearly a year out of the spotlight, Steve Jobs delivered a keynote address at an invite-only Apple event September 9, 2009.

Much like Steve Jobs instigated Apple's success in the 1970s, he is credited with revitalizing the company in the 1990s. With a new management team, altered stock options and a self-imposed annual salary of $1 a year, Jobs put Apple back on track. His ingenious products such as the iMac, effective branding campaigns, and stylish designs caught the attention of consumers once again.

In respect to his personal life, Steve Jobs remained a private man who rarely discloses information about his family. What is known is Jobs fathered a daughter with girlfriend Chrisann Brennan when he was 23. Jobs denied paternity of his daughter Lisa in court documents, claiming he was sterile. Jobs did not initiate a relationship with his daughter until she was 7 but, when she was a teenager, she came to live with her father.

In 2003, Jobs discovered that he had a neuroendocrine tumor, a rare but operable form of pancreatic cancer.

Instead of immediately opting for surgery, Jobs chose to alter his pescovegetarian diet while weighing Eastern treatment options. For nine months, Jobs postponed surgery, making Apple's board of directors nervous. Executives feared that shareholders would pull their stocks if word got out that their CEO was ill.

But in the end, Jobs's confidentiality took precedence over shareholder disclosure. In 2004, he had a successful surgery to remove the pancreatic tumor.

True to form, in subsequent years, Jobs disclosed little about his health.

In the early 1990s, Jobs met Laurene Powell at Stanford business school, where Powell was an MBA student. They married on March 18, 1991, and lived together in Palo Alto, California, with their three children.

Apple introduced such revolutionary products as the Macbook Air, iPod and iPhone, all of which have dictated the evolution of modern technology. Almost immediately after Apple releases a new product, competitors scramble to produce comparable technologies. Apple's quarterly reports improved

On October 5, 2011, Apple Inc. announced that its co-founder had passed away. After battling pancreatic cancer for nearly a decade, Steve Jobs died in Palo Alto. He was 56 years old.

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Special Credit to: www.biography.com

(1955-2011)

The

Secret of

Steve Job S

By Laura Ries

teve Jobs was a rebel who didn't go about life or work in the normal way. He dropped out of college, was a fruitarian for a time and was often called an arrogant, obnoxious, weirdo. Being a rebel, however, wasn't the secret of Steve Jobs. In our youth-obsessed culture, rebels are a dime a dozen.

Many of these brands were new brands with strange names: Osborne, Commodore, Micro Pro and dozens of others. The difference between Apple and the other brands wasn't in the hardware.

It was in the name. Apple was a simple name consumers could instantly associate with the home market. The name also allowed a simple "apple" visual which hammered the name into prospects' minds. (How would you visualize Micro Pro?)

Steve Jobs was a technology genius. From an early age, he was fascinated by electronics. He tinkered at his father's workbench and joined his high-school electronics club. Jobs was so gifted that Atari's chief technology engineer gave him a job as a game designer even though he had no formal technical training. But being a technology nerd wasn't Job's secret either. Silicon Valley is filled with brilliant technology nerds.

Furthermore, Jobs resisted the path that many entrepreneurs take. That is, giving the brand his own name. Would Jobs Corporation have become the world's most-valuable company? Or even worse, how about Jobs & Wozniak Corporation?

The power of a second brand.

During a 1979 visit to Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, Jobs saw a prototype of a computer with a graphical user interface. Rather than typing commands, users rolled a mouse and clicked on menus. This technology fit with Jobs' philosophy of making computers that were dead simple to use.

He immediately started working on replicating the technology.

Steve Jobs was a design genius. He was obsessed with creating tools that were not just good but beautiful. And his aesthetic sense didn't just apply to the outside of things; even the inside of things had to be beautiful. On the Apple II, for example, Jobs insisted that the circuits be redone to make the lines straighter. But being a design genius wasn't the secret of Steve Jobs either. Check out your local Ikea; it is filled with wonderful designs.

On January 24, 1984, Apple released the Macintosh. Previously, the product line included such names as Apple I, Apple II and Apple IIe. But this new computer got its own name and thereby created its own new category. Most companies would have called it the Apple III, but not Steve Jobs.

The world has many great rebels, great technology geeks and great designers. What made Steve Jobs so unique was his supremely-gifted marketing ability.

Here are some examples of the marketing decisions made by Steve Jobs. Decisions that put Apple on the path to becoming the world's most valuable company.

The power of an enemy.

Sometimes the best way to position a brand is by figuring out who your enemy is and then being the opposite. Apple's obvious enemy was IBM which had about 50 percent of the PC market.

The power of a simple brand name.

In the 1970s and 1980s, there were hundreds of brands of personal computers on the market. Many of these brands were line extensions of existing brands: AT&T, Burroughs, Dictaphone, Digital, ITT, Memorex, Motorola, NCR, Radio Shack, Smith Corona, Siemens, Xerox and many others.

That is exactly what Jobs did with the famous 1984 Super Bowl commercial announcing the launch of the Macintosh. What made the commercial so

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powerful was that almost everybody instantly recognized Big Brother, who represented "conformity," as a stand-in for IBM. He repeated the same strategy later with the Mac vs.

PC guy ads.

The power of being first.

In his career at Apple, Steve Jobs did this over and over again. Launching a new product that was the first brand in a new category. ? Pixar's Toy Story. The first featurelength animated movie done entirely on computers. ? Apple's iPod – the first hard-drive music player. ? Apple's iPhone – the first touchscreen smartphone. ? Apple's iPad – the first tablet computer.

The power of a diverging category.

Initially we were skeptical of the iPhone. Jobs had described his new brand as a combination iPod, cellphone, email-and-internet device, all rolled into one. A red flag went up in our head since convergence devices are typically flawed.

The Nokia Communicator had been on the market for a number of years, it was a combination personal digital assistant and cellphone and it was a total loser. But in reality, the iPhone was not a convergence device. Jobs may not have explained it correctly initially, but no matter. The iPhone exploited the divergence phenomenon by becoming the first “touchscreen” phone.

But it wasn't just the touchscreen that would be the iPhone's greatest achievement. It was the way the iPhone handled the many hundreds of thousands of apps created for the new device.

What email did for BlackBerry, Apps did for iPhone. Apps made the iPhone more than a cellphone, more than a music player, more than an email device, more than a web device. iPhone was a totally new touchscreen App device.

The power of the verbal.

When you are the first brand in a new category, consumers need extra help in understanding what you are selling. Steve Jobs had an amazing ability to simplify not just his products but his product messages as well. With two words, “Think Different,” Jobs communicated the essential difference between the Macintosh and every other PC. With five words, “1,000 songs in your pocket,” Jobs communicated the essential difference between the iPod and the other MP3

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players that could only hold 30 songs.

The power of the visual.

Words can communicate a message, but visuals can reach consumers emotionally in a way that words cannot. Jobs understood the power of visuals like no other CEO on the planet and effectively used simple visuals to build his brands. ? The rainbow apple for Apple. ? The white ear buds for iPod. ? The even better white apple for Apple Inc. Job's presentations were also powerful visually.

First was his consistency of dress. From 1998 to 2011 (the era of his return to Apple), he always wore a black turtleneck and jeans for his presentations. Even more impressive were the slides he used during his famed presentations.

No text-filled Power-points for Steve. Nothing but a huge screen with just a single image and a few words on each slide. A picture is worth a thousand words.

The power of multiple brands.

Apple didn't get to be the most valuable company in the world by expanding one brand into multiple businesses. Apple launched multiple brands. In the beginning, Apple Inc. made the Apple computer. But no longer. The Apple computer died along with the home-computer category. Today, Apple is a company name, not a brand name. And a good one at that. Apple Inc. owns the brands: Macintosh, iPod, iPhone and iPad. No CEOs make decisions and follow the principles of branding the way Steve Jobs did. He has left us an amazing legacy.

Future leaders should study Steve Jobs and his accomplishments so that they too can build brands the way Jobs did. If you build brands like Jobs, you can build the next most valuable company in the world.

Al Ries & his daughter Laura Ries have been working together as focusing consultants for 18 years. Ries & Ries was founded in New York in 1994. Three years later, Al & Laura relocated to Atlanta, Georgia. But the Ries team spends most of its time on the road consulting with top corporations around the world from Microsoft to Ford, Disney, Merck, Frito-Lay, and many others. For more info: www.ries.com

Straight From Steve

J

ust before he died on October 5, 2011, he left behind the best legacy for any entrepreneur who wants to be like him. I am not talking about Apple and its i-products; I'm talking about Steve Jobs' success secrets.

do. You should have a definite vision and purpose of what you want to become and fearlessly go for it.

Simplicity. When Jobs returned as the CEO of Apple Inc. in 1997, Apple was at the verge of bankruptcy.

Jobs looked at over 300 products and condensed them to just 10 within two years. After this act, Apple became the number one America's Most Admired Companies on Fortune magazine's list. Jobs believed in simplicity; you should too.

So, here are some secrets to success that you can get from the college dropout who started off in his parents' garage, got kicked out of his own company and later became one of the greatest innovators ever lived.

Do something new. There are thousands of me-too products out there, and it will be very unwise to join the league. So, Steve Jobs advised that you do something new. Be innovative. Create something totally different from what is available in the market place. Dare to be different.

Do what you love. In this century, everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. Good idea. But one big mistake that is very common is that everyone is looking for that money spinning business. This is not a good idea. Steve Jobs would rather advise you to do what you love. When you do what you love and you do it just right, it will yield its monetary returns.

Have a true direction. This simply means to have a definite vision and purpose. Don't be tossed about by the tides of what you should do and not

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Sell dreams, not products. These days, many entrepreneurs are just interested in selling their products. Customers want beyond products, and that is why Steve Jobs wants you to make your customers dreams come alive. Don't just sell products to them, honor their dreams and bring them alive in your

product or service.

Create an unusual experience. Jobs said it is not about selling 29 million ipads during summer, it is about entertaining his customers. You should wow your customers too. They will trust and always come back to you.

Think different. Apple's 1997 campaign “Think Different” was launched not long after Steve Jobs returned to the company he founded. It began with these words: “Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes—the ones who see things differently—they're not fond of rules, and they

have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things. They push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the people, who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Be yourself. Above all, Jobs wants you to be you. Don't try to be someone else.

Don't try to be a Steve Jobs. Be yourself and you will never leave the scene unnoticed.

Special Credit to: www.businessiqnetwork.blogspot.com

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Steve Jobs: Honors & Public Recognition

A

fter Apple's founding, Jobs became a symbol of his company and industry. When Time named the computer as the 1982 "Machine of the Year", the magazine published a long profile of Jobs as "the most famous maestro of the micro".

Jobs was awarded the National Medal of Technology by President Ronald Reagan in 1985, with Steve Wozniak (among the first people to ever receive the honor) and a Jefferson Award for Public Service in the category "Greatest Public Service by an Individual 35 Years or Under" (also known as the Samuel S. Beard Award) in 1987. On November 27, 2007, Jobs was named the most powerful person in business by Fortune magazine. On December 5, 2007, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver inducted Jobs into the California Hall of Fame, located at The California Museum for History, Women and the Arts.

In August 2009, Jobs was selected as the most admired entrepreneur among teenagers in a survey by Junior Achievement, having previously been named Entrepreneur of the Decade 20 years earlier in 1989 by Inc. magazine. On November 5, 2009, Jobs was named the CEO of the decade by Fortune magazine.

In November 2010, Jobs was ranked No.17 on Forbes: The World's Most Powerful People. In December 2010, the Financial Times named Jobs its person of the year for 2010.