Posts Tagged ‘apple’

Thoughts on Leadership: Steve Jobs – A Legacy of Leadership

By Gino Blefari | October 13th, 2011 0 Comments

“You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.” – Steve Jobs, 1955-2011


Greek artist Charis Tsevis has created portraits of Jobs that are made entirely out of the products he invented.

Since Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs passed away last week, I’ve been reflecting on the learning and inspiration that I draw from his career relative to Intero and the work I do as President and CEO.

Our Cupertino office is located amidst the Apple campus, down the street from the Apple headquarters building. In fact, the Intero Cupertino building was one of the first Apple headquarter buildings and still has an Apple stamp on the concrete step in our parking lot. Innovation is literally at our front door.

That is why a mission at Intero is to continually stay innovative (Value #9 – Innovation) in the marketplace. Standing still is the first step towards decline (the stationary position is always the beginning of the end). As Steve Jobs says, “Stay hungry and stay foolish.” He had always wished that for himself. In turn, his inspirational words are how we will stay ahead of the pack and be the leader in change.

Steve Jobs embodied principles that are essential to leadership:

  • Work and passion can go hand-in-hand.
  • Success can be a consequence of a life lived fully.
  • Who we are can shape our work roles, and not the other way around.
  • Being authentic can be rewarded, and enduring ridicule and failure without losing faith is ultimately worth it.
  • The true measure of success is how much meaning your work brings to yourself and others.

Steve Jobs explains at a commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005 (click here to read the full inspirational speech), “Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”

Jobs was a unique genius who transformed the world because he believed he could. The reality is that even if you have never owned an Apple product and have never met Steve Jobs, he has affected your life.

Once you look at Steve this way you realize that not only were his products works of art, but his leadership was too. Like great leaders before him, his presence was a mirror in which we hoped to see our future.

As a CEO, Jobs led from passion for his business and his product, not from greed or ego. He came from a modest background, overcame adversity, took huge personal risks, and built a great company. He made a fortune, of course, but all the while he dressed in Levis and kept his personal life private. This is what I value most about Steve Jobs.

We all need to take guidance and inspiration from Jobs’ career to raise our games and do it right. We need more people who can lead as Steve Jobs did.

Let’s honor him by remembering the lessons he taught us. Take those and apply them to your life – personally and professionally. Play to win because playing not to lose is a poor strategy that generally backfires. Once you stop setting new goals to strive for, and instead just try to protect your lead, your strategy becomes too timid and leads to stagnation and decline.

You still have today. What will your legacy be?

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Thoughts on Leadership: Why Apple Inspires People

By Gino Blefari | July 21st, 2011 0 Comments

Like millions of other people, you’ve likely wondered out loud at some point, “What makes Apple so successful?” It is an extraordinary technology leader, founded and led by extraordinary men.

While it’s easy to explain what a company does or how an organization works, it is much more difficult to understand why. Why is Apple so driven not just to succeed, but to lead in consumer technology, to change the world and stop at nothing less? It is the why that separates amazing companies from mediocre ones – just as it’s the why that separates people who truly lead and inspire from those who are just in power positions.

Apple’s cofounders, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, are great examples of influential leaders (not just men in positions of leadership). I’ve been reading about the common traits of true leaders in Simon Sinek’s book, “Start With Why.” By studying influential leaders, Sinek discovered they all think, act and communicate in the same way – they start with why, and that is what inspires people to follow them to success.

In 1979, best friends Wozniak and Jobs created the first personal computer. Why? What was their why? Wozniak built the Apple I with a vision of giving average folks the same computer power as big corporations. He wanted to help level the playing field in business. Before Apple I, computers were too complicated and expensive for the average individual; they were primarily used as a tool for privileged businesses. Wozniak’s why was to enable individuals to compete.

What about Jobs? What was his why? He was the salesman – an amazing one. He dreamed of building a company that would change the world. With just one product, Apple Computer made $1 million in revenues in its first year. It made $10 million in its second year and in just six years became a billion-dollar company.

Even more remarkable than Apple’s fast growth is its longevity. More than 30 years later, the company continues to succeed – empowering individuals with world-class technology. Changing the world. Apple didn’t stop with the personal computer; the company continued to conquer the small electronics, music, mobile phone, and entertainment industries. Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs succeeded because they started with why. They had a contagious passion that fostered real innovation.

What’s even more interesting about Apple is that not only did the company’s founders inspire its employees to achieve greatness, but also it inspires its customers – to the point where thousands camp out overnight to buy its new products.

Sinek’s following excerpt sums up the leadership lessons from this legendary company:

“Great leaders are able to inspire people to act. Those who are able to inspire give people a sense of purpose or belonging that has little to do with any external incentive or benefit to be gained. Those who truly lead are able to create a following of people who act not because they were swayed, but because they were inspired. For those who are inspired, the motivation to act is deeply personal. They are less likely to be swayed by incentives. Those who are inspired are willing to pay a premium or endure inconvenience, even personal suffering. Those who are able to inspire will create a following of people- supporters, voters, customers, workers- who act for the good of the whole not because they have to, but because they want to.”

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Thursday Thoughts: Crises and the Practice of Leadership

By Gino Blefari | July 23rd, 2010 0 Comments

“People with passion find a way to get things done and to make things happen, in spite of the obstacles and challenges that get in the way.”  
                                                                                                                 -Steve Jobs

After you spend some time leading a company or team, you inevitably encounter a crisis. How you deal with that crisis as a leader ends up mattering more than the crisis itself.

On June 24, the consumer technology industry’s darling, Apple Inc., found itself wrapped up in a publicity nightmare. Many of the consumers who’d bought the latest iPhone 4 were reporting reception issues, and evidence showed that a defective antennae was causing dropped calls and poor connections when held a certain way.

The issues were more than a big deal partly because of all the fanfare leading up to the iPhone 4 release. When the long-anticipated iPhone 4 was announced in early June, Apple said it was the biggest leap they had taken with the product since the original iPhone shipped three years ago. The company sold more than 3 million iPhone 4s in the first 22 days on the market.

The negative press regarding the defective antennae continued to pile on, causing Apple CEO Steve Jobs to abruptly end his Hawaii vacation to address the issue in a rush press conference.

Apple handled some things inadequately during this calamity, but eventually ended up doing the right thing. Here are five leadership qualities Steve Jobs used to get through this crisis that we can all learn from:

  • Strive to educate. In his press conference, Jobs focused more on the larger issues of the smartphones rather than the signal deprivation. He wanted to combine his learning with action and impel the public to seek greater understanding of the product.
  • Maintain constant communication. As this whole debacle transpired, Jobs’ main goal was to show that communication is the real work of leadership.
  • Become a problem solver. Apple did not choose to simply forget about this issue and not deal with it. Instead, company officials dealt with the situation head on and extended support to their customers.
  • Don’t be afraid to show your vulnerability. Jobs began his press conference by admitting the company is not perfect. In doing this and explaining that Apple does have faults, he showed he was strong enough to care.
  • An apology is a powerful way to make things better. At one point, Jobs offered a pure apology. His forgiveness does not change the past, but it will enlarge the future.

The clear lesson here is that it is only in the practice of leadership that we influence our world. Rather than view the iPhone 4 problems as a setback, Jobs saw it as a healthy, inevitable part of becoming a successful company.

As American football coach Lou Holtz once said, “Ability is what you’re capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it.”

Steve Jobs exemplified just that. Without his passion and leadership to get through the crisis, the public would not have believed in his ability to resolve the iPhone 4 antennae situation.

As you think about your career and obstacles you face, remember that Steve Jobs believes, “Passion rules! Passion is about our emotional energy and a love for what we do. Without passion it becomes difficult to fight back in the face of obstacles and difficulties.”

The next time you face a crisis, let your passion kick in and guide your leadership decisions.

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Have You Landed On An iPad?

By John Thompson | May 14th, 2010 3 Comments

Love it or hate it, the iPad, Apple’s latest shiny technogadget, has taken the world not just by storm, but by virtual F5 tornado.

For most of the folks snatching them off shelves like they were loaves of bread in Russia, circa-1980, they’re just awesome, hyper-beautiful, super-slick … toys. But for REALTORS? The iPad holds a wealth of creative new ideas and opportunities to provide new services for customers and clients.

For starters, the iPad’s display is absolutely gorgeous. Really. It’s second-to-none. Imagine taking your clients on showing appointments and presenting them with splashy, hi-res, full-color photos on it. If you’re out and about and they suddenly decide that there are other properties they’d like to see, you can show them right on the iPad. No more carting around that heavy, cumbersome laptop. With it, you’ve also got a terrific way to take notes as you go with them from house-to-house, or with which to give a listing presentation the likes of which they’ve never seen.

And it’s a pretty cool tool outside of client interaction, too!

Some of the great tools that are available to enhance your business are:

  1. Evernote. We’ve talked about this fantastic app before, but the version that’s available for the iPad is fantastic. The app itself is free, and basic memberships to Evernote are free, with upgrade options that, at their most expensive, are a minimal $45 annually.
  2. iWork. Apple’s answer to MSOffice, iWork is a suite of tools — Pages, Keynote, and Numbers — that is incredibly easy, incredibly intuitive. Pages (iWork’s word processor) is a breeze to use, and the iPad version is really slick. Keynote simply blows PowerPoint out of the water in terms of the quality of presentation it produces. Numbers, which is similar to Excel, doesn’t have quite the juice as its Microsoft counterpart, but it’s still off to a pretty good start.
  3. Things. Hands-down, this is the best organizational software out there. It’s a little pricey in terms of apps (most people are still used to paying $1 for things from the AppStore) at $19.99, but it’s worth every penny. If you’re a Mac user, this is a must-have.

There are tons of new apps being added each and every day, so be sure to check back for your favorites.

The iPad isn’t for everyone, but for us? For REALTORS? The iPad’s going to provide a very happy landing.

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