This is just one of the examples of the recent innovations by Google. It happens in the very traditional telecommunication broadband service sector which have been tightly controlled by a few large and long-time businesses for years and where innovations have been slow.

Since the start of the company, Google has never been lacking innovations in its products or services, but its most profound one in recent years, per TriStrategist, is not in the latest smart wearables, Android-related products or map services, but the unique expansion of wide-area wireless access since 2013 in the remote terrains of sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, where for so many years the costs have never been justified for the wires to be laid by telecom companies or poor local governments. By Google Blimps, satellites (Google’s recent Skybox purchase may add to the toolbox) and other locally suitable mechanisms for these remote areas (MSFT is said to be in this endeavor in some way as well), billions of people may soon expect to be connected to the internet and to the rest of the world.

Yes, future commercial gains for Google are in the middle, but the implications of such moves are far more significant – bringing down barriers of information access, promoting health, education and businesses, propagating democracy and social progress, reducing poverty and improving equality… It finally gives a modern and perhaps the most effective way to unleash the human potentials and productivities of the billions of people in these disadvantaged areas in the world.

Combining Google Fiber and Blimps moves, Google delivered disruptive innovations head-on to the long-tradition telecomm and ISP service market. In an urgent defensive move, besides fighting against Net Neutrality in court, global 30+ telecom companies, refusing to be reduced to “dumb pipes” (in their own word) in the new cloud and internet reality, came up a comprehensive counter strategy to try to channel the web and data access through their proposed global NFV (Network Function Virtualization) Network by ETSI standards, but their position and strategy could be misdirected this time.

Former MIT Sloan Professor Edgar Schein, a known scholar on corporate culture, pointed out that the surface terms may not truly describe a company’s culture. He thinks that culture is a way of working together towards common goals that have been followed so frequently and so successfully that people don’t even think about trying to do things another way. If a culture has formed, people will autonomously do what they need to do to be successful.

From his explanation, a corporate culture is the common group approach, in explicit description or without, to do things inside the company and reach agreements. Other scholars summarize it as the combination of process and priorities inside an organization. Prof. Schein did warn us that it’s too easy to over-simply on what is truly a corporate culture. It comes in multiple levels and is influenced by multiple dimensions and factors with the age of the organization and its leaders, missions, strategies and goals, organizational structure and process, time and space, external forces, etc.

The question is at the interpretation of a “success” in a corporation. TriStrategist thinks a corporate culture is more than the “How” & “What” elements of the process and priorities; it has a lot to do with group-enforced human attitudes and behaviors under human psychology. These attitudes and behaviors, which over time form a “group preference” of doing things, for a large part, came directly from those of the company founders or top leaders. “Corporate Values” are not a culture statement. As the Corporate Mission Statement, they are for marketing a company’s ideal image to the outside, but the true culture inside speaks more about the personalities of the top leaders and people who subconsciously try to be “alike” to their leaders in order to be accepted or “successful” in a corporation. Because of the narrow definition of individual success in a corporate environment, the performance review and compensation system, reflecting how leaders and management value their people and contributions, also impact the culture twist. Underlying “directness” vs. “passive-aggressiveness”, “sharing” vs. “backstabbing” can all be the gradual results of it. People may even subdue their true personality in order to fit into a corporate culture at the workplace. A fun-loving person can easily keep a low key and put on a straight serious face for the 8 hours a day for the sake of making a living for the moment. Besides, there are plenty of stories on companies who failed on scandals because of the behaviors of their leaders and their questionable culture, although they had those shinning righteous corporate values posted on the wall.

The formation of a corporate culture is similar to that of a family culture. Even if the head of the household or parents may not explicitly try to “define” the culture of their family from the beginning, the children will inevitably inherit the day-to-day attitudes and behaviors from their parents inside a family. For example, “a caring, loving family” is where parents respect and care each other and their children. Parents’ honesty, hardworking, kindness to friends and neighbors, attitudes towards money, their rewards and punishment standards (especially) all help define a family culture and directly impact how their kids will behave. Same with a corporation. A competitive leader will generally lead a competitive company. A courteous leader who leads by persuasions may result in a company more “friendly” towards each other and to their customers. A overly consensus culture can seldom lead to great decision-making in a competitive market, but if that is the culture, people inside will accept it as a norm for a long time. A cunning, corner-cutting business culture may pursue aggressively on short-term gains, and that’s a culture too.

Neither a successful company ensures a winning culture, nor does a past winning culture guarantee a company’s future success. The snapshot “success” of a business usually comes with both the vision of the leaders and the luck, not necessarily the superior skills or aptitudes of the top leaders themselves. For example, a product or service may jump to an instant success because of the lack of the competitions in a particular market. No business model can last forever. Both the corporation and its culture evolve over time, but the culture, carrying the burden of a long history and the momentum of a large mass, tends to evolve much slower than the market conditions or business decisions.

Big Services companies tend to stay the course, maintain their on-going services to the “satisfaction of the customers”, but customers rarely can point you to the right innovations. That’s why Steve Jobs intuitively pointed out that “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” Unless a Services company truly owns a unique and long-standing high-entry point apart from competitions, hardly the case most of the time, any new service, once turns into an existing offering, can lose the innovative edge immediately or be copied quickly by competitors. A Services companies can keep adding incremental changes to their services and putting a lot of resources into the upgrades and maintenance cycles, but these routine actions in fact divert resources and may only keep them further away from being truly innovative. A lot of times the routine mindset set in and makes it harder for a Services organization to change. Startups, however, usually have limited resources. They have to focus their people’s mindset and tight resources onto creating something new, unique, either a product or service, to hit the market quickly and stand apart from the herd. That’s why startups are in general more innovative than big companies.

An innovative company needs an innovative mindset throughout. Great innovations need out-of-the-box thinking, out-of-the-beaten-path risk-taking, maybe new skills and often a large degree of abandonment of the old routines in order to strike onto something new, exciting, creative and different. How a Services company can maintain its innovative edge? Besides the new services every once a while or adding new product mix, it has to focus more on the behind-the-scene: people innovation, process innovation and value innovation. Its goals should be the market-leading efficiency, the exceptional customer experience, the unique value proposition and/or the superior cost structure. To achieve these, it needs a deeply rooted innovative culture and it needs mindful leaders and talents. It is not easy.

Leaders need to take a long and hard look into an organization’s core strengths, the competitive edge, the culture needed to decide on its best line-ups and directions if they want to stay innovative. Today any big company needs to be willing to transform itself to stay relevant. A company can transform successfully for the money-making sense, but it may not guarantee its long-term innovative edge if the urgency and drive for innovations are not conscientiously put into its core visions, its leadership’s mindset and its daily practices. IBM is a great example. They can transform from a mainframe and PC business into a good Services business, but it didn’t make them an innovative market leader. Today they are still facing the same challenges and threats from the competitors who can innovate a lot faster. Profitability and stability are double-edged swords for a long-term business.

By then, US Auto Industry had already been on the decline for several decades, outpaced by global competitions. The giant region of the “Factory Belt” in the northeast and central states of the US had long become the “Rusty Belt”. Ford was in bad shape financially with $12.6B loss for the year 2006 on a revenue of $160.1B with its corporate bond status in Junk category. Well, during the 2008 Great Recession, Ford sustained itself by not taking the government bail-out money and subsequently emerged out of the crisis as the financially leanest, healthiest and strongest auto industry player in the US and in the global. The prescient and critical financial decisions and steps that Ford took before and during the recession demonstrated the exceptional financial acumen of the Ford leadership, including Bill Ford, Alan Mulally and its Finance Team.

This is a hard subject to explain succinctly, but TriStrategist will try to highlight a few key lessons learnt on the importance of finance play during the business transformation and crisis.

1. Know your numbers.
Balance sheet, cash and benchmark comparison numbers. For example, “Daily Cash Burn Rate” is an important measure for manufacture business – it indicates the standing urgency of the business; “Cost per Vehicle” number indicates the productivity measure against global competitions.

2. Improve cash flow and balance sheet as soon as you can.
Shedding non-essential assets into cash and reducing operation cost are usually the first steps for immediate improvement. Ford’s cost-cutting was already on its way when Mulally got on board, but he took some immediate steps to consolidate the overly complicated global brands(including production lines, supplier & dealer networks, regional dependencies, fuel-economy line-ups) and sold some of the non-core ones for cash. This allowed Ford to focus company’s limited resources on winning or strategic brands. Ford timely and successfully sold a few brands before the recession – they might get nothing if too late.

3. To prepare for the transformation, borrow (not spend) as much as possible while still can.
Ford’s timing to borrow money in 2006 to prepare the coming reconstruction couldn’t be better. Yes, they may have gone all the way (even used Ford logo as collaterals) to appeal to the bankers for the money, but they already sensed that the situation could be worse if they didn’t get it sooner. They also kept an additional revolving line of $10B open which proved to be a very smart move in the hindsight. It eventually provided them the backyard money to skip the drama of the government bail-out (still a very risky decision then; needed hunch and gut more than data!) and Ford thrived hugely from the public image campaign out of it – boldly different.

4. Keep your own finance arm.
Unlike the other two automakers of the Big Three, Ford tried all it can during the toughest time to keep the ownership of Ford Credit Union, its own internal finance arm. When the credit was frozen and tight everywhere during the worldwide economic crisis, Ford could still use this arm to finance the customer purchases, its suppliers and dealers to maintain its sales and operations, more efficiently than the competitors.

5. Adjust the largest long-term cost items – Union contract and pension re-negotiation.
Ford has the tradition of fostering trust and good relationship with the Union – which made their negotiations with the Union easier. They worked out some of the key union worker contract terms right before the recession and also renegotiated the pension plan around the time. Both proved well-timed and critical to allow Ford to make necessary cuts when it needed desperately, move much lighter and faster to react to the market conditions compared to their US competitors.

6. Deep cuts to stay lean and towards profitability.
Mulally was determined to break the vicious cycles of over-production and deep discounts which had prevailed at the Big Three for years. He lead the leadership teams to seriously match production with demands during his tenure. Ford did deep cut while preserving the lean core, key innovations and global best leverage of the business, reduced the overall production in order to move to a healthy profitability state sooner. Different business philosophy and beliefs, different results.

7. Improve long-term debt status whenever opportunities allow.
Ford spared some needed cash through Union contract and pension renegotiations and immediately used it to buy back long-term debt at about 30 cents on a dollar (when the whole industry was on the brink of collapse). Benefiting from the pessimistic market views, they continued other de-risk, de-leverage debt-to-equity maneuvers to convert much of the unsecured debt into stocks. Such moves allowed them to quickly retire large amount of debt which saved them billions down the road and removed the risk of concession hankering by investors. Ford also paid off the renegotiated cash requirements for Union pension trust ahead of the schedule as its own cash status improved out of the recession. These moves relieved Ford some of the most onerous long-term financial burdens. It put itself on a healthy financial path to be able to fully focus on the future.

8. Keep a constant pulse of the market, the competitions and Government directions.
Be prescient and stay ahead of the game as a large corporation. In the time of crisis, it could mean influencing the policy directions and the sentiment of the market to your long-term advantage instead of merely reacting to the panics.

Reflecting on these stories and lessons learnt from the business transformations during the time of huge crisis, we should all remember Warren Buffett’s famous quote:

On April 21, Ford announced a long-time insider Mark Fields (53) to replace the famous Alan Mulally (68) as the next CEO from May this year. Much has already been reported throughout the media on Mulally’s legacy at Ford, but TriStrategist wants to highlight below our own understanding of Alan Mulally’s top three “magic” from his CEO tool chest:

1. Fundamental culture transformation through consistent, simple, common-sense steps and principles.

a.) Motivate people by clear shared visions, not by structure or incentives.
From Alan Mulally’s own words:
“What I have learned is the power of a compelling vision, a comprehensive strategy, a relentless implementation process, and talented people working together based on those commitments.” [From the book “American Icon – Alan Mulally and the fight to save Ford Motor Company” by Bryce G. Hoffman)
“You’ve got to trust the process. You need to trust and nurture your emotional resilience. Do you have a point of view about the future? Check. Is it still the right vision today? Check. Do you have a comprehensive plan to deliver that? Check. If you get skilled and motivated people working together through the process, you are going to figure it out. But you’ve got to trust it.”

b.) Flatten the organization from top-down, effectively use weekly BPR (Business Plan Review) and SAR (Special Attention Review) meetings to enforce the basic principles of management: honesty, transparency, inclusiveness, accountability, discipline, quick decision-making, keeping all areas of the business leaders informed at the same time and all time, emphasizing interdependencies among all business areas, using goal-oriented openness and peer-pressure to foster business focus instead of individual focus or turf focus, encouraging everyone to work together as one team at all time, bringing out the best traits and best behaviors in talents and people. Following top-level example, because it was straightforward, worked effectively and was accepted emotionally, all business leaders would in turn use the same approach throughout the company – resulting in a flat, more transparent organization. All ideas/voices can be heard. People at all levels are informed of company situation and decisions. Everyone feels included and respected as part of the organization. In this way, everyone can think strategically and align their daily jobs to the company’s vision and strategic goals. Therefore the company can march as one entity – “One Ford”. All common sense, but very powerful.

c.) A calm, confident leader with relentless drive on results based on reality (no matter how harsh it is) and data, at the same time always with keen eyes to the future. It could mean tough negotiations and sacrifices, but a relentless leader and his team will focus on goals and results. “The data sets you free” – it fosters honesty, transparency, fairness and reality-facing, especially for this type of manufacture business. Constantly invest on the new products for the future even if in the middle of very tough realities – it is the only way to create a better, more successful future and outsmart the competitions. Opportunities are only for the prepared minds.

d.) Bring talented people to work together. Talented people working together will help a leader figure out ways to realize the vision and overcome any difficulty. As an outsider CEO, Mulally didn’t bring his own confidants (except he did bring in the HR Head from his Boeing Commercial Airplane department). He used most of the talents right at Ford. It needs courage and skills, but it builds trust and respect a lot faster as a true leader.

2. Prescient, timely, prudent and brilliant finance plays.

Timing played a big part in Mulally’s effectiveness and Ford’s survival and turnaround. Ford’s extremely well-timed, almost super lucky financial dealings at the critical junctions of events saved Ford from one of the largest tsunamis of the auto industry and world economy, enabled it to leapfrog the competitions by a large margin immediately out of the recession. Without these finance plays as one of the core implementation strategies, no matter how visionary and motivating a leader can be, Ford would not be able to survive as it did. The wisdom, prescience and brilliance of Bill Ford, Alan Mulally and Ford’s Finance Team provided us an excellent playbook on the importance of finance plays for any large enterprise that is going through business transformation or dealing with large-scale crisis. We’ll elaborate more on this point in another blog article later.

3. One Globe approach – true global inclusive views and implementations on business.

a.) Mulally and Ford did smart, comprehensive global leverage on talents, assets, brands, production platforms, technologies, best practices and markets. They provided some of the best illustrations on the success of such global plays which are valid to all types of businesses.
b.) Truly make “World is my oyster” and one will win in today’s business. All business strategies, hiring, operations, and future investments need to be put on a flattened global playground. A leader needs to constantly think that he is standing on One Globe.

Let’s ask TriStrategist, what should be the top three traits of the new CEO for Microsoft in order to revive this lack-luster tech giant?

1. A brilliant talent leader. 

Microsoft (MSFT) is no lacking of world’s top talents in technologies. The CEO him/herself does not need to be a super technical talent oneself (well, he/she does need to have certain technical knowledge and know-how in order to be respected at MSFT), but he/she must be a brilliant talent leader and manager. Effectively, truly effectively, organizing (including cleaning up) and motivating the vast talent pool inside the company, and continuing to attract world’s best talents (one of MSFT’s long tradition) should be the No.1 priority for the new CEO. It is the “collective genius” that will have the best innovative ideas and execute the best course of actions in global competition that will ensure MSFT to find its new branding and leadership position in technology world again. Make Microsoft a place that all top talents love to contribute with focused actions, and then the company will find its shine once more in no time.

2. One with superb intuition and common sense.

The new CEO does not necessarily to be a technology visionary oneself to decide on the next big-bet for Microsoft. He or she just needs the superb intuition and superior common sense. Ideas can come from the talents inside and out. The difficulties for top leaders are often to decide which idea and which course to focus on at a certain time and under certain global market conditions. Using long-term perspectives and great intuitions as the guide will generally lead to the best choices. Often that’s called a leader with the right visions.  For all other organizational issues, use common sense – the wise, sharp and right ones. Well, the organizational issues inside MSFT at the current stage are definitely not easy tasks either.  It will certainly test the skills and senses of the new CEO.  

3. A masterful balancer of the Wall Street, the Board and the people inside and out.

The new CEO needs to be a skillful leader with extraordinary nerves as a balancer.  The current big challenges for Microsoft are not only on the lackluster technology innovations and organizational inefficiency, but also on dealing with the external forces. Years of stagnation of the stock price have created many agitated investors. Current society’s impatience and short-term profit colored lenses will also add tons of pressure to the CEO.  The board will be hard to please with diverse people on different agenda. New CEO either from outside with no foundation inside the company or someone from within carrying their own political ties and baggage will all face the people issue: inside, a huge company of many strong, but diluted people; outside, Microsoft’s numerous partners and stakeholders will request a say as well. The balancing act will be a hard requirement for anyone to come as a new CEO.

On the other side, there are certain red-flag areas that must be carefully watched with due-diligence in selecting a new CEO.  To our opinion, a few important ones should be: 

  – Avoid anyone with either culture or gender bias:  Microsoft’s survival will be on the global technology stage, not in the US alone. True diversity will be the key to win the hearts and minds of the people on the globe;

   – Avoid anyone who is only a “Number’s guy”: This is not a company or business which depends on penny-pinching and that’ll be a huge waste of the talents’ minds to put that as a focus. It didn’t work in the past and should not be the future focus unless the business was truly mismanaged.

   – Choose a true leader, not a follower. A true leader is an independent thinker and doer, especially when facing the totally new and unknown, which are coming with increasing occurrences in today’s fast changing world.

1. The Collective Genius. Steve Jobs might be a great intuitionist, perfectionist, motivator, promoter and negotiator, but many of the innovative ideas from Apple’s products were not directly from his mind. What he was good at, was to identify where the problems were in consumer products and intuitively know which revolutionary ideas were the best from all the brilliant people that he surrounded himself with. He never tolerated bozos and he can give trust to his selected people around him. He simply knew how to motivate his best people to come up with the best ideas and encourage them to perfect them and realize them, to “think different” and try the impossible. He used these secretive “project teams” for advanced ideas and gather all the needed best-fit resources to focus on each individual great idea until something came up to satisfy his superb senses and intuitions – “That’s just right and insanely great” for the market.

2. A Giant Lead Time. From IPod, to IPhone, to IPad, each great product was a revolution in high-tech consumer industry.  Apple completely leapfrogged competitions by a huge margin. When the products were launched, many competitors hadn’t even thought about the ideas or the direction that Apple had taken. From the idea inception, to perfection, to manufacture and finalization, Apple had at least one and half or two years lead time ahead of the completions. This is definitely not an easy feat to achieve in this highly competitive industry. They did it, with the beliefs, the motivations, the drives, the collective minds and hearts, the effective identification, negotiation and collaboration process with partners. If Apple keeps this tradition, depending on if Apple can make it a tradition in their system regardless of if a strong visionary leader exists or not, it can enable their lead and success for a long time to come. It will be very hard for Apple’s competitors and followers to catch up with Apple in such a business if they don’t have some truly original revolutionary ideas to start with and can’t implement 3-4 times faster than Apple.

3. The Immense China market. Every great idea needs a great implementer to realize it. Apple needs fast and creative implementer, precise manufacture, and a low cost. Apple believes in China market, its unlimited potentials both from consumer thirsts and manufacture prowess, and they have fully utilized it. Jim Cook has been focusing on China for a long time. There in China he found the best manufacture partners who are willing to meet the “perfection” needs of manufacturing for Apple at a very low margin. It was calculated that for each IPhone sold around $500-600USD, Apple’s China manufacture partners only took about $5 USD. He could find nowhere else with such readiness, capacity, inventiveness, agility and willingness for such large-scale manufacture activity at such a low cost. Jim Cook has paid many visits to China and emphasized many times to investors that Apple’s future grown potential revolves a lot around China. For the sales, the Greater China region is Apple’s fastest growing region with triple-digit growth by beginning of 2013. Apple even breaks out China revenue on its balance sheet just to highlight the sheer growth and importance of the region. Apple apparently has a much better understanding and appreciation of the culture of the region than many of its US competitors. For such a culture, long-term thinking, respect, compassion, tolerance and fairness far outweigh short-term calculations, aggressiveness or ideology dominance in business. When the Chinese government demanded an apology from Apple due to some issues, Apple delivered such an apology. It might be awkward for many of the US mentality, but that’s a smart and easy move for Apple to win the minds and hearts for its indispensable partners and consumers in such an unlimited market.

We have to respect Steve Jobs for what he had initiated and implemented to transform Apple. From $18 billion market value in 2000 to $455 billion in 2013, it becomes the largest company per market value and the most profitable. Today, it is a time of great changes for many businesses.  Leaders who can understand the dynamics of the world markets, the industries, and minds and hearts of the customers, and who have the courage to lead them with great innovative products and services will always be the ones we look forward to.

Tidal waves of disruptive changes are coming and threatening the very core of once super successful dominating businesses like IBM, MSFT, Intel, GOOG, Boeing, etc. Let’s focus on technology industry first. We’ll leave Boeing’s story to another article later.

Eastman Kodak was a classic example: too slow a response to the digital transformation means being a dinosaur on the earth after the meteoroids pounded. This time they knew the disaster was coming and saw their own demise helplessly.

Similar stories are always present in the history of business.   

IBM once had the mainframe dominance in worldwide markets and the company run like a family. Years of transformation from an old steady mainframe and PC manufacturer to a technology service company did not pass through without the pain. The elephant finally danced a little bit. Today, it still has to continue transforming itself and locating its next footing of dominance or greatness.

Even for GOOG, the Wall Street darling of the latest decade, is seeing the tidal waves towards it. Pay-per-click search revenue is shrinking with business owners turning more and more to mobile advertisements for better ROI. A business based solely on a set of search algorithm can be unsustainable – there could always be another set of smarter faster algorithm down the road (maybe by some college kids again), even if the dominance (or monopoly, or purchasing power) today could delay any infant competitor’s marketability. Smartly GOOG has been trying to diversify their business in mobile and other areas for years.

All companies, no matter what dominant positions they may have built over the years, are seeing the waves coming, not on the horizon, but already in their backyard, feet or inches away from reaching their front porch. Today, no company can afford to stand still and in fact no one can stand still.

Have these companies ever feared that this day will eventually come? Have they followed the beliefs of human evolution,  especially of the expansion of human brains and senses, the cravings for grander aesthetics, productivity, ubiquitous connectivity and existence?

Have these once smart companies already had tomorrow’s breadwinners in stock? Not quite.  Many of them are just scrambling to play the catch-up games, not at all can be one step ahead of the game. And that could be a dangerous sign.

Business without a long term strategy on promoting innovations as part of the life, without the constant sense of urgency facing competitions can be easily swept away by today’s tidal waves.  If luck is on their side and right strategies are put in place timely to change the playground so that they can maneuver one or two steps ahead of everyone else, they may still transform and survive, but it needs the right visionary leaders to lead them into the next generation.

 
The Human Factors

How about the human factors? Every business’ success is about its people’s collective mind powers, energies and achievements. Culture trumps strategy every time. Without a long term focus on innovation at the very core of the company culture and its business values, catch-up or slim-fast schemes may only save the management for days, but not for years or decades. In fact many such schemes may not work at all or take effect fast enough to escape the tsunami of today’s changing world.

Many companies are going through the painful business transformation at this very moment, no matter due to the worldwide economic recession, the increasing global competitions or the fast technology advances.  Some traditional companies are struggling in the survival mode. For so many long-time employees, the human toll of such transformation could be severe. Cost-cutting and layoffs are usually the first means adopted by the management from its modern day quick-fix toolbox.  Inside many non-performing business units or “cost-centers”, uncertainty-driven emotional burdens can be felt everywhere. Fears and insecurity usually bring out the worst human traits and create many wasteful office dramas. It absolutely takes a lot more management skills and thoughtful thinking than a relentless number-crunching to lead through such a business transformation with grace, respect and consideration to its long-term success with people in it.

No company can be lasting without a cultivated winning culture with its people playing the essential roles. Without a proper culture in place, no matter how lean a company can be, it will not guarantee its survival from the next wave.

Forbes magazine published another article by Eric Jackson on “The Ten Life Lessons From Steve Jobs We Should Never Forget”.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2013/01/22/the-ten-life-lessons-from-steve-jobs-we-should-never-forget/print/

It’s amazingly refreshing to notice the 2nd lesson: Don’t tolerate bozos around you. Here is the paragraph:

“Throughout his life, Steve had a great “bozo” detector. He did a super job of not letting bozos proliferate at his companies. He weeded them out if they were there – until they weren’t. You’ll never be perfect at it and neither was Steve but the key thing is that bozos sap energy from you and the best people in the company working with you. Bozos make bozo decisions. Bozos hire worse bozos beneath them. Stamp them out. Don’t let them take root around you.”

For any truly competent people, we can’t agree more on this truth, but very few in our current society besides Steve Jobs had called it out. Don’t we just tolerate bozos a lot more nowadays in the names of team work, collaboration or simply being pleasant?

For company leaders, especially those top leaders who want to bring a business from good to great, Steve’s bozo theory is super important to remember and an effective detector can be essential for success.

However in consulting industry, diplomacy and pleasing personalities are often the necessity to the extent that it could be both the short-term winning card and the long-term poison. Leaders in consulting need to be mindful about how they play the cards to win business and at the same time to stay true to oneself and to the principals. The establishment of a truthful competent image of the company and its people will be forever lasting no matter for providing products or services.