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Three Crucial Lessons Steve Jobs Taught Guy Kawasaki About Leadership And Communication

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Gallo Communications Group

Guy Kawasaki has so many memories of Steve Jobs, a memory card in my video camera ran out of room to store them all. Fortunately, I had a second one because I had a lot of ground to cover with the bestselling author of 15 books and former Apple Macintosh evangelist.

“In many ways, I am who I am and where I am because of Steve Jobs and Apple,” Kawasaki told me during an interview at his house in Silicon Valley.

In Kawasaki’s new book, Wise Guy, he tells stories from his two tours of duty at Apple and other adventures he’s had as an evangelist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist and high-tech CEO. Each story is accompanied by powerful lessons that continue to guide his professional life.

While there are many lessons Kawasaki learned from his most influential boss, Steve Jobs, we focused on three crucial lessons that relate to leadership and communication.

1). Customers tell you what they want, but not what they need. Although your customers will candidly tell you what they want from your current product or service, they cannot show how to revolutionize a product or category, says Kawasaki. “If you asked an Apple customer in the mid-eighties what they wanted, they would have said a better, faster and cheaper Apple II. No one would have asked for a Mac.”

Innovation, according to Kawasaki, happens on the next curve. A slight improvement to an existing product doesn’t qualify as an innovation. In order to make the leap to the next curve, an entrepreneur often has to set aside the pessimists and the critics. In Wise Guy Kawasaki writes, “Innovators ignore naysayers to get the job done. The ‘experts’ told Steve Jobs he was wrong many times: Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, and Apple retail stores, for example. It’s not that Steve was always right, but sometimes you need to believe in something in order to see it.”

Kawasaki’s advice is to focus on the purpose of your company, not the product. For example, Kodak was in the business of preserving memories—not applying chemical to film. As a result of focusing on the product and not the purpose, Kodak missed the innovation curve to digital. “If you worked at Kodak and you asked customers what they wanted, they would have said ‘faster film with deeper colors.’ Nobody would have told Kodak to stop using film and go digital,” says Kawasaki. “The great irony is that, in 1975, Kodak invented digital photography.”

2). Use stories, not adjectives. “Tell stories. Always tell stories,” Guy Kawasaki says. “Stories are ten times more powerful than adjectives.”

By  "adjectives," Kawasaki means the empty jargon and buzzwords that are commonly heard in pitches and business presentations. “I was a venture capitalist and nearly every entrepreneur who pitched me said: I have a patent-pending, curve-jumping, highly-scalable, enterprise-class product. Unless you're saying something different from the competition, you're basically saying nothing.”

A story is different. It’s about two guys in a garage who grew frustrated with computers that were too expensive or inaccessible to the average person. They decided to make a smaller and cheaper computer they could afford. They called their company Apple. That’s a story.

A story convinced Kawasaki to be Canva’s chief evangelist. Four years ago, the co-author of one of Kawasaki’s books posted a graphic on social media that she had created using Canva, a digital design tool. The company’s co-founders contacted Kawasaki. He agreed to meet with them.

Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht gave Kawasaki a demonstration of the product. He liked the company’s simple mission—to democratize design. He also liked the story, which he writes about in his book: “Perkins was an instructor at the University of Western Australia and noticed that Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop were too hard to learn and too expensive to buy.” Within a few weeks, Kawasaki had agreed to be Canva's chief evangelist. Today’s the company is valued at $1 billion. Great stories are emotional, memorable and catch attention in a noisy digital world.

3). Selling is a crucial skill. Kawasaki and I both agree that public-speaking and communication skills are crucial for everyone to develop if they wish to stand out and get ahead professionally. “It’s an essential skill, and the higher you go, the more important it is,” says Kawasaki. “How else do you change the world, dent the universe, influence and persuade, and change people's hearts minds and actions?”

Kawasaki says there are two fundamental skills—making and selling. “If you’re a great maker—like Steve Wozniak—partner with a great seller—like Steve Jobs. If you can sell, find a maker because you can’t sell what you can’t make.”

Whether it’s evangelizing a product, raising capital or recruiting employees, selling is an “analog skill that’s valuable in the tech world,” according to Kawasaki. Selling and speaking are fundamental skills and Kawasaki has succeeded at both.

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