Part Two: Rules Of Thumb for the 21st Century

Study Apple. There is a company that has broken the mould. Stayed true, thought beyond the traditional to revolutionize all around it. In a recent Fast Company article they explained the 10 reasons for the success: 

1. Magic doesn't happen in an echo chamber. Don't listen to the peer group, that's not what's going to make the difference. Create your own thinking space, your own lab and make that a real world.
2. It's okay to be king. It's important that someone just decides how different its going to be. Get all the planned, prepared, complex stuff out of the way. Clean, simple decisive. Do it.
3. Transcend Orthodoxy as long as it makes sense. Believe it or not there is a huge raging battle about the closed or open nature of iTunes. Who gives a crap its a great platform, it works its easy. It will change. Get over it. Its served a tremendous purpose already. In the beginning everyone who could shout said it wouldn't work. Now who's smiling?
4. The default answer is no. Being a filter for what shouldn't be done is miles more important than what could be done. Easy to add more features when the one or two really important ones are already there but then they get clouded. The focus goes fuzzy. The customers get confused. Think about that.
5. Serve your customer. No, really. Imagine a free repair service on site, no matter what the question no matter where you bought the product, no matter how long it might take. Right there - right now. Doh. How many other services do that? Not many right. That's the aptly named iGenius. I’ve just been. It really works.
6. Apple is Religion. Everything is Marketing. The brand is so powerful and the range so thoroughly designed and beautiful. Each product has its 'thing' the buds on the earphones, the start up sound, the logo that lights up on the back. As long as they can think beyond the great thing we will mostly stay hooked. It needs to stay insanely good in the 21st Century.
7. Kill the past. Looking at Apples patents filings you can see 3D computing, large scale touch and projection screens, desk free computing - why are we surprised? Well we aren't. Its killed previous versions of operating systems, the floppy disk and many other things. It isn't always right bit it makes for always embracing what's next, not what's gone.
8. Turn Feedback Into Inspiration. Don't ignore customers requirements but don't be slaves to them either. They don't actually know what's possible but they will be a great guide. That guidance is the best of all worlds as long as you know how to stay ahead and still perform the alchemy.
9. Don't Invent. Reinvent. Apples speciality is the remix. It takes multiple and threaded ideas and does a stunning job of jazzing with them into a wholly new category or 'type'. It avoids the linear step change and makes the leap radical. Total rethink completely dismisses the inbuilt barriers, the embedded layers of what's stopped earlier revolutions. Think differently. Change the paradigm. Delight the world.
10. Play by Your Own Clock. Create the long plan. Easy when you are Apple. They have achieved the enviable position of being able to write the roadmap. Each wave of product learning from the last but now creating the platform for the next launches. We don't know what that me be just now but we can see the clues in every product, every platform. It just gets better and better. 

More on the next post...

Posted via email from Just Thinking!