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Great Ted - Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action


Myth465

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meh.  Wasn't all that impressed, too touchy feely.  Especially when it comes to Apple. He claims that every other company could do or could have done what Apple does; that's baloney.  There was a famous decision that Jobs made when he first came back.  Jobs said that basically Apple was the only company that built the entire widget any more.  Everyone was claiming that was a huge disadvantage but he said that was Apple's key advantage.  The rest is history.  Since they do the design, the software, the hardware etc, they had a huge advantage over everyone else.  No other company did or does that.  To claim that Apple succeeded because they focused on "why" vs 'what' or 'how' is a huge simplification and inaccurate.  It was more about the fact that they focused on their key advantage and grew it even more, by entering into new markets and by creating an even stronger vertical (opening the Apple stores).

 

The Tivo thing was less than convincing.  Tivo didn't fail because it didn't advertise right, it failed because there was no moat.  Apple has so far failed in TV.  Jobs ironically spoke about why TV is such a tough area to get into recently.

 

On the other hand it was only about 20 minutes, maybe he has something more substantive to back up his claims, it seemed like a lot of hand waving with no evidence to back it up...

 

IMHO.

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From a business perspective I can see where you are coming from, though I think he was right about Apple and Tivo. There are better products then Apple but Apple sold the Ipod the best way inmo. That got them in the door.

 

I thought it was most interesting in relation to passion (Wright Bros) and more importantly politics / mass movements - Obama did the same thing as King, instead of staying I have a plan, he said yes we can. Its very interesting inmo and can be useful when it comes to getting buy in.

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From a business perspective I can see where you are coming from, though I think he was right about Apple and Tivo. There are better products then Apple but Apple sold the Ipod the best way inmo. That got them in the door.

 

I thought it was most interesting in relation to passion (Wright Bros) and more importantly politics / mass movements - Obama did the same thing as King, instead of staying I have a plan, he said yes we can. Its very interesting inmo and can be useful when it comes to getting buy in.

 

There were better mp3 players than the iPod in terms of features, sure.  In terms of usability and design?  Nope.  Polish matters, and it's not easy. While I vastly preferred some of the other mp3 players available at the time (shout out to the empeg team), they were too complicated for most people to use.  There's a place for geek oriented products, but sometimes the hard part of design is knowing what to leave out.

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advantage.  The rest is history.  Since they do the design, the software, the hardware etc, they had a huge advantage over everyone else.  No other company did or does that.  To claim that Apple succeeded because they focused on "why" vs 'what' or 'how' is a huge simplification and inaccurate.  It was more about the fact that they focused on their key advantage and grew it even more, by entering into new markets and by creating an even stronger vertical (opening the Apple stores).

 

To be accurate, it's important to note there are things that Apple used to do which they don't do anymore, like the actual Manufacturing. It's not quite as simple as "do it all".

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