Archives: July 2010

Why You Can’t Work at Work

Jason Fried, co-founder and President of 37signals, recently shared his thoughts on why it is so difficult to actually get work done at work.  In this clip Fried makes the case that interruptions plague many offices and create an environment where it is difficult to actually get work done. He believes many people work on weekends and outside the office, primarily because it is impossible to accomplish work in the modern office setting.

What do you think?

[via Big Think]

MarketingExperiments Research Journal [Q2 2010]

MarketingExperiments, a research group that focuses on optimizing sales and marketing processes, has just released their Quarterly Research Journal for the second quarter of 2010. The researchers at MarketingExperiements take a scientific approach to sales and marketing by conducting measured tests of user interaction, social media, landing page effectiveness, and more.

The Q2 2010 Research Journal contains 131-pages of valuable data including 4 research articles featuring 12 experiments, 21 “how-to” articles, actionable lead generation advice, and social media guidance. The best part is that you can get your free PDF (4.87 MB) copy by clicking here.

[via MarketingExperiements]

Lessons from Steve Jobs @ D8

A couple of weeks Steve Jobs, co-founder & CEO of Apple Inc., was interviewed at the D8 Conference. In addition to talking about the current state of Apple products, he also shared some incredible insight into the best practices and philosophy by which he runs his business.

The complete video presentation is available through Apple by click here. Below are some of the key quotes and lessons Jobs shared during his time at D8. I also provided the time reference for each quote should you want to experience it yourself. Enjoy.

“Apple is a company that doesn’t have the most resources of everybody in the world. And the way we’ve succeeded is by choosing what horses to ride, really carefully, technically. We try to look for these technical vectors that have a future and that are headed up. Technology, different pieces of technology, kind of go in cycles, they have their springs, and summers, and autumns, and then they go to the graveyard of technology. So we try to pick things that are in their springs, and if you choose wisely, you can save yourself an enormous amount of work versus trying to do everything. And you can  really put energy into making those new, emerging technologies, be great on your platform, rather than just okay because your spreading yourself too thin.” [00:03:43]

“Things are packages of emphasis. Some things are emphasized in a product, some things are not done as well in a product, some things are chosen not to be done at all in a product. And so, different people make different choices. If the market tells us that we’re making the wrong choices, we listen to the market. We’re just people running this company. We’re trying to make great products for people. And so we have at least the courage of our convictions to say, ‘We don’t think this is what makes a great product, we’re going leave it out.’ Some people are gonna not like that, their gonna to call us names. It is not going to be in certain companies’ vested interest that we do that, but we’re going to take the heat because we want to make the best product in the world for customers. We’re going to instead focus our energy on these technologies which we think are in their accendency, and we think are going to be the right tecnhologies for customers. And you know what, they’re paying us to make those choices. That is what a lot of customers pay us to do, is to try to make the best products we can. If we suceed, they’ll buy them, and if we don’t they won’t.  And it will all work itself out.” [00:11:25]

“We want to make a better product than they [Google] do and we do, so that’s what we’re about. We’re about making better prodcuts. What I love about the consumer market that I’ve always hated about the enterprise market, is that we come up with a product, we try to tell everybody about it, and every person votes for themselves, they go ‘yes’ or ‘no’. And if enough of them say ‘yes’, we get to come to work tomorrow. That’s how it works, it’s really simple. With the Enterprise market, it’s no so simple. The people that use the products don’t decide for themselves and the people that make those decisions sometimes are confused. We love just trying to make the best products in the world for people and having them tell us by how they vote with their wallets whether we’re on track or not.” [00:27:51]

“Just because we are competing with somebody doesn’t mean we have to be rude.” [00:29:27]

“What I preach is that, I don’t know what’s going to work, but I can tell you as one of the largest sellers of content on the Internet to date, the biggest lesson Apple has learned is: price it agreesively, and go for volumen, and that has worked for us and every time we haven’t done that as much, we’ve seen more attenuated sucess.” [00:40:40]

“We used to have this saying at Apple, ‘Isn’t it funny, a ship that leaks from the top’” [00:59:14]

“Apple is an incredibly collabrative company. You know how many committes we have at Apple? Zero. We have no committes. We are organized like a startup. One person is in charge of iPhone OS software, one person is in charge of Mac hardware, one person is in charge of iPhone hardware enginering, another person is in charge of worldwide marketing, another person is in charge of operations. We’re organized like a startup; the biggest startup on the planet. We all meet for 3-hours once a week and we all talk about eveyrthing we’re doing, the whole business. There is tremendous teamwork at the top of the company, which filters down to tremedous teamwork throughout the company. Teamwork is dependednt on trusting the other folks to come through with their part, without watching them all the time, but trusting that their going to come through with their parts. And that what we do really well and we’re great at figuring at how to divide things up into these great teams that we have and all work on the same thing, touch bases frequently, and bring it all together into a product. We do that really well.” [01:00:02]

“If you want to hire great people and have them stay working for you, you have to let them make a lot of decisions and you have to be run by ideas; not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win, otherwise good people don’t stay.” [01:02:01]

“The worst thing that could possibly happen as we get big and we get a little more influence in the world, is if we change our core values and start letting it slide. I can’t do that. I’d rather quit.” [01:03:35]