Apple - Sucessful Internet related company story

In December 1974, the magazine ‘Popular Electronics’ pictured the Altair 8080 on its cover, headlined ‘World’s First Microcomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models.’ But it was left to the consumer to actually put the kit together, get it working and write the software! The private computer market was about to take off. The magazine article was the spur which led to the founding of Microsoft, after Bill Gates struck a deal with Altair manufactures Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems to produce software for the Altair.

The birth of Apple
The magazine also caught the eye of Steve Wozniak who at the time worked for Hewlett Packard, producing calculators. Wozniak spent his spare time playing with early computer kits similar to the Altair and considered them all too complicated for hobby computer freaks. He also realized that computer parts such as microprocessors and memory chips had fallen in price to such an extent that building his own computer was no longer a mere dream – it was now within financial reach. He got together with fellow computer buff Steve Jobs. On 1 April 1976 they released the Apple I computer and launched Apple Computers in Los Altos, California together with another friend Ronald Wayne, who dropped out a few months later.

Apple I was displayed at a meeting of “The Homebrew Computer Club” – a computer hobby group to which Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs belonged. A local dealer ordered 100 Apple I computers with the proviso that Wozniak and Jobs would do the assembly – to which they agreed. They built and sold around 200.

In April 1977, the Apple II was released and shown at the first West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco. Apple Computers were firmly established, quickly pulling ahead of two other PCs launched that year – the TRS-80 and Commodore PET. Although more expensive, the Apple had the advantage of colour graphics and a floppy disk drive. Over two million Apple IIs were sold.

When Apple went public in 1980, its stock value was $117 million.

Jobs goes
In May 1980, the Apple III was launched as the company competed against IBM and Microsoft, who gained a considerable share of the computer market in the early 1980s.

In 1984, Apple launched the Macintosh or Mac as it became widely known, with a $1.5 million commercial shown during the Super Bowl XVIII. Sales at first went well but repeat orders were poor. However, sales quickly picked up after the introduction of the LaserWriter printer. With this, the PageMaker programme and advanced graphics, the Mac got a firm footing in the world of desktop publishing.
In 1985, Jobs resigned from the company following an internal power struggle which he lost. Jobs founded NeXT Inc. Steve Wozniak also left Apple to pursue other interests but remains a major shareholder.
In 1989, the portable Macintosh computer was released, but its bulk meant that Apple had to rapidly rethink the design. With the input from industrial designers including Sony, in 1991 they came up with the PowerBook 100 – the forerunner of today’s laptop. During these years, Apple’s technological innovations made its products market leaders.

Jobs returns
But Microsoft was not sleeping and Windows development began to overtake the Apple Macintosh - to the extent that Apple sued Microsoft for theft of intellectual property. The case dragged on for years before being finally thrown out of court. At this time Apple’s management was in chaos and various product flops caused the public to lose faith. Apple continued to lose ground to Microsoft Windows.
In the mid-1990s, Apple teamed up with IBM and Motorola in an attempt to counteract Microsoft’s advance. The Power Macintosh was released in 1994 using IBM and Motorola hardware and Apple software. But through the mid to late 1990s, the various attempt at improving Apple’s operating systems seemed to go awry. Apple considered using various operating systems including Microsoft’s Windows NT and NeXT’s NeXTSTEP OS. The latter was finally chosen, bringing Steve Jobs back to Apple. In July 1997, CEO Gil Amelio was fired after considerable financial losses, Steve Jobs took over as interim CEO and restructuring began.

Back in the black
In 1998, just one year later, the iMac computer was introduced. A new all-in-one Macintosh aimed at a general market, featuring an innovative new design with a translucent plastic case, initially in Bondi Blue and white and later in other colours. It was a huge success, selling 800,000 pieces and bringing in a $309 million profit in that year - the first profitable year for five years. The Power Macintosh was redesigned along similar lines and its development continues.

In May 2001, Apple opened Apple retail outlets in prime locations in the U.S.A, to have a more direct influence on the market and thus increase sales. Apple continued to be innovative. In November 2001, it introduced the iPod portable digital audio player, with sales of over 42 million and Apple’s iTunes Music Store offering online music downloads at 99 US cents. By early 2006, 1 billion downloads had been chalked up.

In June 2005, Steve Jobs announced that Apple was to produce Intel-based Macs. The MacBook Pro notebook computer and a new iMac were released in January 2006, both with Intel’s Core Duo chip technology. The Intel chip allows the latest computers to run the Windows operating system.

It is clear that Apple, with Steve Jobs at the helm, will continue to be innovative and keep many customers who are totally devoted to the brand.

There is no doubt that Apple is a computer cult.

***

Stephen Wozniak was born on 11 August 1950 in Los Gatos, California, where his father was a Lockheed engineer. The area, now known as Silicone Valley, was then already a centre for technology.

Inspired by his father, Steve “Woz” Wozniak was into electronics from a very early age and constructed various devices from kits or from scratch, including a voltmeter, ham radio, calculator and games. After leaving high school he went to the University of Colorado but quickly dropped out. While working for Hewlett-Packard producing calculators he met Steve Jobs, another computer hobbyist obsessed by electronics. They joined forces to found Apple Computers.

Although Steve Wozniak made a fortune, it was the technical aspect of the business which fascinated him. In 1981, a plane he was piloting crashed on the runway and it took two years for him to recover from his injuries and amnesia. During that time he became involved in other ventures, sponsoring concerts and pursuing New Age interests. In 1983 he returned to Apple, but left for good in 1985. He then attended Berkley University, where he earned his bachelor's degree in computer science and electrical engineering. In 1985, the two Steves, Wozniak and Jobs, received the National Technology Award from President Reagan.

Steve Wozniak started various other businesses and donated considerable sums to charitable causes, his local school in Los Gatos, technology museums, and universities. In 2005, he received an honorary Doctor of Engineering degree from Kettering University in Flint, Michigan.

He now once more lives in Los Gatos, California with his wife and six children.

***

Steve Paul Jobs was born on 24 February 1955 in San Francisco, California to an American mother and a Syrian father. They later married and gave birth to Job’s sister, novelist Mona Simpson, whom he first met as an adult. Steve Jobs was raised by adoptive parents, Paul and Clara Jobs, first in Mountain View and then in Los Altos, California. His adoptive father was a machinist at Spectra-Physics, and Steve’s early interest in technology was inspired by his father's work.

During his schooldays, Steve Jobs attended after-school lectures at Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto, California. He also worked there as a summer employee with Steve Wozniak, with whom he later founded Apple Computers. After graduating from high school, Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, but dropped out after just one semester.

He went back to California and in 1974 joined the Homebrew Computer Club with Steve Wozniak. He got a job with Atari, manufacturer of video games in order to save some money. He used his savings to backpack through India with Daniel Kottke, a Reed College friend, before returning to his job at Atari.

It was around this time that Jobs and Wozniak developed the Apple computer. They launched the Apple I and Apple Computers Co. on 1 April 1976.

In 1985, Jobs resigned from the company following an internal power struggle. Jobs founded NeXT Inc. Steve Wozniak also left Apple to pursue other interests but remains a major shareholder.

But in 1997, following considerable financial losses by Apple, Steve Jobs once again took over the helm of Apple and today is as innovative as ever.

Steve Jobs is married to Laurene Powell and the couple have three children. Steve Jobs also has a daughter from an earlier relationship.

Ebay- Sucessful Internet related company story

The story goes that founder Pierre Omidyar wanted to call it Echo Bay, but the name had already been registered by a Canadian company mining for gold in Nevada. So Pierre Omidyar chose eBay.

The Mac days
Pierre Omidyar is the founder of eBay. He was born in Paris in 1967, the only child in a French-Iranian family. At the age of six, the family emigrated to the United States and he grew up in and around Washington, D.C. Pierre was bitten by the computer bug at a very early age, sneaking out of the gym to teach himself on his science teachers cheap computer. He later graduated to an Apple II and got paid to computerize the school’s library catalogue.

n the mid-1980s, Pierre Omidyar went to Tufts University near Boston. His main subject was computer science and Apple programming became his obsession. Apple had become a sort of cool trendy alternative to the major computer companies. Pierre did all his work on a Macintosh from his dorm room, rather than use the PCs in the computer laboratory. He created his first Mac programmer’s utility tool for other programmers. He got a summer job as an intern in Silicon Valley with Innovative Data Design, a company which wrote image programmes for Macs. This led to a full-time job and Pierre Omidyar took the following semester off to continue working. After completing a further semester at Tufts University, he moved to the University of California-Berkeley, where he finished his degree.

A bit of business pays off
In 1991, Pierre Omidyar teamed up with a colleague to found the Ink Development Corporation producing software for pen-based computers. This was the technology which - it was thought - would replace the keyboard with a stylus. It did not! However, Ink Development had also developed some software tools for online commerce. They changed direction and re-launched as an electronic retailer – eShop.

In 1994, things weren’t moving fast enough for Pierre Omidyar and so he left eShop. He kept a fair- sized stake in the company and when it was bought by Microsoft two years later, became a millionaire before the age of 30.

A story
As legend has it, in summer 1995 Pierre Omidyar was dining with his fiancée, Pam Wesley, when she mentioned that she was having problems finding PEZ collectors with whom to trade. PEZ, originally breath-freshener mints (later fruit-flavoured sweets) in dispensers with character heads, had become collectors’ items. This, so the story goes, gave Pierre the eBay idea. But actually it is not true. The fact is that Pierre Omidyar was following all other computer freaks in trying to find a use for the Internet.

The dawning
Though Pierre Omidyar had never been to an auction in his life, he believed that an auction could be an interesting marketing tool. Place an advert giving a minimum price and if several people show an interest - why not let them bid?
At the time, Pierre Omidyar was employed by a company called General Magic and so had to do his programming in his spare time. Over a long weekend, he created an auction web site. It didn’t look very appealing, nor did he have a clue as to what the public might want to auction. He just created various categories: antiques, books, comics, computer items, electronics……. and called the site AuctionWeb. At the beginning the site was free and slowly began to attract visitors.

Traffic on AuctionWeb steadily increased through the autumn of 1995 and by the end of that year AuctionWeb had hosted thousands of auctions with over ten thousand bids.

Time to cash in
In 1996, Pierre Omidyar decided to start charging sellers a percentage of the final sale price. He had no idea whether it would be accepted or not, but soon the cash and cheques came rolling in. AuctionWeb was one of the few to make a profit right from the start. By June, revenues had doubled for the fourth consecutive month, reaching $10,000. Pierre Omidyar’s hobby had become a business. He left General Magic and hired his first part-time employee, Chris Agarpao.
It’s said that at this time, the staff sat around on folding chairs and DIY style desks were delivered in cardboard boxes to be screwed together by the employees. It is also said that there was only one single telephone and the staff were not allowed to answer it. Anyway, the number was kept secret because Pierre Omidyar wanted to keep costs to a minimum. The intention was that any customer with a query should send an e-mail.
By August, AuctionWeb was so successful that it was joined by Jeff Skoll, a go-getting entrepreneur who had done some consulting work for AuctionWeb. Pierre Omidyar believed that Jeff Skoll was the man to develop and drive the business. Around this time, the laidback dot.com types were faced by men-in- suits with economic degrees, who had the task of making money while the more relaxed Omidyar tended the AuctionWeb web site and community.

In 1998 eBay as it was now called, was launched on the stock exchange. Although the launch was very successful Odymar was not particularly satisfied. He had envisaged an auction in typical eBay style with the eBay community having a bite of the cherry, but Wall Street and the American stock exchange laws saw it differently.

But in 1999, the casual approach almost brought ruin. Technology had been neglected and on 10 July, the whole computer system crashed and stayed down for 22 hours. Without backup! Luckily the company weathered the storm, got the system back up and running and very quickly invested millions in state-of-the-art technology.


A few years later
Today it’s clear that Pierre Omidyar’s perception has paid off. He quite simply believes that the human race is basically good. At the beginning, many prophesied that it could not work – complete strangers dealing with complete strangers. But it is now obvious that it does. He also believes that the Internet community should remain the central philosophy, fearing a steady commercial takeover. But some things have changed. Pierre Omidyar never wanted advertising on the web site. However, these days eBay is one of the favourite sites for banner advertising. Now known as eBay, the San Jose-based company has become the largest person-to-person online trading community. eBay used the web to create a totally new market in the form of an auction. It now has over 1,000 categories and bids are placed at the rate of over 600 per minute. It is said that over 250,000 items are added daily and that it has sold over 45 million items since its conception in 1995. The site has about 50 million registered users and employs a staff of over 2,500.

One of the most expensive items to be sold (as yet) was a Gulfstream II jet for $4.9 million! Despite his wealth - he is now a multibillionaire - Pierre Omidyar remains a modest man. In 2004 he was still driving around in a beat-up VW convertible.

Amazon - Sucessful Internet related company story

The early days
In summer 1994, former investment banker Jeff Bezos left New York for Seattle, Washington to create an online bookstore. The web site was launched in July 1995 to sell books through the Internet. These were the early days of Internet and the web site was unattractive. However it worked quite well despite a lack of key information such as publication dates. And Tom Alberg from the Madrona Venture Group was impressed enough to invest $100,000 in Amazon in 1995.

Amazon quickly became more than an online bookstore. It soon became a community in which customers could create book reviews online and research others before buying. It became not just a case of buying books but also of sharing opinions.

Rapid growth
In 1996, its first full financial year in business, Amazon generated $15.7 million in sales. In May 1997, Amazon.com raised £54 million in an initial public offering as it launched itself on the stock market. In October 1997 Jeff Bezos himself hand-delivered Amazon’s 1-millionth order to a customer in Japan.

One year after its stock market launch, Amazon added music CDs and videos to its web site. It then followed up with five more product categories – electronics, software, toys, video games and home improvements.

This was growth at absolutely breakneck speed and many onlookers thought that the rapid growth policy would indeed “break their necks”. But early investors, such as Nick Hanauer, were convinced that Amazon would make a profit. However, profits didn’t come quite so quickly. Instead Amazon grew at express speed and profits were waived for the sake of growth to make it impossible for others to duplicate their achievement. It’s said that Hanauer’s initial $40,000 investment was at one time valued at $250 million. Hanauer apparently still keeps an old T-shirt from Amazon’s early days that reads: "Eat another hot dog, get big fast!"

The end of 1999 saw annual sales reach $1.6 billion and on 10 December, Amazon’s stock closed at an all-time high of $106.69. And in the same month, Time Magazine named Bezos "Person of the Year," calling him the "King of Cybercommerce."

But just one month later, the “King's” crown slipped badly.

Amazon.toast
Amazon fired 150 workers as part of a reorganization plan. Five days later, they reported a loss of $323 million for the fourth quarter, but promised lower losses in future. But the subsequent fourth quarter saw losses exceed that amount by more than $200 million.
By the summer of 2000, Amazon's share price had dropped by almost 70% and analysts began to criticize the company for venturing into too many products and spreading itself too thinly. Speculation on Wall Street suggested that Amazon would file for bankruptcy or be bought out. Some even clearly warned investors to avoid buying Amazon stocks. Gloom and doom mongers gave the company various labels such as Amazon.toast or Amazon.bomb as the collapse of the world’s largest e-tailer was predicted. In early 2001, when Amazon reported a huge fiscal loss of $1.4 billion - the company's worst-ever annual performance - Jeff Bezos finally came up with an answer.

Changing focus
In January 2001, the company’s chief executive promised a profit by the year-end. But expenses had to be cut and the business restructured. 1,300 workers (about 15 percent of its work force) were laid off. Two warehouses and a Seattle customer-service centre closed. Jeff Bezos gave orders to get rid of “crap” and cease selling unprofitable products. The company concentrated on streamlining its storage, packaging and delivery operation. It boosted its online offer by becoming an online shopping portal, offering and selling products from companies such as Toys ”R” Us and Target. It also competed with eBay through Amazon Auctions.

By the end of 2001, Jeff Bezos had kept his word. Amazon reported its first profit with fourth-quarter earnings of $5 million. It was clear that one quarter of profits would not be enough but since then profits have steadily improved. This was only achieved by continuously pushing sales and increasing business efficiency and also expanding the products offered on the web site.

10 years on
Nearly 10 years on and Jeff Bezos’ name remains synonymous with the company. Hanauer, who describes his long-time friend as “the smartest man in the world” is pretty sure that Jeff Bezos will head Amazon for some time to come. "He remains as single-mindedly focused on Amazon now as he ever was” says Hanauer. Amazon has survived and is also making a profit - a fact that many analysts and observers doubted would ever happen. The company has grown into a multibillion-dollar business and is now not only the undisputed leader of Internet commerce but also reaping a profit. Its community of almost 40 million customers will help it retain its market lead.

Becoming a Master of Persuasion

Persuasion power can help you get more of the things you want faster than anything else you do. It can mean the difference between success and failure. It can guarantee your progress and enable you to use all of your other skills and abilities at the very highest level. Your persuasion power will earn you the support and respect of your customers, bosses, coworkers, colleagues and friends. The ability to persuade others to do what you want them to do can make you one of the most important people in your community.

Fortunately, persuasion is a skill, like riding a bicycle, that you can learn through study and practice. Your job is to become absolutely excellent at influencing and motivating others to support and assist you in achieving your goals and solving your problems.

You can either persuade others to help you or be persuaded to help them. It is one or the other. Most people are not aware that every human interaction involves a complex process of persuasion and influence. And being unaware, they are usually the ones being persuaded to help others rather than the ones who are doing the persuading.

Persuasion Through Motivation
The key to persuasion is motivation. Every human action is motivated by something. Your job is to find out what motivates other people and then to provide that motivation. People have two major motivations: the desire for gain and the fear of loss.

The desire for gainmotivates people to want more of the things they value in life. They want more money, more success, more health, more influence, more respect, more love and more happiness. Human wants are limited only by individual imagination. No matter how much a person has, he or she still wants more and more. When you can show people how they can get more of the things they want by helping you achieve your goals, you can motivate them to act in your behalf.

President Eisenhower once said, "Persuasion is the art of getting people to do what you want them to do, and to like it." You always need to be thinking about how you can get people to want to do the things that you need them to do to attain your objectives.

People are also motivated to act by the fear of loss. This fear, in all its various forms, is often stronger than the desire for gain. People fear financial loss, loss of health, anger or disapproval of others, loss of love and the loss of anything they have worked hard to accomplish. They fear change, risk and uncertainty because these threaten them with potential losses.

Whenever you can show a person that they can avoid a loss of some kind by doing what you want them to do, you can influence them to take a particular action. The very best appeals are those where you offer an opportunity to gain and an opportunity to avoid loss at the same time.

Getting What You Want
There are two ways to get the things you want in life. First, you can work by yourself and for yourself in your own best interest. You can be a "Robinson Crusoe" of modern life, relying on yourself for the satisfaction of your needs. By doing this, you can accomplish a little, but not a lot. The person who looks to himself or herself completely is limited in his or her capacities. He or she will never be rich or successful.

The second way to get the things you want is by gaining and using leverage. Leverage allows you to multiply yourself and get far more out of the hours you put in rather than doing everything yourself.

There are three forms of leverage you must develop to fulfill your full potential in our society: other people's efforts, other people's knowledge, and other people's money.

1. You leverage yourself through other people's efforts by getting other people to work with you and for you in the accomplishment of your objectives. Sometimes you can ask them to help you voluntarily, although people won't work for very long without some personal reward. At other times you can hire them to help you, thereby freeing you up to do higher-value work.

One of the most important laws of economics is called "Ricardo's Law." It is also called the Law of Comparative Advantage. This law states that when someone can accomplish a part of your task at a lower hourly rate than you would earn for accomplishing more valuable parts of your task, you should delegate or outsource that part of the task.

For example, if you want to earn $100,000 a year, in a 250-day year, you need to make $50 per hour. That means you must be doing work that is worth $50 per hour, eight hours per day, 250 days per year. Therefore, if there is any part of your work--like making photocopies, filing information, typing letters or filling out expense forms--that is not valued at $50 per hour, you should stop doing it. You should persuade someone else who works at a lower hourly rate to do it for you. The more lower level tasks you can persuade others to do, the more time you will have to do tasks that pay you more. This is one of the essential keys to getting the leverage you need to become one of the higher paid people in your profession.

Management can be defined as "getting things done through others." To be a manager you must be an expert at persuading and influencing others to work in a common direction. This is why all excellent managers are also excellent low-pressure salespeople. They do not order people to do things; instead, they persuade them to accept certain responsibilities, with specific deadlines and agreed-upon standards of performance. When a person has been persuaded that he or she has a vested interest in doing a job well, he or she accepts ownership of the job and the result. Once a person accepts ownership and responsibility, the manager can step aside confidently, knowing the job will be done on schedule.

In every part of your life, you have a choice of either doing it yourself or delegating it to others. Your ability to get someone else to take on the job with the same enthusiasm that you would have is an exercise in personal persuasion. It may seem to take a little longer at the beginning, but it saves you an enormous amount of time completing the task.

2. The second form of leverage that you must develop for success is other people's knowledge. You must be able to tap into the brain power of many other people if you want to accomplish worthwhile goals. Successful people are not those who know everything needed to accomplish a particular task, but more often than not, they are people who know how to find the knowledge they need.

What is the knowledge that you need to achieve your most important goals? Of the knowledge required, what knowledge must you have personally in order to control your situation, and what knowledge can you borrow, buy or rent from others?

It has been said that, in our information-based society, you are never more than one book or two phone calls away from any piece of knowledge in the country. With online computer services that access huge data bases all over the country, you can usually get the precise information you require in a few minutes by using a computer. Whenever you need information and expertise from another person in order to achieve your goals, the very best way to persuade them to help you is to ask them for their assistance.

Almost everyone who is knowledgeable in a particular area is proud of their accomplishments. By asking a person for their expert advice, you compliment them and motivate them to want to help you. So don't be afraid to ask, even if you don't know the individual personally.

3. The third key to leverage, which is very much based on your persuasive abilities, is other people's money. Your ability to use other people's money and resources to leverage your talents is the key to financial success. Your ability to buy and defer payment; to sell and collect payment in advance; to borrow, rent or lease furniture, fixtures and machinery; and to borrow money from people to help you multiply your opportunities is one of the most important of all skills that you can develop. And these all depend on your ability to persuade others to cooperate with you financially so that you can develop the leverage you need to move onward and upward in your field.

The Four "P"s
There are four "P"s that will enhance your ability to persuade others in both your work and personal life. They are power, positioning, performance and politeness. And they are all based on perception.

The first "P" is power. The more power and influence that a person perceives you have, whether real or not, the more likely it is that that person will be persuaded by you to do the things you want them to do. For example, if you appear to be a senior executive, or a wealthy person, people will be much more likely to help you and serve you than they would be if you were perceived to be a lower level employee.

The second "P" is positioning. This refers to the way that other people think about you and talk about you when you are not there. Your positioning in the mind and heart of other people largely determines how open they are to being influenced by you.

In everything you do involving other people, you are shaping and influencing their perceptions of you and your positioning in their minds. Think about how you could change the things you say and do so that people think about you in such a way that they are more open to your requests and to helping you achieve your goals.

The third "P" is performance. This refers to your level of competence and expertise in your area. A person who is highly respected for his or her ability to get results is far more persuasive and influential than a person who only does an average job.

The perception that people have of your performance capabilities exerts an inordinate influence on how they think and feel about you. You should commit yourself to being the very best in your field. Sometimes, a reputation for being excellent at what you do can be so powerful that it alone can make you an extremely persuasive individual in all of your interactions with the people around you. They will accept your advice, be open to your influence and agree with your requests.

The fourth "P" of persuasion power is politeness. People do things for two reasons, because they want to and because they have to. When you treat people with kindness, courtesy and respect, you make them want to do things for you. They are motivated to go out of their way to help you solve your problems and accomplish your goals. Being nice to other people satisfies one of the deepest of all subconscious needs--the need to feel important and respected. Whenever you convey this to another person in your conversation, your attitude and your treatment of that person, he or she will be wide open to being persuaded and influenced by you in almost anything you need.

Again, perception is everything. The perception of an individual is his or her reality. People act on the basis of their perceptions of you. If you change their perceptions, you change the way they think and feel about you, and you change the things that they will do for you.

You can become an expert at personal persuasion. You can develop your personal power by always remembering that there are only two ways to get the things you want in life: You can do it all yourself, or you can get most of it done by others. Your ability to communicate, persuade, negotiate, influence, delegate and interact effectively with other people will enable you to develop leverage using other people's efforts, other people's knowledge and other people's money. The development of your persuasion power will enable you to become one of the most powerful and influential people in your organization. It will open up doors for you in every area of your life.

Brian Tracy is the most-listened-to audio author on personal and business success in the world. His talks and seminars on leadership, sales, managerial effectiveness and business strategy provide people with proven ideas and strategies that they can implement immediately for improved results. For more information, visit BrianTracy.com.

Management Secrets of Idea-Friendly Companies

by Brian Libby

New ideas are the lifeblood of many industries, yet dropping everything to pursue any faint glimmer of genius is no way to run a business. How do smart companies balance the two? By setting up standard procedures for collecting and evaluating good ideas, no matter when or where they strike. Whether it’s a company intranet, a regular meeting, or a full-time department, dedicated resources are the best way to make sure brilliant suggestions don’t slip through the cracks. These are the techniques IBM, Toyota, and Motorola use to nurture their employees’ best new ideas.

IBM

Goal:

Collaboration among many employees

Technique:

Online platform that acts as a chat room for ideas

To help connect its more than 350,000 employees around the world, IBM uses software called ThinkPlace, a sort of internal chat board and wiki. Anyone can originate an idea by posting it on ThinkPlace, and others can join in with comments, questions, or suggestions at any time. Managers can also pose questions in hopes of generating creative solutions. For example, Mary Sue Rogers, an executive in IBM’s Human Capital Management division, recently asked how the company might support an increasingly aging workforce.

In the past, new ideas were threaded through multiple layers of IBM management. Now, says Gina Poole, vice president of innovation, “There’s a focus on community-driven efforts: people connecting around the world. An idea starts in Australia and gets picked up by someone in Finland.” Today about 100,000 IBM employees use ThinkPlace to discuss ideas at varying stages of development.

ThinkPlace is also invigorated by a volunteer community of “innovation catalysts” — “IBMers with regular day jobs who are looking for ideas to champion,” as Poole puts it. “They help further ideas and get them adopted.” To select which ThinkPlace ideas and initiatives to implement, IBM has created a consortium of executives called the Ideas to Reality board. Apart from deciding which ideas to pursue, the board’s meetings (be they in person or in the virtual world) are also an opportunity to assign responsibility for new initiatives and prevent inter-departmental confusion.

For ideas that get the go-ahead, the company has a unit called Biztech which distributes the budget and expertise needed to create prototypes. Teams of five to ten employees — most of whom have other day-to-day responsibilities within the company — can spend up to 20 percent of their time working on Biztech-backed initiatives.

Toyota

Goal:

Company-wide participation in efforts to improve operational efficiency

Technique:

Alert systems and meeting templates that empower employees

Toyota has long been recognized as one of the world’s most innovative companies. Its “lean thinking” approach to manufacturing inspired now-common practices such as just-in-time production, which minimizes inventory to keep costs and depreciation down. “The environment inside Toyota’s production system is legendary,” says Tom Kelley, general manager of corporate design and innovation at Ideo. “The leadership says, ‘Show me all your ideas. You’re on the front lines, so you know this stuff better than me.’ Every time workers have an idea, they will have an audience — and they know it’s expected of them.”

Toyota’s management philosophy is based on the Japanese principle of kaizen, which means “continuous improvement.” The basic notion behind kaizen is that progress occurs one tiny step at a time, contrary to the more western notion of producing success in big, bold moves. For kaizen to work, everyone needs to have the authority to help make the company more efficient and prosperous. At Toyota, for example, every employee on the assembly line has the authority to shut the system down using the Andon — a signboard with lights, audio alarms, text, and other displays — to notify management and other workers of quality or process problems.

“The Andon comes on numerous times a day,” explains Mike Morrison, vice president of the University of Toyota, the company’s in-house managerial training facility. “Let’s say you and I are working on one part of the interior, and you detect a rattle of some kind. I stop the line and everyone in our group comes to see how we can resolve it. It’ll be written up and reported.” Such interruptions are viewed as positive, alert moves to assure quality — not as problems that make everybody wait.

The company has also made feedback from its employees a continuous part of the idea-generation process. For example, Toyota utilizes a framework at meetings called a PDCA (for “plan, do, check, act”) cycle. “It’s just a one-page document for displaying problem statements and developing the final move and the result,” Morrison says, “but it’s a useful guide that ensures you don’t skip any steps in the brainstorming process.”

Motorola

Goal:

Pursuing internal ideas in search of the next big thing

Technique:

A program that functions like a venture-capital firm inside the company

Motorola’s Early Stage Accelerator (ESA) program applies venture-capital methodology to ideas within the company. Started by Jim O’Connor in 2003, the ESA uses portfolio theory to assess in-house proposals, treating them like start-ups. “The core purpose of ESA is to save good ideas from being killed and channel them into products as fast as possible,” O’Connor says.

O’Connor identifies three stages of the program: ideation, where the ESA gathers suggestions from employees, vendors, and customers; commercialization, where promising ideas get funding and testing; and market ready, which prepares the final product for commercial release.

At a tech company like Motorola, ideation is the easy part. “Across a company of 66,000 people, 25,000 of them engineers, there are ideas just all the time,” O’Connor says. “But you can’t spend an inordinate amount of time on thousands of ideas.” The ESA studies close to 100 proposals a year. Roughly 30 of those receive funding, and only 15 of those are eventually released for sale.

O’Connor says many ideas still come from old-fashioned conversation — in meetings with customers, during engineering reviews — but like IBM, Motorola also uses a company intranet to capture new ideas. Promising suggestions are assigned to an ESA team member for evaluation, and those that prove worthy graduate to the commercialization phase, where the ESA dedicates funding, assigns a team of engineers, sets milestones, and monitors progress closely. The program also sets an aggressive timeline: the traditional tech development schedule is three or four years; the ESA averages 18 months.

O’Connor and his team use four criteria to assess each proposal: relevance to Motorola’s long-term strategy and targeted markets; projected financial return; execution risk (projects that are aligned with Motorola’s core business tend to work out better); and the previous success of the team behind it. Within each criterion, the ESA has a set of about 100 questions; senior management evaluates the proposals with a software tool called I-Growth, which generates quantitative analysis.

But qualitative assessment remains important, too. “We ask questions like, ‘What is the relevant problem we’re trying to solve?’” O’Connor says. “Sometimes in tech, the tendency is to get complicated. We could be developing a great technology that no one wants to use.”

7 Secrets to Success (Business Startup)

Ever wish you had a cheat sheet for starting a great business? Icon Brian Tracy's 7 core principles are as close to it as you can get.

By Brian Tracy

There are seven essential principles that you must practice as an entrepreneur throughout your business life if you are to achieve maximum success. They have been taught and repeated in thousands of books and articles over the years, and here they are.

1. Clarity: You must be absolutely clear on who you are and what you want. You need written goals and plans for every part of your life. As Zig Ziglar would say, you must become a “meaningful specific” rather than a “wandering generality.”

Begin with your values. What do you believe in and stand for? What is most important to you in life? What would you pay for, fight for, suffer for and die for? What do you really care about? Someone once wrote, “Until you know exactly what you would do if you only had one hour left to live, you are not prepared to live.”

What is your vision for yourself and your future? What is your vision for your family and your finances? What is your vision for your career and your company? Peter Drucker once wrote, “Even if you are starting your business on a kitchen table, you must have a vision of becoming a world leader in your field, or you will probably never be successful.”

What is your mission for your business? What is it that you want to accomplish for your customers? What is it that you want to do to improve the lives and work of the people you intend to serve with your products and services? You need a clear vision and an inspiring mission to motivate yourself and others to do the hard work necessary to achieve business success.

What is your purpose for your life and your business? Why do you get up in the morning? What is your reason for being? And here’s a great question: What do you really want to do with your life?

Finally, what are your goals? What do you want to accomplish in your financial life? What are your family goals? What are your health goals? What difference do you want to make in the lives of others? And here is the best question: What would you dare to dream if you knew you could not fail?

The greater clarity you have regarding each of these issues--values, vision, mission, purpose and goals--the greater the probability that you will accomplish something wonderful with your life.

2. Competence: To be truly successful and happy, you must be very good at what you do. You must resolve to join the top 10 percent in your field. You must make excellent performance of the business task your primary goal and then dedicate all your energies to doing quality work and offering quality products and services.

To be successful in business, according to Jim Collins, author of Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap . . . and Others Don’t, you must find a field that satisfies three requirements. First, it must be something for which you have a passion—something you really believe in and love to do. Second, it must be an area where you have the potential to be the best, to be better than 90 percent of the people in that field. Third, it must involve a product or service that can be profitable and enable you to achieve all your financial goals.

According to the Harvard Business School, the most valuable asset a company can develop is its reputation. Your reputation is defined as “how you are known to your customers.” And the most important reputation you can have revolves around the quality of the products and services you offer and the quality of the people who deliver those services and interact with those customers.

3. Constraints: Between you and your goal, whatever it is, there will always be a constraint or limiting factor. Your ability to identify the most important factor that determines the speed at which you achieve your business goals is essential to your success.

The 80/20 rule applies to constraints in your business. Fully 80 percent of the reasons that you are not achieving your goals as quickly as you want will be within yourself. Only 20 percent will be contained in external circumstances or people.

What are your constraints? What holds you back? What sets the speed at which you achieve your goals? And what one thing could you do immedi-ately to begin alleviating your main constraint? This is often the key to rapid progress.

4. Creativity: The essence of successful business is innovation. This is the ability to find faster, better, cheaper, easier ways to produce and deliver your products and services.

Fortunately, almost everyone is a “potential genius.” You have more intelligence and ability than you could ever use. Your job is to unleash this creativity and focus it, like a laser beam, on removing obstacles, solving problems and achieving your goals.

The essence of creativity is contained in your ability to solve the inevitable problems and difficulties of business life. Colin Powell said, “Leader-ship is the ability to solve problems.” Success is the ability to solve problems. And remember: A goal unachieved is merely a problem unsolved.

The way of the successful entrepreneur is to focus on the solution rather than the problem. Focus on what is to be done rather than what has happened or who is to blame. Concentrate all your attention on finding a solution to any obstacle that is holding you back from the sales and profitability you desire. And the more you think about solutions, the more solutions you will think of. You will actually feel yourself getting smarter by focusing all your energies on what you can do to continually improve your situation.

5. Concentration: Your ability to concentrate single-mindedly on the most important thing and stay at it until it is complete is an essential prerequisite for success. No success is possible without the ability to practice sustained concentration on a single goal or task, in a single direction.

The simplest way to learn to concentrate is to make a list for each day before you begin. Then prioritize the list by putting the numbers 1 through 10 next to each item. Once you have determined your most important task, immediately begin to work on that task. Discipline yourself to continue working until that top task is 100 percent complete. When you make a habit of doing this--starting and completing your most important tasks each day--you will double or triple your productivity and put yourself solidly on the way to wealth.

6. Courage: Winston Churchill once wrote, “Courage is rightly considered the foremost of the virtues, for upon it, all others depend.” It takes tremendous courage to take the entrepreneurial risks necessary to become wealthy. In study after study, experts have concluded it is the courage to take the “first step” that makes all the difference. This is the courage to launch in the direction of your goals, with no guarantee of success. Most people lack this.

Once you have begun your entrepreneurial journey, you also need the courage to persist. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “All great successes are the triumph of persistence.”

The word entrepreneur means “one who undertakes the risks of a new ven-ture in pursuit of profit.” Fully 90 percent of the population will never have sufficient courage to launch a new venture, to start a new business, to boldly go where no one has gone before. You need, first of all, the courage to begin, to move out of your comfort zone in the direction of your goals and dreams, even though you know you will experience many problems, difficulties and temporary failures along the way.

Second, you need the courage to endure, to hang in there, to persist in the face of all adversity until you finally win. When you develop these twin qualities--the ability to step out in faith and then to persist resolutely in the face of all difficulties--your success is guaranteed.

7. Continuous Action: Perhaps the most outwardly identifiable quality of a successful person is that he or she is in continuous motion. The entrepreneur is always trying new things and, if they don’t work, trying something else. It turns out that most entrepreneurs achieve their success in an area completely different from what they had initially expected. But because they continually reacted and responded constructively to change, trying new methods, abandoning activities that didn’t work, picking themselves up after every defeat and trying once more, they eventually won out.

Top people, especially entrepreneurs, seem to have these three qualities. First, they learn more things. Second, they try more things. Third, they persist longer than anyone else. The good news is that, because of the law of probabilities, if you learn more things, try more things and persist longer, you dramatically increase the probability that you will succeed greatly. If you launch toward your goal and resolve in advance to never give up, your success is virtually guaranteed.

The Ultimate Reward
My friend Jim Rohn once said, “The greatest reward in becoming a millionaire is not the amount of money that you earn. It is the kind of person that you have to become to become a millionaire in the first place.”

To have more, you must first be more. For you to set out on the way to wealth and become a self-made entrepreneurial millionaire, you will have to develop many qualities at a higher level than you ever have before. You will have to become an exceptional person. You will have to become more than you ever imagined possible for you.

To realize your full potential and achieve all your financial goals in your own business, you must develop the virtues of integrity, courage and persistence to a much higher level than you have up to now. You will have to practice the qualities of clarity, competence, creativity, concentration and continuous action until they are as natural to you as breathing. You will have to accept complete responsibility for your life and everything that happens to you, and especially for the way you think in every area.

When you develop these qualities and become a completely different person, you will eventually achieve all your goals in life, including financial success. The best part of becoming an extraordinary person is that, if something happens and you lose it all, it won’t really matter. Because you have become a different person, you will be able to make it all back again and more, far faster than the first time.

Welcome to The Way to Wealth. You are about to embark on a grand adventure that may last for the rest of your working lifetime. But if you have the courage to begin and the persistence to endure, nothing can hold you back from achieving all your goals and dreams. If you decide that, no matter what, you will never give up, you will eventually become unstoppable.

Action Plan
Take these steps to get going on your business goals.

1. Decide exactly what you want in life in each area, and write it down. Make your goals clear, specific and measurable.
2. Specify the most important skill you could develop to move you into the top 10 percent of people in your field. Then do something immediately to begin developing that skill.
3. Identify the major constraint or limiting factor inside yourself or in your world that is setting the speed at which you achieve your most important goal, and begin working on removing that constraint today.
4. Determine your single biggest problem or obstacle in your business or personal life. Then focus all your time and attention on the possible solutions.
5. Make a list of what you would want to be, do and have if you had no limitations and you were absolutely guaranteed success.
6. Accept complete responsibility for your life. From this day forward, refuse to make excuses or blame anyone for anything. Instead, take action to make your goals a reality.
7. Reaffirm and visualize your goals of financial success, excellent health and personal happiness as a reality. Remember, the person you see is the person you will be.

Reprinted from The Way to Wealth, Part I: The Journey Begins--Success Strategies of the Wealthy Entrepreneur by Brian Tracy (Entrepreneur Press)

Originally published in the February 2007 issue of Entrepreneur Magazine

Effective is Not the Same as Efficient

from lifehack.org

Are you efficient, effective, or efficiently effective? As you are focused on getting things done efficiently you may be making very quick decisions. You rapidly move through tasks and check things off your To-Do list one, two, three. You look productive because there is activity, your list is full of check marks or strikeouts showing completion, and your calendar shows meetings. That To-Do list isn’t too long and overwhelming because you’re on it. The question is:

Are doing the right things? The key to effectiveness is that you’re doing things that lead to results in the realm of your responsibilities. Meanwhile the key to efficiency is getting your things done in a manner that consumes just the appropriate amount of energy and resources.

Examining efficiency in automobiles: a fuel efficient vehicle gets more miles to the gallon. A car with a mile per gallon (mpg) rating of 50, like a Toyota Prius, is thought to be a mighty efficient car. And it is. However, a Prius wouldn’t always be an effective car. For example, if you had to pull a trailer loaded with your favorite outdoor toy; a camper, a power boat, or a fleet of motorcycles, a Prius probably doesn’t have the horsepower to pull the trailer. It might not even move away from the parking spot. It’s effectiveness in the specific application is low or null.

Personal efficiency is related to the systems that you have in place – the things that allow you to accomplish the most easily. Some characteristics of people who are efficient are:

• You are organized. You can find things quickly.
• You know how to use the tools on your computer to the nth degree
• You write readable and actionable emails
• Your meetings are well run
• You process all the expense reports turned in to you at one time and on a regular schedule (for example)
• You know how to work well with your assistant

Personal effectiveness is closely related to education, experience, and expertise. Your effectiveness is supported by personal efficiency but it’s not the same thing. Education, experience and expertise are the things that give you the ability to meet the goals you have. If you are accomplishing goals that are not your goals continually – you are not being effective. You are being active but not effective. Examples of effectiveness are:

• Meeting deadlines for reports or other contributions
• Making quota
• Earning the amount you target
• Taking the personal time you desire
• Leading your team to define and execute a project

Let’s briefly view the elements of education, experience and expertise as they contribute to your effectiveness.

Education is formal education in college, high school or other institutions. It is also tutoring you receive from a mentor or boss. Education comes from those classes you add to your work week such as Negotiation Skills or Managing a Team workshops. Education is advanced as you read and learn independently.

Experience and expertise are the accumulation understanding, savvy and wisdom resulting from involvement and history. Seeing how things are done and hearing evaluations of actions and decisions yields experience. Finding and remedying mistakes is often the fastest path to expertise. Those things that lead you to think, “I’ll never do that again,” yield loads of experience and expertise.

Efficiency and Effectiveness are different and combined lead to an unstoppable result orientation which feeds success. See how you can find more of each then watch where you go from there!

Susan Sabo is the productivity whiz writing at Productivity Cafe - a friendly place for effective articles on working smarter, reducing stress, and living a vibrant life. Susan consults with professionals on improving their personal productivity and presents motivating productivity programs to groups. Offline Susan travels, bicycles, and celebrates life!