12 tips that made steve jobs inspiring

Steve Jobs 1955-2011

'Think Different‘ is more than a slogan. Jobs aggressively seeked out, attacked and overthrew conventional ideas. The key to thinking differently is perceiving things differently. To perceive things differently, Jobs did his best all his life to be exposed to divergent influences. For example: - when he hired musicians,

artists, and poets on the original Macintosh team.

- when he started the Apple Stores, he purposely avoided hiring someone from the computer industry. He tapped a former Target ( TGT - news - people ) executive, Ron Johnson

- Etc.

1.

Jobs sweated over details. The night before the first iPod was launched, the Apple staff stayed up all night replacing headphone jacks because Jobs didn't think they were "clicky" enough.

Go for perfect

2.

Steve Jobs recruited renowned graphic designer Paul Rand to create the NeXT brand identity (the most famous graphic designers in the world who designed many corporate identities like IBM, UPS and ABC). He recruited Gap's former CEO Mickey Drexler to Apple's board before launching the company's retail chain

Tap the best experts

3.

Jobs was proud of the products he had killed as much as he was of the ones he had released. He worked hard on a Palm Pilot clone, only to kill it when he realized cell phones would eclipse PDAs. That freed up his engineers to develop the iPod.

Be

4.

Jobs famously said "People don't know what they want until you show it to them." So he acted as a one-man focus group, taking prototype products home and testing them for months.

Shun focus groups.

5.

When designing early brochures for Apple, he checked over Sony's use of fonts, layout, and the weight of the paper. Working on the case for the first Mac, he wandered around Apple's parking lot studying the bodywork of German and Italian cars.

Never stop

studying

6.

Jobs' design philosophy was one of constant simplification. He ordered the iPod's designers to remove all buttons on early prototypes, including the on/off button. The designers complained, then developed the iconic scroll wheel instead.

simplify

7.

Nobody at Apple talks. Everything is on a need-to-know basis, with the company divided into discrete cells. The secrecy allowed Jobs to generate frenzied interest for his surprise product demonstrations, and the resulting headlines

Keep your secrets

8.

The original Macintosh team was made up of 100 people; no more, no less. If a 101st person was hired, someone was ditched to make room. Jobs was convinced he could remember the first names of only 100 people.

Keep teams small

9.

Using more carrot than stick will take people and company higher. Jobs was scary, but his charisma was his most powerful motivator. His enthusiasm was the primary reason the original Mac team worked 90-hour weeks for three years making the machine "insanely great."

Use

than stick more carrot

10.

Everything Jobs did was exhaustively prototyped: the hardware, the software, even Apple's retail stores. Architects and designers spent a year building a prototype store in a secret warehouse near Apple's headquarters, only to have Jobs scrap the project and start over.

Prototype to the extreme

11.

12.

One more thing…

Master at selling

Great slides, simple, clear, visual, one idea per slide.

Focus on customers’ benefits

Positive language to convey his enthusiasm.

Use of humour.

Excellent structure.

Clear use of figures. It's not about numbers, it's about what the numbers mean.

Use of real-life examples.

Repetition of the main selling points, to get the message across.

Rhythm, breaking things up to maintain the audience’s attention with videos, demos and guest speakers

Outstanding conclusion in a few words, often saving his strongest stuff for the end

You can bet he worked and rehearsed a lot.

Thank you mister Steve Jobs for having raised the bar for sales presentations.

Now the world will suck a bit more without your insanely great ideas and booms and ‘one more thing’.

All your presentations were great, you have inspired a new generation of reps and CEOs who should never forget that they are the first rep of their company.

You are and will always remain a true master for so many of us.

Goodbye and good luck, master. We miss you.

We will miss you dearly.

Designed by Jean-François MESSIER New Technology Director at Mercuri International My blog: http://newsalespresentation.com/ Voir cette présentation en français : cliquez ici Inspired by: - The 10 commandments of Steve by Leander Kahney, in the daily beast.

Photo Credit : - Slide 2: Flickr.com/ – Think different - M.J. Ambriola - Slide 13: Flickr.com/ - Steve Jobs Speaks At WWDC07 by acaben - Slide 14-15: Flickr.com - Apple CEO Steve Jobs showing the Apple Macbook Air series by TechShowNetwork - istockphoto.com/ – MERCURINT2010 - thinkstockphotos.fr/ jfmessier-MERCURI INT