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12 Lessons Learned From Steve Jobs

The day after Steve Jobs died, Guy Kawasaki gave a talk at the Silicon Valley Bank’s CEO Summit. After watching his speech I felt that many of his lessons really touch on doing great branding, so I  summarized these 12 lessons in this post.
  1. Experts are clueless, don't listen to them if you want to create a new product sub-category.
  2. You cannot ask customers what they want if you plan to develop a new sub-category. They will think status quo and just try to improve the existing products marginally. 
  3. The biggest challenge will win. Challenge your team to make big jumps, they will pay off. 
  4. Design truly counts, use big graphics and big fonts.
  5. Jump curves from one product cycle to another and don't follow one to the end. His motto is Change or Die. It is important to make big inventions – make products not twice as good but 10 times better. Think telegraph to telephone. 
  6. All that really matters is if it works or not.
  7. Real entrepreneurs don't compete on price. (Price vs. Value)  
  8. Value is different than Price. Companies can charge a higher price for products that are valuable to the user and unique in the market. See Uniqueness and Valuable graph below.
  9. A-players hire A+ players. Good CEO always higher people that are smarter than themselves – at least in the field, they are hired for. 
  10. CEOs can demo and use the company's product 
  11. Real Entrepreneurs ship. If they have developed a new product that is unique and valuable to the customer, they don’t worry about making the product perfect before they ship it. If the product is not unique but just valuable and not unique, however,  it has a lot of competition in the market and the product quality needs to be the best it could be to be able to complete.  
  12. Some things need to be believed to be seen. 


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