I did the same thing for 12 years as CEO of Postmates and I still do it when I work on new ideas. I thought it was something I just did. But reading this I have to assume it is more common.
What you do need is a simple why you are coming to work that is beyond “to get a paycheck”.
From what I hear Disney is very much a “process” company these days.
You can draw your own conclusions about whether Disney is doing very well or not, though.
So few leaders understand this. Its not common, not even among 'successful' leaders. More than anyone likes to admit, lots of businesses big and small built their backs on exploiting some luck and then achieving a relatively dominate position and holding it by the virtue of traditional business tactics. There's alot of copying, and very little actual innovative thinking.
This is even true of 'visionaries' but I think there is a difference between outright copying w/ refinement vs taking technology (or technologies) and using them in genuinely unforeseen ways, or otherwise marrying them together in ways nobody else really has.
Most success is entirely circumstantial. Right place, right time, things out of the control of anything. Certainly thats not visionary. Its refining someone else's idea (which is different than taking existing technology, refining it, and using it in entirely different ways than it was intended)
Steve Jobs was unique in that he forged success despite circumstances. In multiple aspects of Apple's history there was no good reason for them to succeed the way they did but he actually had genuine vision. Few others have had that kind of vision. Bill Gates demonstrated this earlier in his career (by the late 90s, Microsoft was exploiting monopoly not visionary innovation). Perhaps a few others I can't think of off the top of my head right now.
I can't say the same for 90+% of business people. It should be more humbling than it is. Unfortunately every CEO seems to think they have the 'magic' and they don't.
I'll also add, there are a lot of managers out there fancying themself in leadership, and lots of leaders who fancy themselves managers, this thinking that there is an ability to co-mingle, is generally incorrect.
(I teach business for a living, this stuff is a lot of what I teach new founders how to understand.)
I imagine this is where that came from.
I'm sad you've never come across a leader with a strong corporate vision, when you work with them it truly is a joy.
If that's not possible to formulate even internally, the company is in trouble.
Don't think you can build a startup into a business if you can't learn how to do this.
One difference I'd call out is that the delivery is different in what's understood as a formal rehearsed performance, than when speaking in informal one-on-one contexts.
IMHO, for informal, it's OK if you use pretty much the same canned explanation each time (especially for an elevator pitch, which is understood as a thing), just don't pretend you're speaking off-the-cuff.
For example, don't pause like you're thinking of the right term or analogy to use. (I've seen Steve Jobs videos where he seems to do this. And I had a colleague who would do it for one key metaphor term, even though they said the same bit about their research to different visitors almost every day.)
If you go to a standup performance or TED talk, you're expecting a heavily-rehearsed performance, with artificial flourishes. But if you're having a one-on-one conversation with someone, you want a bespoke, genuine, engaged, adaptive interaction. Canned bits in that are OK, but don't pretend those bits are fresh.
Take the iPhone. My first iPhone was a 3G. I did not buy it because Steve Jobs convinced me: I bought it because a friend had one, I tried it and it was actually pretty cool. I had tried a PDA before, and did not feel like buying one. No storytelling there, just a product that was a better fit at a better time.
Jobs might have convinced apple to have a vision, but it didn’t mean they invented all the pieces out of thin air. Timing in tech was just right
(The other parts of marketing, IMO, are getting the right message across at the right time - to those right people. The storytelling is the message part).
Marketing in essence is market making. Producer, Consumer. Product, Customer.
I don't mean using it, eg to visit a social media site or whatever. I mean, the device spamming you with ads and "helpful hints' about more products to buy.
Like Google and Android not shutting up about Gemini, nagging you to try it. Or dark patterns to trick you into subscribing to a service.
That kind of persistent nagging is the wrong time, with the wrong message at the wrong people.
I guess the storytelling is the part that I feel is overvalued. "This genius changed the world because of how he phrased it" seems like bullshit to me.
The part where you define what a good product is, this one matters. Even though I feel like there is a whole lot more luck involved than what people want to think. "Steve Jobs was a genius" may rather be "Steve Jobs was really good, and at the same time he was lucky that what he considered a good product at the time was actually perceived as a good product by the masses".
It feels like there is a lot of survivorship bias (let me link xkcd myself before someone does: [1]) that we keep ignoring. "If Musk/Besos/Zuckerberg/<name your crazy billionaire> is where he is, that's most likely because he is the best". Ok, they probably did something right (maybe?), but they got crazy lucky as well.
From the article "It was the story of the product. And it drove what we built."
The story is what kept the product development on track - and thus made the iPhone sell itself - the story isn't about convincing the public to buy, the story was an encapsulation of the products design - refined as time went on.
Product dev can easily go off the rails - take the recent story about Jeep having Ads popup on their infotainment systems - people wondering how anybody could think that's a good idea.
If you told a story about that product feature to your family and friends - you can be sure you'd get the 'puzzled look', and you'd remove it before the car ever shipped.
But to your other point, sure. There is a saying about helping to make your luck, but, yes, there is also luck in just about any career or success.
Jobs did it multiple times, though. The iPhone no doubt overshadows everything else, but the Macintosh and iPod serve as evidence that he had a recipe for successful products.
As I understand it, for example, there's markets for "broken watches": it can be
* broken luxury watches: to have a "rich man look" without paying the full price
* for hobbyist watch-repair
* for professional watch ressellers (after repair)
* for educational / museum...
As far as design is concerned, the watch is broken. But it can be sold if you find who will buy it and why... and that's marketing
Jobs was a great designer too... (and/or knew how to hire great designers and let them get out the best of them)
Sure. I guess my point is that its "product design" was essentially "it's a PDA with more modern technology". It did not look extra-terrestrial back then, it really looked like a better PDA.
In other examples, I have seen product people saying that they had the "vision" of connecting their app to the cloud. Or more recently, "visionaries" will suggest integrating LLMs in everything they can describe (they would suggest writing an LLM driver in the kernel if they knew the word "kernel"). And then, maybe, one such integration will work, and they will say "I had this vision that we should integrate LLM here" and forget the part where 99% of their ideas were worthless, and the one that work was actually not a revolutionary idea but just something that technically worked.
Again, not to say that Steve Jobs was not good. He certainly brought a lot. But sometimes I feel like we overdo it a bit.
Lots of people, including Apple with the Newton, tried to build a really great PDA - some people loved them, most found them too complex and slow.
I'd argue that when the iPhone originally shipped ( remember on shipping it didn't have an App store or even a custom app story - Steve said just write a web app ), it was simply a phone, a web browser, and a music player.
In my view it wasn't trying to be a PDA at all - all that came later.
Sure, but again not revolutionary. I had a Nokia that was a phone, a web browser and a music player. The iPhone was just better at that, but not very different in the end.
A really great multi-touch screen - sure there were touch devices before - and even multitouch ones, but my recollection was they would both miss/confuse inputs and have significant input lag and most were single input - the iPhone just worked as you'd expect - it felt magical. 'You got me at scrolling'
If you take a great touch experience, and a software user interface rather than buttons, then you have a platform with infinitely reconfigurable interaction modes.
Form is function. The user interface ( in the broadest sense of how you interact with the computer ) is key. They delivered touch that worked, in a form factor you could hold.
One of the reasons ChatGPT feels revolutionary is it has changed how people interact with their computers - creating a new conversational mode - ( and sure Eliza goes back a long way as well - but that was a toy ).
Even if Steve never crossed your path, his marketing process is how Apple arrived at the product you wanted.
Honestly, the response from the audience in the hall seemed to suggest we were not getting it. We were expecting multiple devices.
Fortunately Jobs delivered the punchline quickly then and moved on.
I have to assume that most of the people who were in the room knew the rumors also, and were just waiting to see if they were true.
I did watch it live, and that's what I was doing, at least. :)
iPhone was brilliant from cost and mechanical design perspective - there are just so few moving or essential parts in post-iPhone phones. But maybe, just maybe, this solution is not as good as it seemed, maybe it could be better. Just my cynical POV...
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/use-reachability-iph1...
Great.
Otherwise looks nice, thanks for the link
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36265807 ; Pizza Planet
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23945928
> The William Golding, Jung, and Joseph Campbell books on screenwriting, archetypes, and the hero's journey monomyth
Hero's journey > Campbell's seventeen stages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey#Campbell's_se...
Storytelling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storytelling
However I would say there is meta information with value[1] in that he was able to get Fast Company to publish a puff piece on his Steve-Jobs-Like genius of coining the term “Rush Hour Pricing” - when in popular culture (and any editor would point out) we just use the simpler phrase: “Surge Pricing”.
[1] In the same way you can discount information from any outlet that publishes “The suit is back” in their fashion column as a serious article: https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Out of the loop on this but very interested: what are the true origin stories of the iPhone, and what is the traditional narrative they contrast?
A lot of this is covered in various CHM fireside chats - this is a good one: https://youtu.be/5xDRdWFdsoQ
But Apple’s multitouch implementation was based on research that started long before, in the late 90s, and they had already bought the resulting tech company (Fingerworks) more than a year before Han’s TED talk.
But sure, tell me about his narcissistic story telling skills.
Should tell you enough lol.
Because... they ruined it.
Obviously reading about comedy is probably like dancing about architecture, but nonetheless I'd expect some discussion on the delivery itself. Otherwise it's just "storyplanning".
Literary storytelling is one thing, but we also function in daily life by taking in raw information and then distilling it down to a simpler narrative, aka a story. Effective communication accounts for this and creates a narrative for you to latch onto.
Creating a narrative, aka, story telling. It's ready to see the inspiration for the phrase, although yes the result is an overloaded term.
Many people do in fact try to tell people about products or services by just stating a bunch of facts.
But as humans we’re wired to understand stories, not lists of facts. We don’t really process facts without context, and if there’s no main character or narrative our brain instinctively fills that in.
So sure, marketing isn’t literature. It might even be a horrible thing that should not exist. But there is in fact substance to the conversation. There’s marketing that tells and story and marketing that doesn’t.
Intentionally composing that story and getting it into the heads of other people, for whatever purpose, is storytelling. Marketing, propaganda, self-promotion, employee culture, nationalism, the best version of yourself that you tell to other people. All of that and more.
You can faff all you want about the pretentiousness of it, but the process of composing a narrative is not sacred (we all do it), and it's not the exclusive domain of people who write books.
The last part of a story arc is called the reSolution.
> In fact, one of the first rules of fiction is to always create more problems to move the tension along.
In marketing, story reminds people of their problem. While the product they are selling offers a (re)solution to that problem.
You mean creates needs, right?