Authors: Peter Sander
•
Image
. The company or product gets a recognizable label, jingle, and/or tagline. The image creates recognition, is easy to see and to remember, and may convey a thought, a physical characteristic, or a promise. Tide and McDonald’s create recognizable
orange and golden arches images, respectively, which over time have come to mean something bigger to the consumer about the product and the company.
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Consistency
. A brand connotes consistency, especially in today’s world of national brands. Eat at a McDonald’s anywhere in the world, and you will get pretty much the same Big Mac. Buy a box of Tide anywhere in the world, and you’ll end up with clean clothes.
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Promise
. The image and consistency evolve into an intrinsic promise of a certain quality, a certain level of value, a certain taste, a certain style, and a certain level of comfort. Four Seasons has a more luxurious brand promise than Holiday Inn has.
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Trust
. The promise, successfully delivered time and time again, creates trust. The higher the degree of trust, the more valuable the brand.
There’s no doubt that the value of a good brand is huge, and in today’s world of short product life cycles and reduced attention span, the value of a good brand is greater than ever. People trust good brands and are willing to pay more to get them. The value of the Starbucks brand to that company is almost incalculable, and was from the beginning. The value of the Apple brand has become just as incalculable.
The kind of branding that fewer people talk about, and what I think Steve’s leadership legacy is really about, is establishing a
personal
brand—a personal brand as a leader. A personal brand incorporates the traits of a product brand, but goes way, way beyond them. Mike may have done it in the basketball world; Tiger did it in the golf world (until his own behavior destroyed the promise and the trust). But nobody in the business or technology world has ever done it better than Steve.
As a starting point, a personal brand includes all the elements of a product or company brand—
image, consistency
,
promise
, and
trust
. Those traits can be developed in a person, too, and a person, especially a leader, with those traits will succeed. But people have personalities, attitudes, and behaviors that no product can have, and that companies can have only as a sum total of all the parts.
With products and companies, trust is key; if people don’t trust the product or the company, about the only thing a marketer can do to move product (besides repairing trust) is to cut prices. With people, it’s about trust too, but it goes a bit beyond just being able to depend on them. People create things; they decide things; they express emotions about things—there’s more to it than
just whether the product works or is a good value. With people, the “trust” thing evolves into
credibility
.
Several traits contribute to the kind of credibility that Steve possessed and shared every day:
•
Respect
. As an individual or a leader, you gain respect by being right, by admitting when you’re wrong, and—this is what most leaders forget—by respecting others.
•
Optimism
. A person who is optimistic looks forward and is willing to move forward, and is less likely to be bound by the norms of the past. This person dwells in the future, not in the past.
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Passion
. Mix optimism with perseverance and spend every waking hour thinking about it and evangelizing it, and you’ll win the hearts of your followers.
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Confidence
. A confident and self-assured leader makes others around him more confident.
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Altruism
. Good leaders think about others and try to put themselves in their place. They want everyone to succeed, not just themselves.
•
Professional style
. Good leaders develop a consistent work and communication style that everyone knows and learns how to work with. As we saw with Steve, it doesn’t have to be an easy style, but it has to inspire confidence. When a leader is difficult
to work with or keeps others off balance, those people tend to focus on their relationship with the leader, not on the product or the project. When people know you’re a game changer, it means that they can be game changers too.
•
Personal style
. Everything from your clothing and attire to your desire for privacy to how you present yourself inside and outside the organization defines your personal style. Steve’s casual clothing told everyone that he was an artist; he was genuine and “one of the people,” not a “dress to impress” type. Steve’s focus was on the product and the customer, not on himself, and everything about him—what he wore and what he did at Apple and at home—suggested this.
Steve built himself into a unique business and technology brand. That brand represented consistent innovation, a consistent desire to change the game in the customer’s favor, and a consistent application of the complex secrets of technology to better our personal lives. Steve also stood for consistent product excellence, consistent customer experience excellence, and consistent design excellence.
Steve’s brand was almost as much about what he
wasn’t
as about what he was. He wasn’t about money. He wasn’t about the corporation. He wasn’t about politics.
He wasn’t about executive image or grandeur. He wasn’t about owning lots of companies, and he wasn’t about owning many fancy houses or jets or owning a car collection. He wasn’t about being the center of attention. He wasn’t about power.
He kept the focus on the message and not on himself. Steve mostly put people at ease, giving them constant assurances that the product and the customer were the important things. He was just a regular guy to work with as the situation required, with no pretense and no formalities. Sure, he could be difficult if things weren’t going right, but that was part of the brand, too.
Clarity was an important part of his brand and his style; even the words he chose, from “insanely great” to “that’s shit,” are legendary. The elegant simplicity of his own style fed his products, and vice versa.
Steve set such a high bar that many doubt if anyone will ever be so successful at establishing a personal brand. There are other game changers out there, like Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google and Mark Zuckerman of Facebook. But none of them have the style or charisma or respect or influence that Steve enjoyed, and, while people can and do grow, they don’t appear to be moving in that direction.
The “Steve” brand is all the more amazing when you consider the business he was involved in. The fact that Steve built his brand and maintained it so consistently for 35 years in the face of changes in technology and tastes is all the more remarkable. Many people think the changes that led to his departure and his return in 1997 went a long way toward affirming his brand—he was “right after all.” Without that test—and without the chance to achieve excellence with
Toy Story
in a field that he knew little about going in—perhaps nobody would have noticed.
Steve made and led people to huge accomplishments, and he enjoyed a life arc that simply isn’t available to most of us mortals. He established a huge personal brand, lived up to it, and lived off it, and that brand success will forever remain hard to duplicate. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to build your own personal leadership brand.
Why is a personal brand so important? Especially for a leader?
When you establish an excellent personal brand as a leader, your followers know what to expect. They get the idea. They get the theme. They get it. And they trust it. Your personal brand is recognizable and consistent, and it conveys a message. It serves as an example. It is developed and cultivated through experience, combined with a certain sense, a certain style, and a certain image.
People will assume you’re right, not wrong. They will align with your vision. They will look at what they can do for you and your company, not for what you and your company can do for them. They will trust that under your direction, their work won’t go to waste, that it will lead to great things, and that they will be appreciated for it. All of this moves the needle from apathy to motivation to inspiration. Never has a business leader inspired so many people so completely as Steve Jobs.
Those of you who are following the six-step Steve Jobs Leadership Model offered in
Chapter 3
may have come into this chapter expecting a quasi-academic treatment of building consumer and company brands. Nope, that’s not what’s here. Sure, Steve, and Apple, built a tremendously valuable consumer brand, a brand to be envied and emulated. No arguments on that.
If your only success as a leader is to develop a brand with the value of the Apple brand, you’ll be a huge hit, even if nobody recognizes your name and none of your employees know who you are. The corporate landscape is littered with successful brands that were built and are supported by nameless faces in corner offices in thousands of corporations. Who, without looking, could
name the CEO of Procter & Gamble or McDonald’s or Walmart off the top of their heads?
And yet, these leaders are successful by most measures of corporate success—just look at the track record and continuing growth of their organizations. They may have effective personal brands inside their organizations. Or they may carry out the necessities of executive leadership just well enough to keep their organizations going. Or they may have just the right subordinates in the right places to get things done. Or they may be just plain lucky.
When you contrast these generic leadership styles with the more branded leadership styles of Howard Schultz of Starbucks and Larry Ellison of Oracle—and Steve Jobs at Apple—however, it becomes apparent that by developing your own personal brand, you can clearly move the needle on the company’s brand. The company’s brand develops your personal brand, and vice versa.
Now, most of you reading
What Would Steve Jobs Do?
aren’t CEOs and aren’t planning to become CEOs anytime soon. But the same traits that drove Steve’s success can drive yours, no matter what organization you’re in, and no matter what your role in that organization is. Whether you run your own business, manage call center telemarketers, or are an individual contributor and project manager with no direct reports in a big firm, these principles all apply.
Build your personal brand, and people will follow you anywhere.
So how do you build your own personal brand? How do you reach the elusive last step, the last stage, of the Steve Jobs Leadership Model?
Easy. You excel at the first five steps, evangelize them to your team, and develop your trademark style:
•
Customer
. Focus externally. Learn everything you can about the customer.
Be
the customer. Be the customer’s advocate. Consistently ask, “What does this do for the customer?” Develop a visible passion for the customer.
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Vision
. Try to see over the horizon. Develop a vision, test it, communicate it inside and out, and be willing to adapt it to reality.
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Culture
. Create a can-do environment, one that rewards, not hampers, creativity. Make sure the process within your team supports new ideas and customer-focused visions.
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Product
. Focus on the product. Get involved in the details, know it inside and out, and make sure it’s what customers want.
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Message
. Be the spokesperson for your product and for the team. Evangelize. Go inside and outside. Attend trade shows; be your own media rep; build your brand in your industry, not just your company.
Then there’s the style thing. This is a bit less linear. The idea is to develop a personal and professional style that is consistent with the vision. If your vision is to get customers to be more creative and think differently, then black mock turtlenecks and jeans are probably more effective than thousand-dollar business suits. You should convey an image that you think your team will like, and that you think your customers would like if they met you in person.
Again, building a personal brand isn’t linear; it’s not a precise template. If it were, everyone could and would become Steve Jobs! It is something that you’ll have to visualize, dream about, experiment with, and modify:
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Focus on the five supporting steps
from the leadership model: Customer, Vision, Culture, Product, and Message.
•
Keep them in balance
. Don’t be all about message or all about product or all about vision. It won’t work.
•
Be passionate
.
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Don’t overdo it
. Let your actions speak for you. People recognize when you’re trying too hard.
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Be driven by achievement, not power
.
•
Be driven by achievement, not money
.
The “Think Different” ad copy, first aired in 1997, the year of Steve’s return to Apple, says as much about Steve’s personal brand as I can. It makes a fitting ending: