The Steve Jobs Secret

What is the Steve Jobs secret? He sells the Steak and the sizzle at the same time, says BusinessWeek Communications Coach Carmine Gallo.

How Steve Jobs does it:

1. Set the theme
2. Demonstrate Enthusiasm
3. Provide an outline
4. Make numbers meaningful
5. Try for an unforgettable moment
6. Create visual slides
7. Give 'em a show
8. Don't sweat the small stuff
9. Sell the benefit
10. Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse

Read the BusinessWeek article here.

Find an entire chapter on the Steve Jobs keynote here.

Jay, from Bangalore

10 Secrets to success

Pick The Brain talks about the "10 Secrets to success".
1. How You Think is Everything.
2. Decide upon Your True Dreams and Goals.
3. Take Action.
4. Never Stop Learning.
5. Be Persistent and Work Hard.
6. Learn to Analyze Details.
7. Focus Your Time And Money.
8. Don’t Be Afraid To Innovate.
9. Deal And Communicate With People Effectively.
10. Be Honest And Dependable.

From Lifehacker Comments on the 10 Secrets
"Success means getting up one more time than you fall down"

Read On

Jay, from Bangalore

Rock your presentation

LifeHacker has some great presentation tips.
Get them here.

Jay, from Bangalore

Looking for a few good images for your next PPT?

Great painters talk all the time about where to find a good brush, they say. And the mediocre ones? About styles and trends!

Well, we Marcom folks talk all the time about images. My personal all-time favorite is istockphoto. Mostly at 1 dollar a pic, (Except illustrations), iStock helped us create the "winning ambiance" for 2 of our successful Fortune 10 presentations last year.

Another good resource may be the open-sourced images in Flickr.

Presentation Zen has a good list. Find it here.

Jay, from Bangalore

Business, is communication

Business used to be trading. Business used to be marketing.
Now, business is predominantly communication.

Steve Jobs. Robert Scoble. Seth Godin. Examples abound.

The Steve Jobs keynotes have been a netstopper for some time now.
Presentation Zen has six presentation tips from the Steve Jobs Keynote.

1. Develop rapport with the audience
2. Give them an idea of where you're going
3. Show your enthusiasm
4. It's not about numbers, it's about what the numbers mean
5. Make it visual
6. Save the best for last

Read On...

Jay, from Bangalore

Change the world. For free!

If you think you have stuff that can change the world and help people, you can do it now. For free.

Step 1: Start a blog
Step 2: take your blog to the world. Here's how.
10 ways to a Killer blog
15 Powerful Ways to Differentiate Your Blog from the Crowd
The Secret to Building a Popular Blog
17 Ways You Can Use Twitter

There! Get going now.

Jay, from Bangalore

Happy Birthday Robert

"All real living is meeting."
Introductory quote in "We - The Ideal Customer Relationship" - the Steve Yastrow book.

Thank you for meeting so many of them, and for making your viewers a part of those meetings.

Happy Birthday, Robert!

Jay, from Bangalore

Bangalore, Monday Morning Jan 14

16°C, Humidity: 91%. Moderate fog. The city is just waking up.

The milkman is late today!

Jay, from Bangalore

Is this the real Web 3.0?

Google + iPhone. Is this the real Web 3.0, the future of the web?

The iPhone version of Google, as reported by Techcrunch.

But why iPhone? Read the untold iPhone Story here.

Jay, from Bangalore

TATA Nano: the 21st century world car

When a county on the wedge of a breakthrough gets an affordable, enviable "vehicle for the masses", miracles can happen.

The Ford Model T, for instance.

Now, think of a $2,500 price tag, which brings the car within reach of the Indian "masses". Think of Euro 4 environmental standards. And 20 km per liter mileage.

Is the TATA Nano the 21st century Model T?
What do you think?

Jay, from Bangalore

Robert Scoble Lawbreaker?

Did Robert Scroble break the law by trawling Facebook for "Names, email ids and birthdays?"
More importantly, did Robert break the trust reposed in him?

"He single-handedly bashed through most of the basic principles of privacy with his scraping exercise, never mind Facebook’s terms of service." - says Thomas Othevo

"My friends gave me permission to use their stuff when they gave me access to their information. " counters Robert Scoble.

"I was erased. Erased so quickly and completely that my friends had no idea what happened."
posts Robert about the way he was removed from Facebook.

But Facebook may have had their own real reasons why they did what they did.

Be advised, this is one space that's worth watching. The early debates on the rights and wrongs of our increasingly "real" virtual world.

Jay, from Bangalore

"We" - the best brand strategy

"We" is the best brand strategy, says Steve Yastrow in his new book "We - The Ideal Customer Relationship".

Find the book at Amazon

What do you think?

Jay, from Bangalore

GE 2.0. A journey from "We bring good things to light" to "Imagination at Work".

"A strong brand -- BusinessWeek and Interbrand rate GE's as No. 4 behind Coca-Cola, Microsoft and IBM -- and an iconic slogan are tricky to tinker with. A company doesn't want to tarnish its brand in, for example, the way that Coca-Cola did in the 1980s when it fumbled the introduction of New Coke. Yet it also must update its image as times and its business change. "

GE's Judy Hu: 'We're Reinventing a Brand and a Company' - Knowledge@Wharton

Read on, about this remarkable journey...

Jay, from Bangalore

The CRM Challenge

Will anyone suggest a definition of customer relationship management that doesn't include the words, "software," "application," "system" or "database"? asks Steve Yastrow.

While not exactly a CRM definition, Mahatma Gandhi had an interesting view of the CRM mindset:

"A customer is the most important visitor on our premises.

He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him.

He is not an interruption of our work. He is the purpose of it.

He is not an outsider of our business. He is part of it.

We are not doing him a favour by serving him. He is doing us a favour by giving us the opportunity to do so."

Jay, from Bangalore

Update: Tom Peters comments on the Gandhi Opening:

The following is a little heavy for me, but given the Gandhi opening above, I'll let it rip:

“What would happen if we looked at a customer and saw the face of God in them? To most people it sounds like a lofty idea. But if you see the face of God in a flower, why wouldn’t you see it in the face of a customer? If we treated customers and honored the God within them—if we loved them—we would not need a ‘quality program.’” —Lance Secretan, founder of Manpower, Inc., and most recently author of One: The Art and Practice of Conscious Leadership

Why not, indeede?!
http://www.tompeters.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=10176

Making a difference

entrepreneur.com lists the top 5 traits of Sales Superstars. This one is Trait no. 5.

"Going above and beyond"
"The most successful sales-people go out of their way to lend a helping hand. As one customer told me, "We're not a company that looks solely for price. What's more important to us is the extra effort and degree of service we get from the rep and from the company. There's one sales rep who is outstanding in both effort and service. If we have an unexpected workload that exceeds our supply, she's willing to [do whatever it takes] to get us through the crunch period. We had a case where she even drove the product from Greensboro, [North Carolina], to Charlotte [for us]. Because of her, we would not change vendors for a difference in price.""

Jay, from Bangalore

The Starting Point

"The starting point of all significant change is mindset" - Tom Peters

What is your's? How is it holding you back?

Jay, from Bangalore

"The curse of knowledge"

Knowledge brings ignorance. Period.

"Once you’ve become an expert in a particular subject, it’s hard to imagine not knowing what you do. Your conversations with others in the field are peppered with catch phrases and jargon that are foreign to the uninitiated. When it’s time to accomplish a task — open a store, build a house, buy new cash registers, sell insurance — those in the know get it done the way it has always been done, stifling innovation as they barrel along the well-worn path."

Be wary. Be very, very wary.

Jay, from Bangalore

Do More!

Most of us can probably accomplish twice as much with half the resources.
More brings more. Give it a try.

Jay, from Bangalore

Hello 2008

"Every day is going by so freaking fast. "

What I have learned in 2007 - Robert Scoble

25 ways to distinguish yourself - Rajesh Shetty

Top Web Apps and sites of 2007 - Richard McManus

The day the world almost died - Tony Rennell

Have a great 2008!

Jay, from Bangalore