Steve Jobs said, “This is really hot,” when he unveiled the iPhone 4 at his Worldwide Developers Conference last month. He wasn’t joking.

It took Apple 72 days to sell a million of their original iPhone when it launched in 2007. Last year, the iPhone 3GS sold a million units in three days, a benchmark it took the iPad took 28 days to achieve. But all these look positively lethargic compared to the iPhone 4 and Apple’s most successful launch in its history: they’ve sold over 1.7 million phones in just three days since its release on June 24.

Estimates for Q3 claim sales of 10.2 million units, rising to 12.2 million for Q4.

The really interesting thing is that 77% of those early sales were to existing iPhone owners. Over three-quarters of sales are to folks who are upgrading! That’s the very definition of a want, not a need.

As Seth Godin might say, seek out committed customers and harvest a tribe by finding/making products for them. Inspire and reship.

Steve Jobs is the ultimate tribe leader. Love him or loath him, make no mistake you’re watching the Pied Piper of tech, folks.

Image from Wired magazine.

Old news: technology and consumerism are intertwined. Simple example, the cheque book and then the debit card were tech replacements for cash.

Today’s smart phones and the rush of tablets we’re about to see really are changing the landscape now, not just tomorrow. Watch Scoble interview the head of eBay mobile, Steve Yankovich to see how serious one of the globe’s largest retailers is about mobile.

They’re serious about augmented reality; serious about decoupling from the desktop PC; and serious about going truely global. It’s 25 minutes long but hang in there, the second half is more ‘business’ than the first.

BP's embattled leader, Mr Hayward

I was reminded this week that management is about doing things right and that leadership is doing the right thing. I’m sure you’ve come across that before.

But I’ve been thinking about small business leadership and exactly what that all encompassing term means on the ground.

Surely everything a leader of an SME does needs its output to ultimately fall into one of these two categories:

Scale – grow turnover, profits, clients, reach, output, customer perception etc; or,
Simplicity – repeating a good day every day; setting in place the systems to cope with stormy waters.

What do you think?

Someone recently told me about a conversation they’d had with Henry Engelhardt, the founder and CEO of Admiral Insurance. Engelhardt, an American, said the key to his success has been managing to the numbers.

At the close of business each day he gets a report (presumably a dashboard) of his core KPIs. One sheet of A4 tells him exactly how his business is doing. He says us Brits don’t manage by the numbers enough.

But isn’t leading and managing a business all about moving the numbers?

Feed more of the hungry, house more of the homeless;
Decrease the cost of sales, grow stakeholder value;
More page views, fewer bounces;
Acquisition costs down, conversion rates up;
Increase quality, decrease errors;
More support, fewer complaints;
Waste less, save more;
Ship more goods, shrink the deficit;
More followers, less churn;
Golf handicap down, stamina up (more a metephor, but you get it).

If you agree with Engelhardt, what numbers are you trying to move this month? This year?

Frank Tyger said, “Progress is not created by contented people.”

Yet again this savings figure of £6 billion is caught on the newswire this week. What a joke.

Our deficit is in the region of £167 billion. Trumpeting about saving £6 billion in a year is the fiscal equivalent of downgrading your weekly toilet paper and tea bag shopping to Tesco’s value range – all well and good but really a drop in the ocean. Let’s get our eye on the prize, the RIGHT prize.

The interest payment on this deficit is nearly £42 billion. On interest! That’s more than we spend on defence and more than three times our policing budget. We should all be praying to the house of credit that we don’t lose our AAA rating or we can add another £5 billion p.a. to our troubles. It’s starting to look like a Guy Ritchie movie, isn’t it?

The real issue is that after the longest period of consistent economic growth in our history – 16 years – we were spending 4.5% of our national income more than we raised in tax. You don’t need advanced math to know that puts you in the red.

Forget ring fencing, surely nothing is off the table. Scrutiny belongs everywhere, including our three largest areas of spending: social security, health and education. All budgets, from the Olympics to waste collections must come under microscope.

Our medicine will certainly be a bitter pill to swallow but Greece is the starkest warning to anyone who thinks simply muddling through is an option. Debt is a powder keg waiting for fireworks night.

With a new face in 11 Downing Street I was really hoping to hear a more honest fiscal message than £6 billion but I guess we’ll have to wait until the emergency budget. Emergency – what an understatement.

Teddy Eddy

My daughter was given charge of the class teddy last week and became completely engrossed with him. He was part of nearly every sentence – Teddy Eddy this, Teddy Eddy that. They were instantly joined at the hip: at the dinner table, in the bathroom, washing hands, cleaning teeth, bedtime story and, of course, in bed itself.

This OTT passion was completely out of the blue and somewhat overwhelming. You honestly couldn’t hold a winning lottery ticket with more fervour than she did with this scruffy bear.

Seeing it, I was reminded of meeting an excellent facilitator, Pammy Johal of Backbone. Pammy is a captivating individual and exactly the sort of person you’d want to be stuck in a lift with. Our conversations have run into cycling. She’s confessed she’s mad on her four bikes; they’re her babies.

To calibrate her self-proclaimed madness she told me about her selling an old Trek bike. She bumped into the lady that bought this bike from her a couple of years later in the supermarket. “How are you enjoying the bike?” Pammy asked. “Dunno really. It’s at my sister’s. I think it’s in her shed,” came the unwelcome reply.

Pammy was so desperate for her (former) bike – her offspring – to be with a family that loved her, she wrote the lady a cheque there and then to buy the bike back for the original sale price. The beloved Trek was repatriated.

Yes, these are two extreme examples of passion but what if you could get your teams feeling and acting 10% of that level toward your products, your services, your clients? What would 50% look like?

Drucker’s infamous dictum goes along the lines of, ‘Business is all about finding and retaining customers.’ A fraction of the passion shown above would have your clients returning every time – the trouble is fostering it certainly isn’t child’s play.

How are you enabling your team to be passionate?

Nestle are used to their fair share of bad press; students the world over have seen to that. But March 2010 is when they will go into social media case study history.

For anyone who’s not read the full saga, here’s the short version: a video was staged which drew a play on eating Kit-Kat and orangutans’ fingers. Nestle had the video taken down but, of course, it reappeared. They chased it around the ‘net like a drunk trying to bath a cat and made life pretty miserable for themselves by fumbling over logo violations when Greenpeace were organised.

I’m struggling here between ethics and communication tactics. If you make a bad product – deem that as you will – then, with or without a great web interaction, you deserve to be called on it. But, lets assume you aren’t evil personified and you deserve your place in the world of commerce, what do you do when attacked online?

Despite what some experts portray, social media isn’t always a simple mirror, signal, manoeuvre affair. On top of the immense variables, there is the fear of inflaming situations, adding sugar to the fermenting jar that forums and blog comments can become. I don’t believe there is a definitive three, five or ten-point plan. Social media has only one absolute for all organisations: listening. If it’s nothing else for you, it’s an opportunity to listen.

That said, Seth Godin believes he’s got an answer: brands in public. He launched this aggregator back in September last year.

Strangely for a Godin fanboy I wasn’t convinced at launch. And after six months or so I can’t say I’m overly impressed with their client list – no Coke, no Cisco, no Microsoft, all of whom are being critiqued hugely online. If anything, is this not a $400/month garden where a bad ‘vibe’ can grow? From a brand manager’s standpoint, doesn’t she prefer any negatives to be disparate across the web, rather than collate neatly in one screenshot? Of course, the positives mentioned online will also look more powerful together.

Which brings us right back to our variables problem: join in and risk inflaming the situation or enter and solve problems with a swath of your service sword? The trouble is unless the Nestles of the world truly engage (as in adopt some of their philosophies, ecological or otherwise) with the likes of Greenpeace, they’re likely to find hugging a tree has morphed into overtaking a Facebook wall as the militant tool of choice.

But don’t be frozen by fear. The wonderful John Battelle at Federated Media recently wrote, “…all of our customers are already operating in social media. You can’t pretend otherwise. And it’s better to engage, make mistakes, admit those mistakes, and move on, than to not engage at all. I call this “conversational judo,” and suggest we all practice it, daily. Twice on Sunday, perhaps….”

Touché.

MPs have published a report this week, from the Business and Enterprise Committee, wagging fingers at Kraft for closing Somerdale after it promised otherwise.

Did anyone old enough to spell ‘business’ actually think Kraft weren’t going to slash costs as quickly as they could? As the song goes, the first cut is the deepest.

Does Mandelson et al actually believe Irene Rosenfeld – Kraft’s iron lady – cares one iota about what they do, let alone think? What possible retribution can they threaten her with? Perhaps they’re angling for an excutive discount at the latest coffee shops in town?

Westminster were stupid enough to believe the American’s rhetoric, now they’re scoring own goals by commissioning a report whose Executive Summary could read, “Hey everyone, we were naive schoolboys. Look at what the nasty business lady did under our noses.”

Mr Cameron has started his election campaign referring to the voting masses with the phrase “the great ignored” (stolen from Nixon’s silent majority). Maybe he was actually referring to the Business and Enterprise Committee.

Did we really need to spend money on this report? What’s the expression, ‘fool me once…?’

Photo is Irene Rosenfeld taken from Kraft’s site.

Why is it such a struggle to ask for help?

We want the best for our teams so we work hard. Sometimes we recognise that we’re not winning so we turn it up a notch and work even harder. But wait, that’s not working either.

At some point, we can see the failing – at least internally – but all too often we plough on with the bit between our teeth and nothing new in the arsenal that’ll change the situation. I bet you’ve seen it happen recently in your organisation.

It calls for something new. Some assistance. For the hubris to say, “I’m struggling with this project. Could I pick your brains for a minute?”

Help is the winner (and your team really want to win, don’t they?) so it’s counter intuitive not to seek it. But asking is the really painful bit. I don’t know about you, but I want to be asked rather than witness eleventh-hour meltdowns?

Shall we help them light the flare?

Photo credit: RNLI

Read a great article over on Inc. about Nick Sarillo and his pizza restaurants.

It tells about his unorthodox hiring process, about his talent development and his $200k consultant’s bill. But essentially, it’s about his business’s culture.

Culture is surely one of the most intangible aspects of business and as such can be the most frustrating. The culture can all too easily be clockwatching and pilfering in an entrenched oligopoly, but if you’re looking to push scale or improve net profits then you’ll find it almost impossible without the correct culture – whatever that is.

Culture in a company dictates whether you follow a 50,00 word business plan religiously or you hand the bank manager a one page outline of your ideas and put your best foot forward. Fred Goodwin’s culture of ‘win at all costs’ crippled RBS and Dick Fuld’s sent Lehman off the cliff. Culture is what Scorsese and Spielberg embody in their actors before letting them navigate a scene.

Isn’t this all really HR’s job? Well, I’m afraid I see too many organisations with HR departments that seem to treat their jobs in two facets: personnel operations coupled with a fear (and avoidance) of legal proceedings. Do you know many HR folk who treat their fellow employees like those at Nick’s Pizza & Pub? I’m sure you know more who would say that it’s not their remit, that line managers and supervisors should push those boundaries, not HR.

In an entrepreneurial business like Nick’s the form filling takes a distant second place to structure, satisfaction, autonomy and development. If your culture’s right then surely the marketing becomes the story of that result?

Image from Inc article here.