The Steve Jobs Way - iLeadership for a New Generation

Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.

At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology. He built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering.  

Although Jobs cooperated with this book, he asked for no control over what was written nor even the right to read it before it was published. He put nothing off-limits. He encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. And Jobs speaks candidly, sometimes brutally so, about the people he worked with and competed against. His friends, foes, and colleagues provide an unvarnished view of the passions, perfectionism, obsessions, artistry, devilry, and compulsion for control that shaped his approach to business and the innovative products that resulted.

"There are three pillars of enchantment: likability, trustworthiness, and quality. The Apple experience is the best modern-day example of all three pillars. Carmine's book will help you understand and implement the same kind of world-class experience."
--Guy Kawasaki, author of Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions and former chief evangelist of Apple

"Carmine Gallo explains beautifully and simply just what makes the Apple retail experience so successful. No matter what kind of business you are in, there are insanely valuable lessons in this book!"
--Garr Reynolds, best-selling author of Presentation Zen and The Naked Presenter

"The Apple Experience isn't just for retailers. It applies to any business that involves people. At its core, this book is not about Apple. It's about delivering the best experience possible." --Tony Hsieh, New York Times bestselling author of Delivering Happiness and CEO of Zappos.com, Inc.

"An exciting resource for any business owner in any country who wants to reimagine the customer experience."
--Loic Le Meur, CEO, LeWeb

"Why can't other retail experiences be as great as an Apple store's? Not only does Carmine Gallo answer that question brilliantly, but he shows precisely how to make sure your customers never ask it about your business."
--Matthew E. May, author of In Pursuit of Elegance and The Laws of Subtraction

"Carmine Gallo gets to the magic of Steve Jobs: Touching people's lives. This simple, yet delightful vision should be at the heart of every retail interaction in the world today."
--Peter Steinlauf, Chairman, Edmunds.com

"This magnificent collection of insights illuminates the way for anyone who wants to create a truly great experience, whether in retail, service, or software. "
--Dan Roam, author of The Back of the Napkin and Blah Blah Blah

Reinvent your business to deliver Apple-like customer satisfaction and profits

Carmine Gallo interviewed professionals at all levels who have studied Apple, and he spent hundreds of hours observing the selling floor in Apple’s retail space and learning about Apple’s vision and philosophy. Using insights and data from these sources, he breaks down Apple’s customercentric model to provide an action plan with three distinct areas of focus:

• Inspire Your Internal Customer with training, support, and communications that create a “feedback loop” for improving performance at every level
• Serve Your External Customer with irresistible brand stories and dedicated salespeople who embody the APPLE five steps of service-- Approach, Probe, Present, Listen, End with a fond farewell
• Set the Stage by ensuring that no element is overlooked in creating an immersive retail environment where customers can see, touch, and learn about your products

With The Apple Experience, you can improve the return on your investment in retail by adding real value to every customer interaction. Better still, any business that deals with people--employees or customers--can adopt the techniques to achieve Apple-like market dominance by enriching lives, building loyalty, and reimagining the customer experience.

Carmine Gallo is the communications coach for the world’s most admired global brands. A former anchor and correspondent for CNN and CBS, Gallo is a popular keynote speaker and has worked with executives at Intel, Cisco, Chevron, Hewlett-Packard, Coca-Cola, Pfizer, and many others. Gallo writes “My Communications Coach,” a regular column for Forbes.com. He has written several internationally bestselling and award--winning books, including The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs, The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, and The Power of foursquare. Gallo has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and Success magazine and on CNBC. He lives in Pleasanton, California, with his wife and two daughters.

Decline can be avoided.

Decline can be detected.

Decline can be reversed.

Amidst the desolate landscape of fallen great companies, Jim Collins began to wonder: How do the mighty fall? Can decline be detected early and avoided? How far can a company fall before the path toward doom becomes inevitable and unshakable? How can companies reverse course?

In How the Mighty Fall, Collins confronts these questions, offering leaders the well-founded hope that they can learn how to stave off decline and, if they find themselves falling, reverse their course. Collins' research project-more than four years in duration-uncovered five step-wise stages of decline:

Stage 1: Hubris Born of Success

Stage 2: Undisciplined Pursuit of More

Stage 3: Denial of Risk and Peril

Stage 4: Grasping for Salvation

Stage 5: Capitulation to Irrelevance or Death

By understanding these stages of decline, leaders can substantially reduce their chances of falling all the way to the bottom.

Great companies can stumble, badly, and recover.

Every institution, no matter how great, is vulnerable to decline. There is no law of nature that the most powerful will inevitably remain at the top. Anyone can fall and most eventually do. But, as Collins' research emphasizes, some companies do indeed recover-in some cases, coming back even stronger-even after having crashed into the depths of Stage 4.

Decline, it turns out, is largely self-inflicted, and the path to recovery lies largely within our own hands. We are not imprisoned by our circumstances, our history, or even our staggering defeats along the way. As long as we never get entirely knocked out of the game, hope always remains. The mighty can fall, but they can often rise again.

The South is no longer the "swing" region in American politics -- it has swung to the Republicans. Most of the South is beyond the Democrats' reach, and what remains is moving steadily into the Republican column. The twin effects of race and religion produce a socially conservative, electorally hostile environment for most Democratic candidates. What's wrong with Kansas is even more wrong in the South, where cultural issues matter most to voters.

Yet far too many politicians and pundits still subscribe to the idea that Democrats must recapture the South. This southern nostalgia goes beyond sentimentality: It is a dangerously self-destructive form of political myopia which, uncorrected, will only relegate the Democrats to minority-party status for a generation. The notion that Democrats should pin their hopes for revival on the tail of a southern donkey is no less absurd than witnessing the children's variant of the party game, for both involve desperate attempts to hit elusive targets while wandering around blindfolded.

Meanwhile, political attitudes and demographic changes in other parts of the country are more favorable to Democratic messages and messengers. The Midwest and Southwest are the nation's most competitive regions. There are opportunities to expand Democratic margins in the Mountain red states while consolidating control over the reliably blue northeastern and Pacific coast states. Before dreaming of fortynine-state presidential landslides like those of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, the Democrats ought to first figure out how to win twenty-nine states. And that means capturing Arizona -- or even Alaska -- before targeting Alabama.

Republicans cannot win without the South, Schaller argues, but they also can't win with the South alone. Much as Democrats were confined to the South for decades prior to the New Deal, the Democrats should South but little else. After winning and governing successfully elsewhere, Democrats can then present their record of achievement to the South -- the nation's most conservative region, but one that is steadily assimilating with the politics of the rest of America and, therefore, will become more competitive in the future.

But for now, Democrats must put strategy ahead of sentimentality. To form a new and enduring majority coalition, they must whistle past their electoral graveyard. They must whistle past Dixie.

The Wall Street Journal Bestseller!

Updated to include Steve Jobs's iPad and iPad2 launch presentations

“The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs reveals the operating system behind any great presentation and provides you with a quick-start guide to design your own passionate interfaces with your audiences.”
—Cliff Atkinson, author of Beyond Bullet Points and The Activist Audience

Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs’s wildly popular presentations have set a new global gold standard—and now this step-by-step guide shows you exactly how to use his crowd-pleasing techniques in your own presentations.

The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs is as close as you'll ever get to having the master presenter himself speak directly in your ear. Communications expert Carmine Gallo has studied and analyzed the very best of Jobs's performances, offering point-by-point examples, tried-and-true techniques, and proven presentation secrets in 18 "scenes," including:

• Develop a messianic sense of purpose
• Reveal the Conquering hero
• Channel your inner Zen
• Stage your presentation with props
• Make it look effortless

With this revolutionary approach, you’ll be surprised at how easy it is to sell your ideas, share your enthusiasm, and wow your audience the Steve Jobs way.

“No other leader captures an audience like Steve Jobs does and, like no other book, The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs captures the formula Steve uses to enthrall audiences.”
—Rob Enderle, The Enderle Group

“Now you can learn from the best there is—both Jobs and Gallo. No matter whether you are a novice presenter or a professional speaker like me, you will read and reread this book with the same enthusiasm that people bring to their iPods."
—David Meerman Scott, bestselling author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR and World Wide Rave