Steve Jobs – More than just one story

We are strong believers that many stories make up your personal brand or company brand …not just one.  It is a subject I explored in a previous post ‘The Yeti and the Brand Story’ and was reminded of again when I read a recent Smart Company article on ‘The Five Best Steve Job Anecdotes’.

This article recounts five anecdotes from Steve Jobs that collectively show you the type of man he was.

Such as this one when Jobs was shown a prototype of the iPad and complained it was too big.

“After the engineers said they couldn’t make the device any smaller, Jobs took the iPad over to an aquarium, and promptly dropped it in. “These are air bubbles,” he said. “That means there’s space in there. Make it smaller.”

To this story that showed Job’s attention to detail:

“Google senior vice president of social business Vic Gundotra wrote recently on Google+ that once in 2008, he was sitting in a religious service on a Sunday when he received a call from an unmarked number. It was Jobs, leaving a message saying he had something urgent to discuss.  When he called him back, Jobs said the issue was urgent, and that he needed it addressed right away. In fact, he had already assigned someone on the task.

“I’ve been looking at the Google logo on the iPhone and I’m not happy with the icon. The second O in Google doesn’t have the right yellow gradient. It’s just wrong and I’m going to have Greg fix it tomorrow. Is that okay with you?”

To this story about the issues with Mobile Me which was Apple’s first venture into the cloud.

“It didn’t work properly and didn’t deliver as promised. Jobs was unimpressed. According to a Fortune article published earlier this year, Jobs gathered all the people responsible for Mobile Me at the company’s Town Hall, and told them they were “tarnishing Apple’s reputation”. He even said they “should hate each other for having let each other down”.

“Can anyone tell me what Mobile Me is supposed to do?” he asked. When someone answered, he said, “So why the f&*% doesn’t it do that?”

“Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering,” he said.

Hearing one of those stories in isolation would give you a limited insight into Steve Job’s the man, Steve Job’s the professional CEO and Steve’s Job the entrepreneur.  It is the combination of not only these three stories but all the stories being shared that create the Steve Jobs brand. 

All of us and the world are diminished by his passing.

Who else wants to raise millions of dollars?

I read with interest in a recent Smart Company post about Ernst and Young’s nominees for Entrepreneur of the year.  The research presented some surprising facts such as 60% of Entrepreneurs start off working in corporates.  It also revealed some not so surprising facts.

“Not surprisingly, funding, people and know-how presented the biggest barriers to entrepreneurial success. The difficult funding environment lends way to entrepreneurs building “ecosystems” – networks of resources – to address the barriers.”

There is another way to address the barrier of funding and let’s explain that through one of our clients success story.

Greg McClardie may be a familiar name to you as he featured with us in a BRW June 2009 Imagine That  in June 2009.  Greg needed to raise 37 million dollars for his venture aimed at consolidating the abalone industry.  When Greg came to us in 2006 he had a sound and logical business case but was frustrated with the reluctance of venture capitalists in coming on board.  He felt he had the sound logic but in his own words ‘something was missing’ …and something was missing.  Greg’s entire presentations to venture capitalists was focused on presenting the logical data.  It lacked emotional connection.

Greg’s passion was evident to us but he needed a way to get that across effectively and purposefully in his pitches for funding.  We helped Greg develop three types of purposeful business stories that he weaved throughout his presentations and he achieved immediate success.

Greg raised the $37 million dollars he needed and has recently used further stories to raise further funds to secure his second multimillion-dollar venture.

Greg is a great example of how using business storytelling purposefully and skillfully can help overcome one of the biggest challenges entrepreneurs face …raising funds.

The Yeti and the Brand Story

There is a giant hairy, ape like creature known as the Yeti, or Abominable Snowman believed to be roaming in the Himalayan Mountains.  In Tibet, the word Yeti means “magical creature”.  Many attempts have been made to find this magical creature, including Sir Edmund Hilary’s 10-month expedition in 1960.  His attempts and all others have failed.  Many people claimed to have seen the Yeti; scratchy photos exist and large foot prints have been discovered.  Many believe that it is not one creature but many creatures including a gibbon type ape and the rare Tibetan Blue bear.

So the Yeti remains a legend because like the Loch Ness monster, there is no firm evidence to support its existence. 

Similar expeditions for a ‘magical creature’ are swirling around us in the business world.  Organisations invest time and resources looking for their ‘brand story’.  The single magical story that explains who they are, what they do and why.

Over the last 12 months the most frequent question we are asked is ‘Can you help us develop our brand story?’  It is time to burst that bubble, like the Yeti, it doesn’t exist.  There isn’t one ‘magical story’ but many real stories.

There are many definitions of what brand is and here is one we are putting on the table.  Simply stated ‘Your brand is the stories people share about their experiences with your company, your people and your products’.  These stories could be about poor service or clumsy products or they could be about amazing products that have been life changing, think iPhone.

A company cannot hope to communicate its brand through one single story.  Brand is communicated through many stories.  Collectively these stories are your brand and it is the stories lots and lots of them (not one) that convert what David Ogilvy’s (who was known as The Father of Advertising) defined as the intangibles of a brand into tangibles.

So just like the Yeti, the magical brand story may be out there, we are not saying it isn’t.  But there is no convincing evidence of its existence.  Companies may be better off focusing their expeditions on looking for real creatures.  How many exist in your organisation?  Real stories do exist, they just need to be found and shared…..or you can keep looking for the Yeti.

Check out part two of this post – Push Pull Story Strategy

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