An established company which, in an age demanding
innovation, is not able to innovate, is doomed to decline and extinction.
Business has only two functions – marketing and innovation. All the rest are
costs.
The aim of marketing is to know and understand the
customer so well the product or service fits him and sells
itself.
The best way to predict the future is to create it.
Within five years, if you’re in the same business you are in now, you’re going to be out
of business.
The entrepreneur always searches for change,
responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.
…effective executives do not start out by looking at
weaknesses. You cannot build performance on
weaknesses. You can build only on strengths. Make weaknesses irrelevant.
We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process
of keeping abreast of change. And the most
pressing task is to teach people how to learn.
Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed,
nothing else can be managed.
Mentor Expertise Gifts
• Management thought leader• Strategic focus• Necessity of continual change• Lifetime learning
Conversations among the
members of your marketplace happen whether you like it or
not. Good marketing encourages the right sort of conversations.
Choose your customers. Fire
the ones that hurt your ability to deliver the right
story to the others.
In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is failing. In a busy marketplace, not standing out is the same as being
invisible.
The easiest thing is to react.
The second easiest is to respond.
But the hardest thing is to initiate.
Every interaction, every assignment, is a chance to
make a change, a chance to delight or surprise or to
touch someone.
Most organizations spend their time marketing to the crowd. Smart organizations
assemble the tribe.
The act of giving someone a smile, of connecting to a human, of
taking initiative, of being creative, of putting on a show – these are things that we do for free all our
lives. And then we get to work and we expect to merely do what we’re told and get paid for it.
Products that are remarkable get talked about.
Mentor Expertise Gifts
• Marketing thought leader• Leading edge thinking• Lead change• Make a difference
Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be.
Change, BEFORE you have to.
If you don’t have a competitive advantage,
don’t compete.
An organization’s ability to learn and translate that
learning into action rapidly is the ultimate competitive
advantage.
Giving people self confidence is by far the most important thing that I can do because
then they will act.
Globalization has changed us into a company that
searches the world, not just to sell or to source, but to
find intellectual capital – the world’s best talent and
greatest ideas.
The essence of competitiveness is liberated when we make people believe that what they think and
do is important – and then get out of their way while they do it.
Willingness to change is a strength, even if it means
plunging part of the company into total confusion
for a while.
Mentor Expertise Gifts
• Leadership• Change agent • Competition• Employee development
A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person.
You can earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.
The most important single thing is to focus obsessively on the customer. Our goal is to be earth’s most customer
centric company.
We were willing to go down a bunch of dark passageways
and occasionally we find something that really works.
Our point of view is we will sell more if we help people make purchasing decisions.
The internet in general and Amazon.com in particular, is
still in chapter one.
What’s dangerous is not to evolve.
Mentor Expertise Gifts
• Customer centric• Persistence• Experimentation• Not afraid of failure
Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn’t
what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was
how it worked.
A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to
connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The
broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design
we will have.
For something this complicated, it’s really hard to design
products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know
what they want until you show it to them.
That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to
work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there,
you can move mountains.
Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night
saying we’ve done something wonderful…
that’s what matters to me.
The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its
current predicament … May, 1999.
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow
connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut,
destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down,
and it has made all the difference in my life.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone
else's life.
I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-
successful ones is pure perseverance.
Mentor Expertise Gifts
• Creativity, innovation• Design• Simplicity focus• Passion
Final Thoughts
Continue your learning based on the lessons of these, and
your own, silent mentors
Never stop the learning process
About Dr. Schoultz
Dr. Schoultz has thirty five years of business development, marketing, technology, and business operations experience.
He served as VP / President of Distribution Technologies, a company he helped to found and grow to a 700 M + / year market leader.
Dr. Schoultz Ph. D. is from the University of Virginia.
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Digital Spark Marketing Consulting, LLC