Two Steves, One Legacy

You'd think he knew everybody in the world.

Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter were awash yesterday in black turtlenecks and sombre RIPs as the news of Steve Jobs' passing spread like wildfire across the globe.

Grown men admitted to crying. Skeptics found strange praise peppering their commentary.  People who had never met Steve, felt as if a close friend had died.  Such was the influence of the man, through the iconic products he unleashed on an unsuspecting world, that changed our world forever.

I'm one of the few people I know who's never owned a Mac. (Eight years at HP and another three at Lenovo have left me not so much brandwashed as psychologically challenged at stumping for one of Steve's sleek machines.) Yet I've willingly bought MacBooks for the rest of my family. And vividly recall the day I caught grief at the office when I brought a MacBook box to a team meeting and challenged them to design packaging that was half as elegant. 

Steve cared about the little things, you see. He possessed an uncanny ability to look at his company's products from the outside in. He believed that "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." 

So do I think this is the end of an era, and the beginning of a slippery slide for Apple?

Well, yes and no.  There will never be another Steve. They broke the mold when his birth was done. Nobody else, I daresay, will approach his (her) life's work with the clarity of vision, the power of purpose, the instinctive decision-making and tolerance for risk-taking as Steve possessed.

But, as Steve said 10 years ago, "You’re missing it. This is not a one-man show. What’s reinvigorating this company is two things: One, there’s a lot of really talented people in this company who listened to the world tell them they were losers for a couple of years, and some of them were on the verge of starting to believe it themselves. But they’re not losers. What they didn’t have was a good set of coaches, a good plan. A good senior management team. They have that now."

The legendary CEO left more than an able deputy to take over the reins when he relinquished his position, with impeccable timing. Steve etched an imprint of his values along the hallways of 1 Infinite Loop. His persona is indelibly seared into the personality of the company. His spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple.

Today, I also think about another Steve. (Sorry, it's not Wozniak.)  Steve Prefontaine was arguably the greatest American middle-distance runner in history who, at the height of his career, held every American track & field record from the 2,000 metres to the 10,000 metres. He was recruited to the University of Oregon in 1969 and trained under legendary track coach Bill Bowerman, who had just founded a running shoe company called Blue Ribbon Sports with Phil Knight, a solid if not spectacular athlete under his charge. (In 1978, the company was renamed Nike.)

"Pre", as he was affectionately called, was an aggressive runner, insisting on going out hard right from the gun, and not relinquishing leads. He once famously said,  "I'm going to work so hard that it becomes a pure guts race. If I can do that, at the end, I'll be the only one who can win it". And win races he did... by hanging on while others faltered and faded. His rare defeats included the thrilling 5,000m final at the 1972 Munich Olympics -- a race he led until the last 150m when he was passed by hard-charging Lasse Viren, Mohammed Gammoudi and Ian Stewart. 

Stadiums would erupt with cheers whenever Pre stepped onto the track. You couldn't help but watch Pre run with your heart in your mouth: He was totally committed in every race; 100% in. He liked to say, "To give anything less than your best, is to sacrifice your gift."

Pre died in 1975 in a tragic car accident, on his way home from a party. He was 24 years old.

Such was the loss to the racing community, and the strength of his personal brand, that roadside memorials sprang up spontaneously. Two movies and a documentary were made about him. And Nike's leaders, who instinctively understood the enduring appeal of his humanity, created TV spots and named a building in their Beaverton headquarters after him. Pre stood for the triumph of the human spirit; and inspired a whole generation of Nike employees to regard their work and their products with more purpose and meaning.

Two Steves, with one legacy: They stood for something, and burned bright. Each in his own time made a difference in his world.  And the brands they are associated with, the people who have been inspired by them, are the better for it.

Creating a Lighthouse Identity

I lived and worked in Canada for a time in the early 1990s. For over six years, Vancouver was my home; and for a third of that time, I used to commute to work, an hour each way, along a coastal road to my office downtown. A lighthouse dotted a rocky outcrop along my route; and I remember wondering what it would be like to trade places with the lighthouse master for a week. After a month or so, I stopped gazing at the lighthouse as I drove past: I knew it was there, and I knew that it signalled I was only 10 minutes from home.

As we put to bed a tumultuous 2009 and gird ourselves for the year ahead, we should give a thought ourselves to polishing and projecting a Lighthouse Identity -- for the brands under our charge as well as our own personal brands. We should strive to be -- and care for -- brands with a clear sense of who they are, and what they stand for. Brands with a true north, that aren't swayed by market forces, that compel others to navigate by them because they are anchored in constancy and consistency.

Adam Morgan lays out the credo of building a lighthouse identity in his seminal book Eating The Big Fish. It's very good; read it.

2010 will usher in a sea of change. To survive and thrive, we need a firm foundation, a bedrock of values for ourselves and our brands that will stand the test of time.

Happy new year, and may your light shine as you strive to 'keep it visible'.

Scarred for Life by a Moment's Folly

Reputation, like credibility, is something that is earned over time. It does not come with the job or title. It is built, day by day, brick by brick. Yet a moment's folly can bring down a lifetime's work.

Just ask Thierry Henry. A professional soccer player, and the most capped and highest scorer in French history, Henry knows just how much it's taken to put together a 15-year body of work that's brought him away from a childhood of poverty to his stratospheric standing - as of last month -- at the pinnacle of soccer immortality.

But that edifice was dealt a severe body blow just over a week ago during a critical World Cup second leg qualifying match against Ireland. With the aggregate score tied at 1-1 and the game in injury time, Henry handled the ball twice with his hand before delivering a cross to William Gallas to score the winning goal for France and send Ireland tumbling out of the World Cup finals in 2010.

Was it an instinctive, accidental handball? Probably. No less a soccer legend than Pele has come out to publicly defend Henry. And the man did lobby for the match to be replayed -- albeit a day later. But all this is scant consolation for the Irish -- some of whose players have lost their only reasonable chance of playing in a World Cup finals.

What Henry should have done -- and what he'll regret not doing for the rest of his life -- is stop the match and overrule the referee. There's been ample precedence in the annals of sport.

In Mats Wilander's very first semi-final appearance in a Grand Slam tennis event (the 1982 French Open), Wilander overruled the chair in a call on match point, giving another lease of life to Jose Luis Clerc. Interviewed after the match (which he eventually claimed), he said, "I didn't want to win like that." For the record, Wilander went on to the win the event, the first of his 7 Grand Slams.

Thierry Henry's personal brand took a severe beating that fateful day -- one from which he may never recover. Instead of Kaka and Messi, his name is going to be more linked with Maradona, the original 'hand of God' perpetrator whose disputed goal helped Argentina beat England 2-1 in the 1986 World Cup quarter-final.

Great brands -- corporate and personal -- hold themselves to high(er) standards. They know that faith is hard won, but easily lost. In a Premier Leage match between West Ham and Everton in 2000, Everton goalie Paul Gerrard went down injured in the penalty box in the dying minutes of the game. Unfortunately, play went on, and the ball got crossed to West Ham's Paulo Di Canio in front of an open goal. Instead of tapping it in, Di Canio caught the ball, and signalled that Gerrard needed attention. The crowd gave him a standing ovation.

We should all be so blessed to have the same presence of mind in such a defining moment.

What Do You Stand For?

Yesterday I attended a TED talk -- the first of its kind organized by the TED community (http://www.tedxsingapore.com/) in our island nation -- and learned about aerialist Ueli Gegenschatz, expert paraglider, skydiver and base-jumper extraordinaire. The audience was treated to video footage of his jaw-dropping flights in a wingsuit: a high-tech, flying-squirrel-inspired getup that enabled him to soar as close as humanly possible to our shared dream of human flight. (To view his 12-minute TED talk including a clip of his daredevil wingsuited jump, click on http://www.ted.com/talks/ueli_gegenschatz_extreme_wingsuit_jumping.html

In an accompanying clip of an interview with Ueli, he mentioned plans were in motion for his next record-setting endeavour. It was only when the clip ended that we were told Ueli is no longer with us. On 11th November, he had attempted a base jump off the Sunrise Tower in Zurich. A gust of wind hit him, casuign him to lose control of his jump. His parachute failed to deploy in time and he hit the ground almost at full speed, seriously injuring himself. He died in hospital two days later.

We made out worksheets into paper planes this morning; and on the count of three, 200 winged prayers launched across the SMU hall in celebration of the life of a man who dared to dream, stood for something, and pursued it with all the God-given talent he had been blessed with.

Now, some might question the wisdom of this extreme sport and say he brought his end upon himself, pushing his luck too far in pursuit of, what -- an adrenaline rush? Fame? (Certainly not fortune.) A few might quote Einstein: "Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile."

I think, however, that Ueli lived by the discipline of operating within boundaries he felt he could control. At 11:45 of the TED clip, he was asked if there is anything he would not attempt, and his answer was spontaneous, "Yeah, some people have crazy ideas ...!" Ueli had a finely honed sense of what he was put on this earth for -- and in his own way, he inspired countless others to find and pursue their purpose in life. As Abraham Lincoln said, "It's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years."

How many of us are honing our personal brands with such clarity, consistency and visibility?