Leadership Q&A: Guy Kawasaki

Guy Kawasaki is best known as the former chief evangelist for Apple, having worked for the company between 1984 and 1987 and then again for a stint in the mid-nineties. These days, a great many people —400,000 at last count—consider him worth following on Twitter. He also co-founded Garage Technology Ventures and i “online magazine rack” Alltop.com. The resident of Palo Alto, Calif., is also the author of 10 books on technology and marketing, the most recent titled Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Actions. Canadian Business western editor Michael McCullough caught up with Kawasaki at the Art of Marketing conference on June 9 in Vancouver.

CB: What’s the most important skill for a leader to have?

GK: The most important skill is to be able to shut up and listen to customers, vendors and employees. It’s a rare skill.

CB: What mistake taught you the most in life?

GK: I was once asked if I wanted to interview for the CEO position of Yahoo, as the first CEO of Yahoo. I turned that down. And I left Apple twice. If I had stayed at Apple either of those times, you might have the Guy Kawasaki San Jose Sharks today. They [these mistakes] taught me that I’m stupid (laughs). They taught me that life goes on, A. And B, people think they can just plan their life out. They see an end point and they see a direct path to it. I think that’s not at all true. I’m 56 years old today. If you were to take me back in time and say, ‘You’re a high-school senior, or a college senior: predict your path.’ I would say, ‘I’m going to New York,’ and end up in Buenos Aires. It would be so different. Decisions take you to places you never anticipated. One lesson is to stay flexible.

CB: What’s the biggest challenge facing your business today?

GK: I’d say the challenge is always producing great content—on Twitter, Facebook, blogging or writing books. It’s not easy to keep coming up with content.

CB: What quality do you most value in an employee? And conversely, what quality do you value least?

GK: I would value most the willingness to grind it out—that is, to just work hard. The least? Well, I can’t stand sucking up. I don’t like people who suck up, to me or anybody, really.

CB: What was the last book you read?

GK: Let me get my iPad. I can’t remember. I just read it last night. If you think it’s going to be highbrow literature I’m going to disappoint you. It’s called The Shop. It’s one of these mystery-thrillers. That’s the kind of books I read.

CB: Why should organizations bother with enchantment? There are companies that people hate that have been very successful.

GK: First of all, I’m not saying that every company has to be enchanting. It is one method to success. You could be operationally very efficient, you could have a monopoly—there are other ways to achieve success. So this is but one way. I think the beauty of enchantment is if you have this deep, mutually beneficial and voluntary relationship with customers, than life just gets easier. It’s easier to sell them more stuff. It’s easier to take care of them. You don’t have to be angry and defensive all the time. It just takes less energy to be enchanting. You might think it would take more energy, but I think when you add it all up, it’s easier.

CB: One of the components of building that, you talk about having a cause. Doesn’t that set you up for criticism down the road? Look at Google’s ‘don’t be evil’ mantra.

GK: Don’t confuse causes with slogans. I think the cause of Google is to democratize information. Initially they did it by putting together a better way to search for and find information. And with Analytics they found a way to democratize web information. And with their scanning the book project, that’s obviously to democratize information. The reason why Google exists is to democratize information. You don’t start a company for the purpose of not doing evil. That may be a value you espouse, but that’s not why customers buy AdSense. It’s because they democratize information. I think that’s a cause. Apple [by contrast] increases people’s creativity and productivity.

CB: Were you with Apple in the down years, in the 1990s?

GK: Yes. You could say I caused the down years (laughs).

CB: What do you see as the issue going on there?

GK: One of them was overcoming resistance to change. In a sense it’s overcoming resistance to enchantment. People just thought that MS-DOS was good enough. Those people who questioned it at all thought it was good enough. People either were in no position or did not care to question it. One of the lessons that I learned is the best widget doesn’t win, or not necessarily. You’d think that if you had something much more innovative it would be easy but it’s actually harder. You have to overcome more resistance.

CB: So you’re saying the resistance was in the buying public. It wasn’t in Apple.

GK: Not to say Apple was faultless but it did create a good operating system. It did what it had to do. It was just resistance to change. The status quo is the status quo because it’s usually good enough.

CB: Do you think people are more comfortable with the flow of technology now? They don’t expect their appliance to work for them for another 20 years?

GK: So they know going in that things are going to change? I think that’s probably true. Although I could also make the case that there’s been less change. The difference between Apple II and MS-DOS and MS-DOS and Mac—those were leaps in differences. The difference between Windows and MacIntosh? It’s getting harder and harder. The difference between each version of MacIntosh? Those things are incremental changes. It’s settled down a bit, and with the Internet, you never hear about these wars between MS-DOS and MacIntosh. These used to be holy wars. You don’t hear that any more. I think it’s because the Web is this great equalizer. What’s it matter once you can get to a Web page? It doesn’t matter what OS it is. So that’s settled down, and to Apple’s credit in the meantime it’s changed the front of the war to smartphones. Apple’s not trying to convert you from computer to smartphone; they actually want you to buy both. That’s what makes Apple so enchanting: you buy a MacIntosh and next thing you’re buying an iPhone, iPad, iPod, iEverything. That’s enchanting. Most computer companies sell you one thing and pray you come back in four years.

CB: What are the products or brands or companies that are most enchanting to you right now?

GK: I say that there are three pillars of enchantment: trustworthiness, likability and quality. So for trustworthiness I’d say Zappos, because it has convinced women to buy shoes without trying them on. For likability I would say Virgin. Richard Branson specifically is a very likable CEO. And quality would be Apple.

CB: Has the BlackBerry lost its power to enchant?

GK: I don’t know if it was ever enchanting as much as—I don’t mean this as a negative—it was such a good utility. It had a good keyboard and you got messages instantly. You could make the case today that the ability to enter text on a BlackBerry is superior to on an iPhone.

CB: So its edge was never one of enchantment.

GK: I don’t think so. It was just extremely practical, which is not the same as enchanting.

CB: You don’t sound like a details guy. How was it for you to be a hands-on CEO? You’ve started a number of companies.

GK: Actually, I’m a very hands-on guy. I don’t consider myself a visionary at all. I don’t consider myself a big-picture person. The secret to my success is grinding it out. That’s why I appreciate people who grind it out.

CB: It seems like the marketing industry is split into two with a digital side and a traditional marketing and strategy side. Clients don’t seem to trust either one to manage the whole job. What do you see unfolding? Will the digital companies buy up the ad agencies or vice-versa?

GK: If we go back 15 years in time, many people were asking, ‘Why should I have a website? What is this Internet thing? I have Yellow Pages. I have print advertising. I have Super Bowl commercials. The people on the Internet are geeks and scientists. They’re not mainstream. It’s not suitable for business to business.’ All that kind of stuff. We’re probably at that stage now with social media. I don’t think a few years from now you’re going to have social media and then there’s marketing. It’s just going to be marketing. The companies and agencies that are still around, they will be combined.

CB: Or will brands be managed in-house like Apple or, to use a local example, Lululemon?

GK: Apple’s a bad example because Apple is an anti-social company. There is no Twitter account, there’s no Facebook, there’s no blog, nothing. Apple is anti-social. So Apple is not doing anything—agency or in-house. If you look at the big brands, the ones I consider doing it well, Virgin America does it internally. Ford does it internally. Comcast does it internally. Dell does it internally. I hesitate to recommend that people abdicate social media to an agency. Agencies can accelerate and supplement and help, but social media should come from the soul of a company rather than whomever you can retain.

CB: That said, for somebody entering the marketing profession right now, where’s the best place to make an impact? 

GK: If you’re trying to break into this industry, you’ll take whatever you can get. I think they would learn more and faster working inside a corporation than working at an agency because the nature of an agency is you have the rainmaker, the rainmaker comes to the first couple of meetings, says, ‘We have this great team behind you. We understand your business,’ then—boom—you don’t see him again. Then the real work is given to the young, less experienced people and they sort of muddle through. I’m painting a bad picture here, but they’re not at the core of Ford or Virgin America. They’re not living, breathing this thing every day. They are an agency. You may see Richard Branson once in a while. You might hear from his lieutenants. But that’s not the same as being inside Virgin.

CB: When did you start tweeting? Or did you have all these followers before on a blog?

GK: When I first saw Twitter I thought it was the stupidest thing I ever saw because it’s total strangers tweeting about their cats rolling over, which I could care less. I started about three and a half years ago, and Twitter is five years old so I was not an early adopter. What turned me on to Twitter was that after a couple of weeks I figured out what’s really interesting about Twitter is searching, not Tweeting. You can search for your name, you can search for your competitor, and then you can tweet to react. When people signed up for Twitter there was a suggested user list. As the registration process proceeded there was a point where it said, ‘We suggest you follow these 50 people,’ and there was a huge button that said, ‘Accept.’ It was a tiny button that said, ‘No, skip this and go on.’ So guess what? Everybody clicked on accept. And that’s how Britney Spears got five million followers, because most people didn’t know they were following her. I wasn’t one of those. If you were one of those you kind of got as a gift millions of followers. I have between my two main accounts about 400,000 followers. Every one of those was hand-to-hand combat. Arguably I did it the hard way. The way I got followers was because I had 20 years of reputation in the high-tech business.