From the perspective of any modern corporation, Steve Jobs was a misfit and never should have made it to the top of the world’s largest technology company.  Compared to his peers at AT&T, RIM, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Samsung, LG, Lucent, Nokia, and even Google, one of these things is not like the others.  These people, while they are for the most part talented managers and/or innovators, are not brave and unconventional visionaries questioning — and challenging — the status quo.  The template of a contemporary CEO simply does not apply to Jobs.. yet it is safe to say that he created more shareholder value during his split tenure at the helm of Apple than all of these combined.

Jobs doesn’t fit as CEO material because, as I wrote a few years ago, the design of corporations systemically weeds out and ultimately purges people like Steve Jobs, tending to favour evolution over revolution; hedgehogs over foxes.  Insodoing these institutions prefer making incremental steps toward that which can be known and quantified versus embracing risk and opportunity to make great leaps forward.  HP or Microsoft would never have brought us the iPod.  Certainly not the iPhone.  And the efforts of Apple’s competitors in the tablet space?  Hmph.

The lesson with the greatest gravitas from Steve Jobs’ famous 2005 Commencement Address is in my opinion the following:

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.

So what made Steve special is that, having ascended to the top of the technology industry ecosystem, he was seemingly a fluke.  Those dots — The iPod led to the iTunes Music Store and to a flattening of media distribution and to the iPhone and iPad and beyond — all connected back to a single leap where a computer company decided to sell some portable music devices and see what happened.  Jobs made big bets all the way along and knew that the dots would somehow connect down the road, and staked his personal and corporate reputation on quality in every regard.  No focus group or market research could have supported the decision to place these bets, and so no other CEO did.

Many of us think that we have the courage to make big bets.  Far fewer among us are given the resources and leeway to execute these broadly.  Still fewer among those are actually successful in both ideation and execution.  Steve Jobs danced on that razor’s edge and always came away unscathed, teaching us all that it can be done and that the rewards for success await.

Steve Jobs created new markets and made us crave things we didn’t know we would need; he helped us consume information and ideas in ways we never knew we could; he literally tore apart the media business and set forth reshaping it to be more consumer-friendly.  All the while he dazzled us with things which are ‘insanely great’ like a magician entertaining a crowd of transfixed six-year-olds.

The saddest aspect of Steve Jobs’ passing is simply that without him it will be a long time before a similar revolutionary will ascend the treacherous climes of corporataucracy to lead another hugely successful company to create things which dazzle and inspire us.  If ever.

Here’s hoping there’s another Steve in the wings somewhere.  Until then, we’ll likely have to make do with a whole lot less magic in our world.

The company’s angst, I believe, stems fundamentally from the fact that Apple and other vendors have come to understand that increasingly mobile phones are a consumer purchase decision, and not a corporate one.  And when people can choose, they choose the products they fetishize.  And no one has captured the consumer market’s imagination like Apple, with the iPhone and iPad.  But you, dear reader, already know all of this.

I firmly believe that any turnaround involves deep pain and difficult choices, and I have not seen any sincere effort by the co-CEOs (and now co-COOs) of RIM to make these decisions and brace for the sting.  In fact, judging by their actions it’s not even clear that Messers Balsillie and Lazaridis actually agree with the prevailing notion that there actually is anything wrong with their company.  These layoffs and strategic pronouncements feel mostly like lip service.

At any rate, in the unlikely event that I were to suddenly become the CEO of RIM, a company that is about 1,300 times larger than my own modest startup, here is what I would do:

1. Split the company in two.
   RIM is really the composite of two companies — network and messaging services for carriers and consumers, and smartphones which we users decreasingly hold in our hands.  For the majority of RIM’s lifecycle these two components were strategically and inextricably bound — cool devices with unique features drove demand for the services carriers needed to obtain in order to be able to fulfill that demand, and thus sell more devices — however now that RIM’s infiltration of the carrier market is largely ubiquitous that delta into the mobile network needs to be taken in two directions.  The devices and the network services are now loosely coupled, and the need to tie them together feels more like an albatross.  In order to progress on both fronts these cannot be constrained by the need to support the other’s objectives.
2. Kill the Playbook.
   I’m really not sure why anyone would enter a race not intending to take a stab at winning it.  We have lived with the PlayBook for months now and it still doesn’t have an email client — akin to BMW selling a car without an accelerator pedal.   It is clear to all that aside from the potential for limited enterprise and government sales there is very little chance for the Playbook market to expand.  It has no raison d’etre; no killer app; no je ne sais quoi.  Apparently RIM doesn’t sais quoi either, as the Product Manager for the Playbook and the one of company’s VPs of Marketing have just quit — not a good sign.  As far as branding and marketing is concerned, the Playbook is an attention and messaging sinkhole; and it almost certainly has distracted R&D, preventing RIM from building an iPhone competitor that we could get behind.
3. Focus on 3rd-party developers.
   It would be impossible to deny that much of the demand for iOS is driven by the myriad things that one can do with an iPhone or iPad.  In fact, the iPhone is actually quite a terrible telephonic device, with a bad chipset choice and terrible RF engineering, and it’s consistently suffered supply chain problems as Apple struggles to keep up with demand.  None of these issues matters.  Most iPhone apps suck.  But they suck a lot more on Blackberries, where they exist there at all.  Developers have to run a gauntlet of a horrifically bad developer ecosystem, fragmentation (the need to have multiple versions of each app) that reminds most of us of J2ME, a distribution system which is spotty, and even an enterprise policy shield which allows IT managers to lock down phones and prevent apps from being installed.  If I see an iPhone in someone’s hand I know I can get the ONE version of our app onto it.  If I see a Blackberry in someone’s hand the odds of that user being able to get and run our app may be as low as 3 in 10.
4. Understand that BlackBerry Messenger, and messaging, is the company’s strategic future and open it up to other platforms.
   RIM fears cross-platform messaging apps like Kik and WhatsApp enough to take steps toward actively blocking them.  However nothing could possibly be more powerful, or useful, than a cross-platform BlackBerry Messenger network.  This could subsume the lowly phone number as a primary identifier for communications, and subvert the wireless carriers in a way that Apple has actually been executing on much more poorly than you’d expect.  As part of this strategy I would help the company understand that messaging is not simply “WHAT R U DOING LOL” messages flying back and forth, but also includes Push Notifications for apps, call setup requests, and social networking.  As part of this strategy I would acquire Urban Airship, a modestly-funded private company that could be bought for <$100M and would become a catalyst for radical change within RIM, again leveraging the company’s delta into carriers.  Messaging is the one thing RIM has going for it that is hugely viral, and they’ve got a massive critical mass to build upon in the existing BlackBerry market that they simply need to unlock.
5. Stop dicking around with cheap plastic phones, and own the keyboard.
   One area in which Apple has exhibited significant leadership is the use of real materials, such as glass and metal, in their devices.  This gives them a stronger and indeed perennial feel, while the plastic on most BBs tends to fade in colour and begins to look tired and damaged within a few short months.  Everything about the BlackBerry needs to feel solid — including the keys.  Speaking of which, the domain of the keyboard is an area that the iPhone is unlikely ever to tread upon.  Use this to differentiate the BB and shame Apple.  There are many many users (among them women with long fingernails) who will NOT give up their keyboard for a touch screen, and a generation of teens who have known text messaging as their primary means of communication for more than a decade.  The focus on the keyboard is one of RIM’s core strengths.

I’ve purposefully attempted to avoid reading others’ prescriptions for RIM so I apologize in advance if any of these represents overlap.

I’ve been a shoulder to cry on for colleagues from Telus and Cisco often enough to not want to witness the death of what may well be the last great Canadian telecom company.  Even as recently as 5 years ago, RIM was lauded for its culture of innovation and relentless aggression.  However, the current wave of layoffs and strategic pronouncements are nothing more than hackneyed Wall Street pandering — a movie we’ve seen before at other declining giants that have never recovered — and these moves have already killed that culture.  I have seen what this kind of short-term management thinking and denial can do to a company’s culture, nurturing an internal environment where lifers sandbag their turf and the company’s former wunderkind rest and vest.  Neither behaviour is conducive to the kind of thinking or the can-do attitude that gets companies turned around quickly.  And really, who would want to be CEO and lead that sort of army into battle?  Not me.

It has been a year since Apple and Rogers Wireless launched the iPhone 3G in Canada.  It was that summer, in 2008, I unloaded my first-generation unlocked iPhone for a legit iPhone 3G from Rogers Wireless.  One of the benefits of having a carrier-supported iPhone is, of course, supposed to be seamless warranty replacement.  Shortly after I got it, my iPhone began dropping calls and failing to dial out on the network.  I assumed this to be A) a problem with Rogers’ network, B) a firmware bug in the iPhone itself, or C) a combination of both.

I had heard things about chipset problems afflicting AT&T iPhone customers so I assumed this would be remedied in a soon-to-follow update from Apple.  By October of 2008, I had given up.  I called Rogers tech support and was walked thru the usual “wipe it clean and pray it’s fixed” procedure and tried it for two more weeks but no joy, so in November I instigated the phone swap process from Rogers.  The call was short and sweet and all seemed to be well with a new iPhone winging its way to our house.

On the Friday before my iPhone was to arrive, my SIM suddenly stopped working and my iPhone could not connect to the Rogers network at all.  I later found out that this was due to the fact that my phone number had been reprovisioned to a new SIM that was in the box accompanying my iPhone.  Odd.  It was obviously my iPhone that was broken, not the SIM, and I just couldn’t fathom why they wouldn’t just give me a 1-800 number to call to activate the new SIM when it arrived versus forwarding my phone service to a brown box in the back of a UPS truck, leaving me without my phone service for 3 days.  I called Rogers (from my Vonage line) to complain, spent an hour and a half on the phone, and could not get this resolved after bouncing around 3-4 agents.

On the following Tuesday, the replacement iPhone arrived.  I tried starting it up, but it wouldn’t boot.  It had a substantial hardware problem that led to garbage on the screen and all kinds of other garbage, but in effect the replacement phone was DOA.  As I had to go on a business trip that day, I put the new SIM in my old iPhone and left the new iPhone for a week or so before I tried it again, this time putting the replacement thru all kinds of hardware resets and software reloads.  I could not resurrect it from the dead despite hours of trying.

So I called Rogers.  Again.  After two hours bouncing around various agents in various departments, I could not get an agent to take responsibility for my problem, instead each agent dispatched me to another department as I (admittedly) became increasingly irate.  One agent accused me of lying, and/or not knowing what I am talking about.  Finally I threatened to QUIT Rogers, switch to Telus, and sue them for breach of contract — I was transferred to a magic save department where I met a very nice lady who calmed me down, promised to solve all of my problems, and who would call me the following week which was, now 7 weeks after the Odyssey began, Christmas.

Needless to say, she never did call back.  Never solved my problem.  Probably got laid off.  Might be working for Bell Canada right now, for all I know.

Next I began to receive a torrent of threatening letters demanding that I return my old, somewhat functioning iPhone or I’d be charged $780.    I called Rogers again in January trying to resolve the issue, but to no avail:  Rogers Wireless wouldn’t take the badly broken replacement iPhone back without also sending my other one, leaving me phoneless.  I gave up after the best I could do was an agent telling me I had to send BOTH iPhones in one shipment to their call centre.  Fuming, I waited another few days to call back.

Eventually on my next call,  an agent relented: I kept the semi-working iPhone, sent back the badly broken replacement iPhone.  I packaged up the replacement phone and sent it back, recording the shipping tracking number from UPS.

Then the predictable happened.  They charged $780 to my card.  I was furious, but sugar-coated my attitude and called back AGAIN to ask for a refund.  After bouncing around to various departments, each complaining about the slowness of their computers, they could not track the whereabouts of the iPhone I had returned, despite the fact that I could even tell them the name of the signing agent who had received the package.  I nearly hit the ceiling.  I threatened a complaint to the CRTC (which, in fairness, I have every right to do).  Finally someone agreed to help me.  One quirk:  They couldn’t refund the $780.Instead I got a credit — in effect I was loaning Rogers money — against future use.  A compromise that irritates me, but was under the circumstances acceptable.

Now it was March.  By my logs of various telephone calls to Rogers, I had now spent about 9 hours on the phone with Rogers attempting to address a single issue spanning more than 6 months.  I was so exhausted with the process that I accepted the neutrality of being exactly where I was technically, and further behind financially, than when the problems began — with an iPhone that didn’t fully work and with my wallet $780 lighter but an account credit.

It wasn’t until late last month that I mustered the courage to call again and try to get a new replacement iPhone.  I had assumed that these processes, immature at the time I first endured them, may have seasoned and smoothened with time and experience.  I called again, had a very pleasant half-hour call with an agent, who whisked me a new iPhone 3G toot sweet.  As before, my phone service was disconnected for a couple of days after they shipped the replacement phone, but by now Stockholm Syndrome was taking effect and I was becoming numb to the varied mistreatments by my captor.

The very same day the new iPhone 3G arrived, I cracked open the box, dropped in the new SIM, zeroed my old iPhone, and boxed it up for shipping.  UPS picked it up that very day, May 28, 2009.  I expected to hear nothing of the issue further.  According to the UPS tracking data, the package arrived the following week, on June 6th.  On June 14th, Rogers sent me a letter threatening to charge me $730.

I cannot fathom that within 8 days, Rogers could not process and acknowledge the receipt of my RMA’d iPhone 3G.  I furthermore cannot fathom that when they do overcharge you due to their own error, they cannot refund the excess back to your credit card (which is how I pay for my phone service).

Rogers is a company clearly hampered by its own hugely restricted billing, provisioning, and customer service systems.  Ted Rogers, five weeks before his death last year, spoke to an audience marshalled by the local YEO chapter, which I gratefully attended as a guest of Mario from ShowTime Tickets.  Two thoughts of Ted’s permeated his frailly-voiced speech that day.  He said, of customer service, that “the secret to good customer service is always saying yes” and that his success as CEO was directly tied to the number of layers that existed between him and his customers — the fewer the better.

I know that it’s difficult dealing with the kinds of customers iPhone brings to the table and the scale of operations necessary to support the volume that a device like the iPhone can generate for Rogers.  Not easy.  But I wonder what Ted would think after reading this story?

Which one are you?  The ancient parable of the fox and the hedgehog has come into increasing view in popular culture lately.  And while its origins are somewhat ambiguous, the allegory has been applied to entrepreneurs, scientists, philosophers, playwrights, business leaders, economists, and even US presidents.

One of the fables goes something like this (sorry, no link to a source … I am paraphrasing a story from my childhood):

A fox and a hedgehog were strolling through a country path.  Periodically, they were threatened by hungry wolves.  The fox — being blessed with smarts, speed and agility — would lead packs of wolves on a wild chase through the fields, up and down trees, and over hill and dale.  Eventually the fox would return to the path, breathless but having lost the wolves, and continue walking.  The hedgehog, being endowed with a coat of spikes, simply hunkered down on its haunches when menaced by the wolves and fended them off without moving.  When they gave up, he would return to his stroll unperturbed.

According to the great liberal (before that was a dirty word) historian and thinker Isaiah Berlin who in 1953 wrote the Essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox“, interpreting the works of Tolstoy, Foxes are complex thinkers who account for a variety of circumstances and experiences while hedgehogs have the keen ability to focus and drive along a single path.  As examples, Berlin flags such thinkers as Plato, Lucretius, Dante, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, and Proust as Hedgehogs and slots Herodotus, Aristotle, Erasmus, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Moliere, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce, Anderson as Foxes.

More recently, Jim Collins (author of “Good to Great“) took this concept into the business world in his book and it is one of the central unifying themes of his work.  In his book and other writings Collins comes down pretty hard on Foxes:

Those who built the good-to-great companies were, to one degree or another, hedgehogs. They used their hedgehog nature to drive toward what we came to call a Hedgehog Concept for their companies. Those who led the comparison companies tended to be foxes, never gaining the clarifying advantage of a Hedgehog Concept, being instead scattered, diffused, and inconsistent.

This is understandable.  Collins, a former Stanford University Business Professor, comes from a hedgehog factory.  He has made a career of spooling hedgehogs into mainstream companies at the mid-management level and consulting with large, heavily-matrixed companies on business strategy and leadership.  In many respects he lives in a world constructed by and for hedgehogs — so it makes sense that he could see the “Great” companies he writes about in his books (all typically fortune 500 players) as hedgehogs.  On a long enough timeline we are ALL wrong, but it is worth pointing out that a number of Collins’ “Great” companies have suffered badly from (and others have caused) the current economic downturn, eg. Circuit City.

As Nicholas Kristof describes the dichotomy in the NY Times:

Hedgehogs tend to have a focused worldview, an ideological leaning, strong convictions; foxes are more cautious, more centrist, more likely to adjust their views, more pragmatic, more prone to self-doubt, more inclined to see complexity and nuance. And it turns out that while foxes don’t give great sound-bites, they are far more likely to get things right.

John Kerry is clearly a Fox: A self-doubting; complicated; unable to present absolute, sound byte-friendly answers to complex questions.  George W. Bush, however, presents himself as a hedgehog: simple, direct, ideological, and absolutely assured of his correctness.  In 2004, America signed up for its second term of 4 years of hedgehog leadership to substantial effect.

In our industry, hedgehogs have the benefit of focus and the ability to keep their heads down and companies out of trouble during tough times.  They succeed through the avoidance of substantial risk and through the ability to see things through.  When they fail, it’s because their conservatism holds them back, and markets move past them; or because they can’t release their death grip on that singular idea and move on to the next thing.

The Fox has the benefit of broad vision and the ability to perceive the complex interaction of seemingly dissonant ideas, and they succeed because they are able to travel outside of marked pathways with their ideas and make substantial gains.  When they fail it’s because their reach exceeds their grasp, because they are too far ahead of the market, or because they have difficulty maintaining focus to see things through.

The one problem that Mr. Collins cannot cop to is that while Hedgehogs are mass-produceable through training and discipline (this is what MBA factories do), Foxes are not so easy to come by:  their behaviour is learned but it is most likely interdisciplinary and tangential.  As a modern example, one could strongly argue that Steve Jobs, Reid Hoffman, and many successful tech entrepreneurs are foxes.

On the other hand Bill Gates, who at one time was the richest man in the world:  pure hedgehog.  Rupert Murdoch?  Count the spikes.  There are many successful hedgehogs in the mainstream business world and far fewer Foxes.  The structure of businesses, after all, are generally designed around hedgehogs. In general larger corporate structures aren’t great at absorbing foxes.  It’s why Jobs quit Apple, before going back as CEO under a mandate that embraced his wide-ranging aspirations.  It’s probably why entrepreneurs such as Evan Williams, who blew out of Google as soon as he could after selling blogger.com to them, generally can’t wait to get out of the mother ship after a their lock-up periods are done.  A friend and the CEO of a company acquired by Microsoft always referred to Redmond as “they” and never “we” even while he took down an amazing salary serving as a VP for two years.

Innovation is a concept which we modernists tie into every description of a person’s thinking process.  Wikipedia says there are a few different types of innovation:  “It may refer to incremental, radical, and revolutionary changes in thinking, products, processes, or organizations.”  Perhaps the razor cuts this way:  Perhaps hedgehogs deliver incremental changes while foxes deliver radical, revolutionary changes.

As a fox, I know that many of my successes have come when paired with hedgehogs.  A hedgehog can pluck a singular concept from the maelstrom of energy emanating from the fox and run with it along a narrow path.  Steve Jobs had Wozniak on the engineering side, and just as significantly Mike Markkula on the financing and business affairs side.  The latter two are quintessential hedgehogs.

While it’s valuable to know whether you’re a fox or whether you’re a hedgehog, it is not particularly constructive to assign a static value judgment to one versus the other.  At varying points in the arc of a business, a prevalence of influence from either a fox or a hedgehog can make or break a company.  Witness the foxes that artificially inflated hyper-economies at Enron (Jeff Skilling) and AIG (Joseph Cassano) to great personal benefit but ultimately destroyed hundreds of billions of dollars in wealth.  And meet the Hedgehogs, Gil Amelio and John Sculley, who sapped the growth of Apple, diluted its brand value, and very nearly bankrupted the company.

So figure out what you’re good at, chase the visions you believe in, and if you’re fortunate enough to work in an environment that embraces and supports your particular attributes, you’ll ultimately be successful.