Author: Kelli Richards

Why You Should Learn From Steve Jobs, Not Idolize Him

Kelli Richards August 5, 2013

Imitation may be the highest form of flattery, but it’s not a winning-business strategy.

Steve Jobs not only revolutionized the way we listen to music and use a telephone, he also changed our understanding of a computer and even recaptured our ability to fall in love with films through his work with Pixar.

Without a doubt, young entrepreneurs can learn endlessly from Jobs’ example, but they shouldn’t adhere too closely to his image. After all, he may have been a design genius but he did ruffle a few feathers.

He disregarded every “rule” and regarded his mentors and role models loosely. Even he would hardly advise someone to emulate him. I think it’s far more likely he would say: “The best way to be like me is to be more fully yourself.”

Still, you can learn an awful lot from the man. Here are a few very specific things that up-and-comers can learn from Jobs’ example:

1. Keep the customer experience in focus. Jobs was a master at getting into customers’ minds. He knew what we wanted — and how we wanted it — often long before we did.

2. Have an eye for beauty. It couldn’t just work well. Steve knew that it also had to feel good to touch, be delightful to use, and be exceptionally beautiful to look at.

3. Foster innovation. Do you remember a time without an iPhone? How about an iPod? Steve created products and product categories no one even had a frame of reference for and made them central to our lives.

4. Insist upon excellence. Jobs had little patience for people who didn’t think things through, and he pushed the people around him to be their best. He accepted no substitutes and inspired great loyalty.

Finally, if there is one powerful absolute to learn from Steve Jobs, it is to focus on your customers and put them before everything else. Think about rabid Apple users — the ones who stand in line outside of a store for hours awaiting the release of the next iPhone. They’ve done more to grow the brand than Apple itself ever has.

You will never replicate that by trying to be Steve Jobs. But, if you ask these questions to apply his laser-focused attention to your own customers, you can definitely inspire that kind of brand advocacy.

Are we surprising and delighting our customers while also delivering a consistent experience?

Are our products and services frictionless for our customers to use and enjoy?

Are we meeting their needs each and every time they interact with our company?

Are we iterating and innovating with a product pipeline that’s in line with (or ahead of) the market?

Are we blazing new trails?

How do you inspire brand advocacy? Let us know with a comment.

Original blog posted on YoungEntrepreneur.com. View it here: https://www.youngentrepreneur.com/blog/entrepreneurship/why-you-should-lean-from-steve-jobs-not-idolize-him/

I would appreciate your feedback in the comments section.

Until next time,

Kelli Richards, CEO of The All Access Group, LLC

Q&A with Brent Wilkins

Kelli Richards August 1, 2013

I recently had the opportunity to talk with Brent Wilkins, Vice President of Global Business Development at Skullcandy Inc., a company that markets and distributes performance audio and gaming headphones and other accessory related products.

Brent previously worked as the Managing Director in HTC’s Corporate Strategy Organization where his responsibilities included identifying and driving new strategic initiatives within the company for adoption into the HTC product portfolio. Prior to that, as the Managing Director of Cantor Fitzgerald, Brent was a key contributor in assisting Cantor Fitzgerald LP to rebuild its telecommunications infrastructure following the tragic events of 9/11. Brent’s work then, and now, is definitely something worth learning more about!

Visit my website to hear the entire interview https://allaccessgroup.com under the Resources Tab/ Blog Talk Radio.

Until next time,

Kelli Richards, CEO of The All Access Group, LLC

Linda Tucker

Kelli Richards July 31, 2013

Listen to the entire podcast here: https://allaccessradio.libsyn.com/one-womans-journey-to-save-the-white-lions-of-south-africa

Excel –Canvas or Spreadsheet?

Kelli Richards July 29, 2013

When you first hear the word “Excel” do you immediately cringe? Does it remind you of spreadsheets, graphs, and formulas? For most people in the business world, using Excel can be compared to an alarm clock repeatedly beeping in the middle of the night with no shut off button; that’s a horrifying thought. But for one man, using Excel doesn’t coincide with rows and columns of numbers. For 73-year old Tatsuo Horiuchi, Excel is just another canvas to paint on.

Horiuchi uses Excel to create traditional Japanese artwork using Autoshapes. In an article in Yahoo! News Horiuchi explained that he often saw his coworkers using excel in the office. He said, “I could probably draw with that. Graphics software is expensive, but Excel comes pre-installed in most computers.”

Horiuchi was first noticed for his Excel artwork in 2006 when he won an Excel Autoshape Art Contest.

Upon hearing about Horiuchi’s creative use of the program, I of course had to try it out for myself. The program does provide a surprising number of drawing tools for a program whose uses don’t really align with drawing, until now I guess.

Horiuchi isn’t the only artist using Excel. Danielle Aubert uses Excel to make her own kind of art. On her website she explains, “Microsoft Excel is a program designed to track and compute information, but here I am using Excel as a drawing tool. These drawings are a part of a series that I executed on an irregular daily basis for 16 months. Each drawing is in a new ‘worksheet,’ which is automatically set up as a grid. The drawings were made by changing cell preferences for background color, fill pattern, and border styles and from time to time inserting ‘comment’ boxes and letters or words.”

From Horiuchi and his beautifully mounted Japanses artworks and Aubert who created an eclectic coffee table style book of excel artwork a whole new world has been opened up to those of us who thought excel was just a program to create spreadsheets. Who knew!

Until next time,

Kelli Richards, CEO of The All Access Group, LLC

*Images from www.spoon-tamago.com

Brent Wilkins

Kelli Richards July 26, 2013

Listen to the entire podcast here: https://allaccessradio.libsyn.com/kelli-richards-interviews-brent-wilkins-of-skull-candy

Working Behind the Scenes with Dave Stewart

Kelli Richards July 25, 2013

Watch the video below as I share with you some insight on just how fun it is working with artists like Dave Stewart as a producer.

Until next time,

Kelli Richards, CEO of The All Access Group, LLC

iWork for iCloud

Kelli Richards July 22, 2013

It seems like it was just a matter of time before Apple coordinated its iCloud technology, currently used for bringing media stored in iTunes (music, movies, tv shows, etc.) to all your Apple products, with its iWork platform- syncing Apple’s version of Microsoft Office to iPhones iPads and Macs alike.

Notice that, I referred to iWork as Apple’s version of Office, as it very may well be the only thing that Microsoft does better than its Silicon Valley competitor. It’s unusual to think about Apple as a little brother, or an inferior, for lack of a better word, in any product that is knighted with the bite-missing Apple symbol; and it appears that the head honchos of Apple will be putting an end to Microsoft’s control of work documents in the Fall- restoring order to the world.

The implementation of iWork with iCloud will be game changing, swinging the proverbial momentum in favor of Apple. Whereas one would previously have to transfer files via email or convert documents into a Google Drive in order to access them away from the office, classroom or kitchen table, with iCloud files stored through Pages, Numbers, or Keynote can be accessed on all devices. So, no more searching through emails, or rummaging through Google Docs, just simply open the desired application and choose your document, accessing the file like a song you purchased on your iPad and played on your iPhone.

The most unnerving aspect of “iWork for iCloud,” for Microsoft at least, is that it will bring Pages, Numbers, and Keynote to PC’s as well. But can the tides turn that rapidly? Can this relationship in which Microsoft had its hands in Apples cookie jar all of sudden flip to where Microsoft is groping at thin air, while Apple enjoys all the spoils?

Until next time,

Kelli Richards, CEO of The All Access Group, LLC

Fireside Chat with Dave Ulmer, author of “The Innovator’s Extinction”

Kelli Richards July 18, 2013

Dave Ulmer, author and recent Managing Director of New Growth Businesses and Head of Global Cloud Business for SingTel, has had a successful career of creating and launching multiple new businesses and products. He has been a colleague of mine for almost 15 years and I was happy to welcome him on my BlogTalkRadio show last week.

Dave previously led digital media transformations at LG Electronics where he was Global Vice President of Content & Services and was also the Senior Director of Mobile Media and Entertainment at Motorola Mobility. He was the original founder of Roxio, the company that revolutionized the music and CD recording industries. Dave is now a sought after management consultant, entrepreneur, radio personality, and speaker.

To hear our conversation and more about Dave’s business explorations and personal motivators, visit my website, https://allaccessgroup.com under the Resources Tab/ Blog Talk Radio.

Until next time,

Kelli Richards, CEO of The All Access Group, LLC

Futuristic Mac Pro “Pretty Hot”

Kelli Richards July 15, 2013

In a rare move at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco on June 10^th, Apple offered a sneak preview of what Philip Schiller, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, calls “the most radical Mac yet.”

Referring to the newly redesigned Mac Pro, one of Apple’s most expensive products and one favored by creative types, the desktop has indeed received an impressive overhaul – its first real update in years.

The new Mac Pro is architected around a unified thermal core, allowing the desktop to “efficiently share its entire thermal capacity across all processors” – resulting in what Apple assures us to be “breakthrough performance” from a machine that is “optimized for performance inside and out.”

The new system features next-generation Intel Xeon E5 processors with up to 12 core configurations, delivering double the floating point performance, as well as the fastest ECC memory ever seen in a Mac with 60 GBps bandwidth. It boasts flash memory up to ten times faster than the previous model, and video performance up to two and a half times better than the last generation thanks to dual workstation GPUs.

“Can’t innovate anymore, my ass,” Schiller quipped after showing off a video of the new hardware, which prompted loud cheers from the WDC audience. NBC tech editor Wilson Rothman agrees, calling the new desktop, which is capable of driving three 4k resolution displays, “pretty hot.”

With six Thunderbolt 2 ports that can deliver up to 20Gbps of bandwidth to each external device, the next generation Mac Pro is “the most expandable Mac ever built,” according to Apple. “Each of the six Thunderbolt 2 ports supports up to six daisy-chained devices, giving you the ability to connect up to 36 high-performance peripherals. Thunderbolt 2 is completely backwards compatible with existing Thunderbolt peripherals, and allows you to transfer data between Macs faster and easier than ever.

As if these specs weren’t already impressive enough, all this processing power and expandability is packed into a dramatic new cylindrical design that is merely one-eighth the volume of the previous generation, standing only 9.9 inches tall – what Rothman calls “a gnome” next to its predecessor. The entire top of the new model is a handle, making it supremely portable, while ports are all located in the back.

“Best of all,” Schiller concludes, this futuristic machine “will be assembled here in the USA.”

Geared to professionals, the Mac Pro has already generated a lot of excitement, despite the fact that it won’t be available until “later this year.” Though Apple did not offer any pricing on the system, the current model starts at $2,499.

Until next time,

Kelli Richards, CEO of The All Access Group, LLC

Q&A with Debbie Gisonni, CEO of Sillheart Institute

Kelli Richards July 11, 2013

On this week’s Blog Talk Radio Show I spoke with Debbie Gisonni, a best selling author, holistic lifestyle advisor, and corporate leader who inspires people to make simple changes that radically improve their self-awareness, well-being and success. A charismatic speaker and media guest, she is the CEO of Stillheart Institute, and was one of the first and youngest women publishers in high tech, as Publisher of Network Computing and Publishing Director who launched InternetWeek.

Debbie was one of the first woman publishers in the high tech industry, but when four of her family members died in just four years, her personal life was shattered. She began a mission to help others overcome life-altering events and now advises people from workers to executives on how to adopt a healthier lifestyle. Health an fitness have been an integral part of Debbie’s life since childhood when she would watch Jack LaLanne with her mother and she’s known for doing an entire body workout while sitting in an airplane seat. She’s an Italian foodie, who at age 45 appeared in the Ponds commercial for being 40 and fabulous. Debbie has written the non-fiction books, The Goddess of Happiness: A Down-to-Earth Guide for Heavenly Balance and Bliss and Vita’s Will: Real Life Lessons About Life, Death & Moving On. Her most recent book, Note to Self: Love is her first novel and is now available on Amazon.com. Debbie blogs on Huffington Post and has been a guest on numerous radio and TV shows.

You can hear our complete interview on my website at https://allaccessgroup.com under the Resources Tab / BlogTalkRadio.

Until next time,

Kelli Richards, CEO of The All Access Group, LLC

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Author: Kelli Richards

Why You Should Learn From Steve Jobs, Not Idolize Him

Q&A with Brent Wilkins

Linda Tucker

Excel –Canvas or Spreadsheet?

Brent Wilkins

Working Behind the Scenes with Dave Stewart

iWork for iCloud

Fireside Chat with Dave Ulmer, author of “The Innovator’s Extinction”

Futuristic Mac Pro “Pretty Hot”

Q&A with Debbie Gisonni, CEO of Sillheart Institute

Search Resources

Topic Areas & Guests

Join our mailing list

As Seen In:

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My Commitment to You

Now is Your Time

Author: Kelli Richards

Search Resources

Topic Areas & Guests

Categories

Join our mailing list

As Seen In:

Join our mailing list

Pages

My Commitment to You

Now is Your Time