An Open Letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook

Dear Tim,

First of all, belated congratulations on your promotion. I know it came from terrible circumstances. You’re handling it with class. Kudos for that.

Just to be clear, I love your products. I’m writing this on a MacBook Pro. Of course I have the iPhone and the iPad. I’ve got a damn box of iPods in the garage someplace. I’m old so I owned the Apple II and the original Macintosh 128k. Small black and white screen and enough RAM to hold the operating system and, um, nothing. It cost $2200 in 1984. If I’m doing the math correctly, in current dollars that’s like the cost of your Prius with the leather seats, nav system and upgraded sound system. I even got my boss to buy a Newton. Go look it up. You sold three of them. So on a percentage basis, I was one of your top reps.

I used to drink orange cinnamon tea at the Good Earth in Cupertino with my resume in hand hoping to strike up a conversation over a bran muffin and a tofu scramble with someone from Apple who might hire me. Even though at that time, I’d only worked at three jobs, it was a six page resume. I worked at a Burger King for a year, an amusement park and then Macy’s. Six pages. I can spin a little BS, Tim. I had Apple written all over me.

Now that you understand that I bleed Apple um, pure white, help me out.

Your battery life is terrible. Not yours personally. I saw that interview on Rock Center with Brian Williams a couple of weeks ago. Apparently, you get up at five in the damn morning or some such nonsense and put in a 20 hour day. I’m speaking of the products.

Every new generation touts “improved battery life.” Tim, I’ve had every generation of everything. If there’s been improvement, it’s barely noticeable. Like, not noticeable enough to mention. To your average customer, “improved battery life” would mean that they could sit at Starbucks and write an additional…let’s say…six pages of dialogue for their screenplay that will never get optioned. And that’s at a minimum.

And Tim, don’t embarrass us both by showing me a sparse yet aesthetically pleasing graphic of a bar chart showing battery improvement. Improved battery life is like pornography, to paraphrase former Supreme Court Justice Stewart Potter, I’ll know it when I see it regardless of your chart.

And the iPhone battery? When I go to the Apple Store, they tell me that I must have a rogue app running. Or too many apps running. Or Bluetooth running. Wasn’t that the point, Tim? To run apps? To do stuff I wanted to do because I decided that said apps or Bluetooth enriched my life? When you tell me to not do stuff that it seems I should be able to do, the dream dies a little bit, Tim. Just a little bit. Barely noticeable. I could do a sparse yet aesthetically pleasing graphic of a bar chart on my disappointment if that would help drive the point home.

OK, that last thing was kind of catty. I’m sorry. I really am a fan.

Here’s an idea: With your NEXT next generation products, instead of being obsessed with making it one one-hundredth of an inch thinner, make the thing as fat as it needs to be to have a battery that works in the real world. Or solar! I had a solar powered calculator in about 1987.

So Tim, thanks for reading. I know that batteries aren’t sexy and you’re busy with your new dream of becoming the new Bang and Olufsen and going into the television business but if I have to borrow my kid’s Samsung Galaxy S3 to make a call one more time, the dream could be gone for good, sparse yet asthetically pleasing graphic or no.

Regards,

Brian

Sales.

Here’s some advice. Take it or leave it. Before I impart it, I’d like to say that I am not currently in sales but spent the last 30 years (until March ‘11) in sales or sales management. I’ve done everything from inside sales (prospecting) way back when to managing large accounts to managing sales teams selling high-end software and/or services for the largest software and consulting companies in the world.

Why am I not doing it now? An incredible opportunity came up to do something really special for an amazing company called Toolwire and I never looked back. But I still think a lot about sales and selling and I tried to distill the most important things I’ve learned. With a shout-out to the great Tom Mackey (Follow him here on WordPress!), here you go:

1. Make more calls: Prospecting calls. Checking in on your customers. Whatever. Reach out. Before you go to lunch, before you go home for the day, make one more call. Talk to one more person. It’s so easy to have internal meetings about crafting your message, social networking strategies, etc. I promise that you will not sell one dollar’s worth of anything to a co-worker unless it’s your daughter’s Girl Scout cookies and that doesn’t count.

2. Time is your only currency: If you’re really serious about your career and you are sitting at your desk reading Fantasy Football blogs right now rather than following rule number one noted above, I don’t want to hear that you’re serious about rising to the top of your field. Your time is finite. Yeah, you’re not a machine and blah blah blah but certainly you could be a little more focused.

3. Add value: When you do call customers or prospects or even go to internal meetings, engage your brain and be a business partner. If you think your job is to “be available” if someone in your territory wants to buy something but you don’t think it’s your job to understand their business or your product, go do something else. You’re just annoying everyone.

4. Be pleasant to every single person in your company who supports you: You probably don’t build the product or process the orders or do the dishes in the break room but someone does. WIthout these people, you’d have nothing to sell. Be nice to them. Know their kids’ names. Buy them small (or large) gifts at holiday time. Kiss their asses. You want them to want you to be successful and they won’t if you’re an ass. You want them to work harder on your deals and for your customers than they should and you want them to leap on the grenades you leave lying around. They’ll make you better than you are.

5. It’s not a “sales cycle”. It’s a buying cycle: I know “nothing happens until something is sold” but nothing is sold unless it’s bought. Understand the buying cycle in ridiculous detail so you can to tweak it in your favor. Qualify relentlessly. If there is a difficult question you are afraid your prospect will ask, ask it yourself just to get it out of the way. It’s uncomfortable but you gain control of the situation and have a better chance of overcoming it. Or you can waste three months of your time just to get blown out of the water by something obvious.

That’s it. It’s not rocket surgery.

They Never Should Have Taken The Very Best: Goodbye, Levon.

The news that came like a sledgehammer that Levon Helm was in the final stages of cancer and was not long for this world. It was a scant two days later that he was gone. As the drummer for The Band and the voice that gave us “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”, “The Weight” and so many others, even if you think you didn’t know him, you knew him. I saw him (and The Band) for the first time at The Last Waltz, their final concert as the original Band. I saw him a few years later at The Saddle Rack in San Jose at a gig that was marketed as the second coming of The Band. The pure joy this man put out is undeniable.

He always reminds me of the George Carlin joke about taking a group of 4 Irishmen and adding a Black guy, the Irishmen will sound Black in about 5 minutes but the Black guy will never try to be Irish. He was one guy from Arkansas with four Canadians yet the group sounded like it was from Little Rock.

I could go on and on about his influence on me, on music and the like. I’ll leave it at this: He played music as hard as he could as long as he could. When he was diagnosed with throat cancer in the late ’90s, he underwent treatments that left doctors wondering if he’d speak again let alone sing. He proved them all wrong by singing again because he had to. He had to.

This clip is not The Band. It’s Levon after the cancer that eventually took him from us was originally treated. This is Levon at, by his own admission, 80%. Listen to the joy. The commitment. I’d take 1%,

You’ll be missed, Levon.

Warren Hellman Died Today.

He was a San Francisco billionaire investor who bankrolled the one-of-a-kind Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival. He was a really amazing and nice guy. Hardly Strictly is the best 3 day music festival in the country. Completely free to 600,000 people, well run, fun and magical.

His daughter said the festival will continue but it won’t be the same without him. Tammy and met him a couple of years ago and thanked him for the festival and he thanked us for enjoying it.

He was the 1% who thought that most of the 1% needed a kick in the ass. He practically predicted the OWS movement in this Fortune article in 2007 (http://money.cnn.com/2007/10/15/markets/hellman_private_equity.fortune/?postversion=2007101514).

He’d been in and out of the hospital for several months for lukemia and it finally got the best of him.

San Francisco is San Francisco because in a country that embraces sameness and the familiar, it’s a city that appreciates different ideas. Often, it pays the price for that. But sometimes, it helps create a Warren Hellman and that’s worth something.

Do What You Love

If you’re not doing what you love, don’t delude yourself into believing that you’re any better than anyone with any other job. Or anyone without a job. I don’t care where you went to school. You’re just doing what you’re doing to get by. I’m reading “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson. It might be the best biography I’ve read. There is a lot to be learned. Trust your gut. Be smart. Make a difference.

The time U2 met me.

The cover of U2's "Boy".

In March 18, 1981 (right when ‘Boy’ came out), U2 was doing some free concerts at west coast colleges. I was told it was their second day in the US ever but that may not have been correct. They’d played a free concert at UCLA the day before and were now at San Jose State University where I was finishing up work on my journalism degree. The free concert was headlined by Romeo Void, a local punkish band and U2 was the opener.

The fabulous Christine McGeever, who I had a crush on, suggested I go. We were writing for the one of the school papers and she was going to interview them after the concert. Christine’s taste in music was uniformly impeccable. She had previously asked me if I wanted to go see a new band she was interviewing and I didn’t go and they turned out to be The Police. This time, I went.

The Student Union at San Jose State had a ballroom (a grandiose term for what it was) upstairs that comfortably held roughly a thousand people. Between the time the concert was booked and it was actually performed, U2′s first album, Boy had come out and the single I Will Follow was getting some airplay. This, of course, was back when things like “air play” and “singles” mattered. As the time for the music to start grew near, the place got crazy. It’s hard to imagine now, but U2 was seen as an artsy punk band at the time and the fact that they were from Ireland was a curiosity as well. I wore my usual Hank Williams Jr Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound t-shirt but the place was packed with mohawked, dog collared punks. In fact, I later learned that one of the dog collared punks would later become my wife although at the time, we didn’t know each other.

From the moment the first note was struck by The Edge, this would be remembered as “The Night That No One Would Remember If Romeo Void Existed or Played a Note.” According to the published setlist, they played 15 songs. I remember it being more than that and that they played “I Will Follow” at least twice if not three times. The Student Union was built on big rubber piers for earthquake safety. One of the common dances of the day was the “pogo”. So there were roughly two thousand people in a room meant to hold less than a thousand and most of them were jumping up and down in unison and crashing into one another. You could see the speakers on the stage start to sway and guitars falling over. People from the crowd climbed up on stage and became human ducttape to hold the speakers in place. I remember it being loud and crazy and I remember the crowd begging for more U2 until halfway through Romeo Void’s set.

After the concert, Christine and I went backstage. I don’t recall us having any press passes or any ID. We were just told to go back after the show and U2 would talk to us and Christine could write her usual excellent ‘up and coming rock band’ story. It was billed as kind of a press conference but in a moment that felt truly Spinal Tap-ian, we were the only ones there. The U2 guys were obviously very young (Bono was 21) and exceedingly polite. Surprisingly, they weren’t in much of a hurry which was unexpected. They seemed to be happy that we’d heard of them and that we were interested in the music. Christine asked her questions for her story. We asked them how they liked California and if it was what they expected. They said they liked the palm trees but were expecting to see Ronald McDonald walking down the street. Bono had a small tape player. I asked him what was on it. He said he didn’t write music but carried the tape player so he could hum tunes into it and as he came up with lyrics, he’d match them up. He turned on the tape player and I could hear him humming over the drone of what I’m sure was a jet engine.

To be honest, as Christine and I walked back to the newspaper office, I felt that I’d been to an event that was wild for San Jose State University but the crowd was much tamer than what we experienced at Mabuhay Gardens on any Saturday night when the Dead Kennedys played. Since at the time, rock was on its way out and punk was in, U2 in its very early formation was being marketed as punk. So instead of feeling like we went to an incredible rock show, it felt like watered down punk which really wasn’t fair to u2.

That said, you could not deny the power of the music and the performance. There were no thousand dollar sunglasses. It was kids with longish greasy hair and jeans and t-shirts who were playing a very tight brand of rock music that was at odds with the almost purposely unprofessional punk bands of the moment.

Al Davis is Dead.

Al Davis, noted football man and plaintiff

He owned the Oakland Raiders. I was a massive Oakland Raider fan as a kid. Massive. I wrote my freshman english Shakespeare paper on George Blanda (a Raider player) rather than The Merchant of Venice. I got a C on the paper because it was not about The Merchant of Venice but Miss Winner couldn’t bear to give me less than a C because it was such a well-written paper. This in a way got me thinking about writing which led me to a journalism degree. I digress.

Everyone hated Al even then. But one sad day, he took my team and moved them to Los Angeles where they went from being a ‘blue collar’ team to being a ‘teardrop tattoo, what makes you think I won’t cut you, gang colors’ team. I tore down all my Raider posters of Belitnekoff, Blanda, Otto et al and while I respected the players, the Raiders as an entity were dead to me as was Al himself. Like taking candy from a baby,  he bilked the well-meaning but clueless rubes who run Oakland out of millions of dollars they didn’t have and came slinking back north. You knew that whatever happened be it lawsuits, financial disagreements, scuffles with the powers that be in the NFL offices, Al would win through bullying, selfishness and intimidation. While he couldn’t always win on the field in the later years, you didn’t want to cross him in a courtroom, backroom or alley.

He was a walking, breathing monument to the non-existence of karma. But like him or not, he spent every day the last half century doing doing exactly what he wanted to do and answering to no one until he died peacefully in his home at age 82 as if to give us the finger one last time.

Thanks, Steve.

Steve Jobs stepping down as CEO of Apple hit me hard yesterday. Apple will be fine. He leaves them with great products and $75 billion in cash in the bank. It’s hard to find fault with that equation but there’s so much more to it.

To me, Steve Jobs is the icon of icons in Silicon Valley. Yes, there’s Bill and Dave at HP and the guys at Intel and they deserve their due. But I can’t think of another guy who made technology more usable and even desirable for every man, woman and child in the world. The generation that preceded him in Silicon Valley was building technology for technologists and I’m not diminishing the importance of that because it was leveraged into thousands of products that we use everyday. Jobs took things that already existed (notably, at XEROX PARC in the early days) and created new elements and made them highly functional and at the same time, objects of desire. There were thuds, the LISA and Newton come to mind, but even those had some redeeming qualities that were taken back to the drawing board to reemerge as part of another offering.

And who knows better than Jobs how to launch a product? I can’t think of anyone. From the simplicity and power of his presentations to the ads that get across in 30 seconds what competitors couldn’t in an hour. The secret, of course, is that absolutely nothing dissipates the force of a concept faster than a discussion of features and functions. It’s the difference between getting a shotgun blast to the chest versus opening up the shell and throwing the BBs at someone one by one.

Vision counts. It’s so lacking in the world today. We have loud. We have superficial. We need vision and not only does Jobs have it, he knows what to do with it. I hope he continues to do more of the same and that someone steps up to fill his shoes as that iconic visionary that Silicon Valley needs.

Thanks, Steve. In my current job, I use Apple as an example of something  almost every week and the “Don’t think outside the box, reinvent the box” mentality to guide me. I sincerely wish you the best as you deal with your health, your family and future endeavors.

Happy 100th, Lucy. How I loved you.

Lucy and Ricky Ricardo

I Love Lucy was off the air by the time I was watching TV of course but the reruns were on every single day. This, in the days before cable TV when there were literally a handful of channels to watch. So, if you are choosing between about a dozen channels and there is a show that is on every couple of hours somewhere, you notice it. And at the time, we only had a black and white TV, so the program didn’t feel dated.

There is not a modern equivalent that I can think of to help you understand how popular the show was. When Lucy had a baby, 72% of all the TVs in the country were tuned to that show. There were only a few networks at the time so the programs that were really popular were REALLY popular. Roughly 3 networks. No DVR. No VCR. If you wanted to watch a program, you stopped whatever you were doing and you watched it. And that’s how America watched Lucy and came to love her. In fact, the show was number one in the ratings by a very wide margin when it went off the air. There was no slow fade. The show was felled by marital problems between Lucy and Desi.

The show was miles ahead of it’s time from a technical perspective. Back in the ’50s, shows were shot on a kinescope and savable only in very low quality, murky black and white. I Love Lucy was the first show shot on 35 mm film. Crisp images you could show again and again. No one had thought of reruns or syndication at the time. In fact, ILL basically invented the rerun because of this. The show was the first shot with 3 cameras in front of a live audience, a method so perfect, most scripted shows are still done this exact way almost 60 years later. The show was done with a live audience rather than using the canned laughter that was popular at the time. You can even hear the actors that aren’t in the scenes being filmed laughing along with the audience. At that time, commercials were often integrated into the show. Once in a while, you can see the shows in their original format on TVland and Lucy or Ricky will wax poetic about Chesterfield cigarettes or Sanka. Oh, please note that Ricky Ricardo was the sharpest dresser in the history of television and I’ll stand on Don Draper’s modern art glass coffee table and scream it.

When I got my first VCR and figured out that the shows were shown in chronological order in reruns, I had boxes of tapes of all of the shows and we’d watch them all the time. So, yeah, I really did Love Lucy.

My Favorite Under-appreciated Albums, Installment I

I’m a big music fan. And if I make my list of my favorite albums of all time, many would be some of the same things many people would list. “Highway 61 Revisited” by Bob Dylan and the like. But there are some that might be on that list that are minor gems. Some sold in reasonable numbers, some didn’t and some didn’t really sell at all. I’d like to throw a few out there and hear what you think. Genre-wise, I’m all over the map but I could throw any of these on my virtual turntable any minute of any day and be very content. I’ve got quite a list of these but I’ll start with these three:

Mule Variations

1. Mule Variations by Tom Waits. It’s odd to consider this a hidden gem or under-appreciated since it was Waits’ highest charting album ever when it reached #30 for a short time in the US and was #1 in Norway. Tom being Tom, did promote this album a bit with a performace of “Chocolate Jesus” on Letterman that might have been a little too quirky for middle America but it’s more than the reclusive Waits had done previously. It did get a couple of Grammy nominations. The fact that it won a Grammy for “Best Contemporary Folk Album” and was nominated for “Best Male Rock Vocal” (For the astoundingly great “Hold On“) tells you that critics and record buyers didn’t to know what to do with Waits’ incredibly nuanced, diverse work. Some critics found it to be a rehash for Waits, I think it’s a great summation of his career up to that point. From romps like “I’m Big in Japan” to the poignant “The House Where Nobody Lives” make this a very rewarding listen.

The Mona Lisa's Sister

2.The Mona Lisa’s Sister by Graham Parker. Parker burst on the scene in the late ’70s with the punk movement and was a contemporary of Elvis Costello and a harder edged version of Joe Jackson. After some commercial success in the early 80s, Parker’s bombastic personality caused him to change labels a few times. He got to RCA and made this album which contains lyrics that have stood the test of time, well for me they have. From the reggae-tinged “The Girl Isn’t Ready” to “Get Started, Start a Fire” where the album’s title comes from, his sly humor, insight and ability to not give a rat’s ass what anyone thinks all came together in a more stripped down approach that has stood the test of time. Sadly, it may be out of print in CD format but will live forever on iTunes.

Valley So Deep

3. Valley So Deep by The Texas Sapphires. This is straight ahead country. I bought a version of this CD for $10 from the band in the Austin airport. From a music perspective, Austin, Texas is my North Star. This band was playing in the airport. Free. Just playing their hearts out and sounding fantastic. I’ve never been so disappointed that a flight left on time. I talked with Billy Brent Malkus for a few minutes, took my CD and boarded. When I got home, I played the thing ragged. The CD I bought isn’t the one that’s for sale now. The band re-cut the songs with legendary Austin producer Lloyd Maines for a slightly crisper sound. Whether they’re doing songs written by Billy or covers of solid country songs, the musicianship and commitment to the music is unmistakable. One of my favorites, written by Billy and Arty Hill, is “Bring Out the Bible (We Ain’t Got a Prayer)” which explains that “There’s peace in the valley but we never made it down there.”