Appreciating the shallows

When you look back, much of your life has revolved around the big things like graduating from high school or college, getting married, having kids, and getting that great job.   Those big events remind me of deep waters where you cannot see to the bottom.

You face a lot of deep, dark waters during your life.  When you join a corporation, it is unlikely you have any idea how long you will be there, what you will accomplish, or how your career will end.  Certainly I had no idea my time at Apple would end so abruptly right at the very moment when my team was achieving such amazing success.

When you commit yourself to spending your life with another person, there is no way to read those waters and what will happen over the years.  You just have to prepare yourself for the ride and hope you can keep your love and friendship alive.

Children are much the same.  There is no way to predict what kind of person that wonderful toddler will be in twenty years.  You do the best to guide them, provide some advice, and try to be a good example.  I know my parents were very surprised when I graduated from college and headed off to Canada to build a cattle operation in the hardwood hills of New Brunswick.

As you get beyond some of those milestones in life, the water get a little shallower and it is a little easier to see to the bottom or you could face next. Life always holds plenty of mysteries, but you often have a little better idea of what will happen if you do a certain thing. You have done a lot of things over and over and some of your actions reliably produce a consistent result. There is some comfort in that. If I go to church every Sunday, pay attention in the pew, and try to live better, I end up feeling better about myself and those around me.

I know that if I go out and walk five or six miles during the day, I will be really tired at night and likely sleep really well.  If I also do a lot of yard trimming and gardening on the same, there is a good chance that I will be so tired that I will have trouble sleeping. I seem to feel the best when I walk three or four miles in a day.

We know if we call our older daughter at 9 PM on Sunday night, it will be a short call.  That is when she is watching one of the few television shows that she enjoys. My neighbor enjoys washing his cars early on Sunday morning. Sometimes he washes them when even he admits they are pretty clean.

We understand that when beach season arrives that shopping in the grocery stores is a lot more challenging.  We try to shop for our groceries between Monday and Thursday and typically we avoid buying groceries on  the island from early June until late August.  It is part of the rhythm of life here on the coast.

While you can never predict what the future holds, experience teaches us much over the years and as the water gets shallower or our time horizon gets closer,  you do get better at navigating the waters. Know even a handful of things that you can comfortably count on to happen removes a little stress.  If life was always as mysterious as that first day on a new job or as stressful as a move to a new city, we might be perpetually stressed out.

There is some comfort in shallow waters whether you are fishing in them or living them.  Almost eight years ago when I moved to the Crystal Coast I had no idea that I would be so at home among the oyster rocks that once appeared so threatening.  Now I would rather go out on our river to fish when the tide is falling and the water shallow.  It is easier to sit alongside an oyster rock and fish.  When the tide is in, I cannot see the oyster rocks, I have no place to rest my kayak, and I am also unlikely to catch any fish.

When I get up in the morning, I no longer have to worry about the implications of every email that I write or each decision during the day.  I am no longer in the high pressure corporate world that defined my life for twenty years.  Now I try to please my wife, keep the commitments that I have made to myself, my family, my community, my church, and also to my boss who is not rich like Tim Cook at Apple but happens to be a whole lot better leader.

We have been here on the Southern Outer Banks of North Carolina long enough to appreciate how spring can start cool but easily rush into summer and quickly deliver us to beach season.  There is comfort in worrying about when the tomatoes will get ripe instead of when global warming will reach the tipping point or whether Apple will be able to deliver promised products before the end of the year.

Perhaps the choice of living here in Carteret County is a choice of shallower water than Reston, Virginia, where I worked for so many years.  By moving here we escaped from the city and found a less complicated life where you are more likely to be something more than just another face in the crowd.

I have written in our Emerald Isle Travel Guide that Carteret County is a lot of water spread mighty thin.  Maybe life here on the Crystal Coast is easier to take just because of that.

Reinventing yourself

As I look back to the summer of 2004 when I left Apple Computer, I have no doubt that I have learned more in the four years since Apple than I did in the nearly twenty years there.

While I learned a tremendous amount as I worked at Apple, the nature of the company perhaps limits your growth in ways that are hard to see until you leave.

Perhaps the biggest challenge at Apple is the overwhelming pressure for the company to present an image which has no blemishes.

I have learned more from my mistakes since I left Apple than I did from my successes at Apple.

You certainly did not want many mistakes at Apple because that was the quickest way out of the company.

Measured in awards and sales results, my last years at Apple were my most successful.

Other teams flocked to learn what we had done in order to be held up as an example. When you are asked to present to other groups on how to be successful, it might be a warning that you have become a little too successful for your own good.

Success at Apple has to have a sponsor. You can be very successful at Apple and labor in anonymity. However, if your success helps move an agenda forward, you can easily be held up for others to admire. If your success looks like it might overshadow your sponsor, you might see it evaporate.

Success can be turned into a failure with just the right negative words whispered into the appropriate vice president's ear.

In my last four years at Apple, I led a sales team that more than tripled Apple's federal business.

Yet when it was decided that an inside sales team needed to look better than my team, our success got repositioned as failure.

All corporations have similar messes when one executive wants to leap ahead of another. Maybe at Apple it is a little worse, but that is pretty hard to measure. The point is that what you learn from those situations does not help you grow a lot in your skills.

If success at Apple comes not from what and how you have accomplished something, but from what others want to showcase in order to advance their agendas, then it is hard to pull many valuable lessons from the experience.

Since leaving Apple and being on my own for the last couple of years, I have found that the only way to learn whether something works is to try it. If it fails, you try to evaluate why and try something else. You can make a lot of progress that way.

You quickly realize that perfect does not exist in the real world. You can get close, but you soon come to realize that being a lot better than the competition is much more achievable when being realistic and flexible than when agonizing over the perfect words to include in a mailing.

I once watched Apple spend over a year trying to decide what they wanted to say in a security document describing an operating system which had already been released. In effect Apple's programmers managed to get an operating system out the door before Apple's marketing could figure out the perfect words to describe it.

The interesting thing about security and OS X is that Apple missed a huge opportunity to market to many customers who were very troubled about computer security. Apple did not miss the opportunity because they did not have a good product, they missed it because they were afraid to talk about it.

While there is financial security in a place like Apple if you are in favor with the right folks or if you have found away to hide, you will never learn the skills to actually make intelligent decisions.

Significant decision making ability at Apple is restricted to the very few.

If you want to be nimble and ready for this new economy, Apple is not the place to prepare. Try creating your own business, you will learn a lot more.

Having to reinvent myself every six months is an amazing experience, but it gives you a lot of confidence in your own abilities. It is much better than figuring how to cover your rear or whom you have to sacrifice in order to save your own skin.

I would rather have the successes and failures that have taught me much since leaving Apple than the always suspect favor of an Apple vp.

Inauguration Day- A new road?

NBC News is reporting that 75% of the American public think the country is headed in the wrong direction.

That puts anyone looking for change in the majority. I know government is not the answer to everything.

However, government needs to be part of the solution, just as much as corporate American needs to revamp itself.

It will take leadership in government and a change in corporate leadership techniques to restore success to America. I know more about corporations than government so here I will focus on corporate behavior.

Last spring Wired had an article, "Breaking the Rules: Apple Succeeds By Defying 5 Core Valley Principles." One of the points in the article was the following.

5. CODDLE YOUR EMPLOYEES
Valley Rule
Since the best ideas bubble up from within the ranks, encourage autonomy by allowing workers free time to focus on their personal projects. Also, shower them with perks like free food and massages to make them feel special.

Apple Rule
Motivate through fear. Don't be afraid to scream. Threaten to fire them. Withhold praise until it's truly deserved. Go ahead and bring them to tears. As long as you can inspire them with your sense of mission, they'll consider this the best job they've ever had.

At the time, it appeared that Apple and Steve Jobs could do no wrong. Ten months and Steve's health problem have changed the equation.

Steve has built a company that has with his help turned out some fantastic products. My guess is that Steve has not created a management style which will benefit other companies or America or aid Apple in building a long term proposition.

Nearly twenty years at Apple taught me that fear of retaliation is not the best way to get the most out of your employees. Fear of failure certainly is not the best way to build a strong leadership culture in a corporation.

I continue to believe that the best management technique is to build strong interdependent teams where individuals are committed to supporting each other and to mutual success. Apple being enthralled by slash and burn management techniques where employees are often afraid to convey anything but good new has a weak leadership culture as a result.

I saw Apple corporate employees rush to cancel events where results would be anything less than perfect. I saw a brochure about security in a new operating system take longer to write than the operating system because people were so afraid of making mistake. I saw a simple customer request ignored by a handful of vice presidents because everyone was afraid of making the wrong decision.

What we need today is a culture in both government and private corporations which emphasizes accountability but also recognizes that you rarely get something right without making some mistakes along the way.

If you are honestly focused on trying to do the right thing for the right reasons, mistakes should be written off as long as progress is made towards a solution.

No business and certainly few government officials are immune to the politics of personality. New leaders try to make their marks, and when the personality becomes more important than the solution, more problems are created than solved.

Now that Steve Jobs is gone, Apple will continue with the products it has in the pipeline. Some will undoubtedly be successful. However with an attitude that typically ignores customer input and focuses on delivering margin to the company at the expense of value to the customer, I think the long term outlook for Apple is negative.

Articles such as the recent WSJ one, "I Once Was Chic, but Now I'm Cheap," indicate that others are questioning the value proposition of Apple. I have long suggested that Apple's market share will peak at 10%. The culture of Apple is to create the easy hit and move on to the next one, often with little effort beyond exacting the highest price from the most people in the shortest time.

I cannot hold Microsoft's Vista up as an example of success, but I can credit Microsoft for a strong effort to fix the product and deliver a new one that is better. Vista is a far better product today that what it was sixteen months ago when I first purchased it.

In the meantime, hardware manufacturers have delivered vastly less expensive products which help the Vista operating system look better.

Certainly Apple's Leopard came out of the gate as a far better product than Vista and has shown some improvement. However when I look at Apple hardware line, I am disappointed.

The MacBook went up in price, the MacMini is still spec starved, and we are still waiting for a new iMac and a product between the iMac and Apple's expensive towers,

In the end, I want better, lower cost products not just hit products from Apple's culture of fear.

That fall feeling

As the season begins to turn here on the coast, my thoughts are drawn back to previous falls. There are some great memories there.

One fall, probably 1974, I built the first big barn on our farm in Tay Creek, New Brunswick. I can still remember nailing up the last of the steel siding just before American Thanksgiving.

By then it was pretty cold to work outside without gloves.

In the fall of 1981 we had our cattle dispersal sale. In one afternoon we sold all two hundred head of our purebred Angus cattle. Some went as far away as Alberta. It was an amazing event that I will never forget.

About a year later I went to work in one of the first retail computer stores in eastern Canada. The transition from working outside all the time to a desk job was easier than I thought. It is a wonder that we have any farmers. Still in less than a year, I had helped open four other stores and had a number of employees working for me.

When the fall of 1984 rolled around, I joined Apple Computer for an amazing journey of almost twenty years. For those years, fall always meant a sales conference which in the later years was usually in the California. The early years were wild for a guy used to life on the farm..

At the end of one early conference in Boca Raton Starship played for us. Then there was the greased watermelon hunt with Michael Spindler on a beach that I cannot even remember.

The year 2004 brought the first fall after leaving Apple. It was a time of soul searching and trying to figure out what to do next with my life.

I ended up doing a couple of years with small companies, but I found that for the most part the only way that young companies learn is through their own mistakes. I actually time to relive corporate mistakes that I have already seen would be wasted.

Then in the fall of 2006 after lots of training I passed my real estate licensing exam for the state of North Carolina. I felt a great sense of accomplishment because I had not been certain that I could go back to school. Old computer guys can learn new tricks. The rest of that fall was spent taking even more real estate classes.

We also moved down to the coast of North Carolina in the fall of 2006. It was a risky dream of mine, but I am glad we did it. I have learned a tremendous amount and met some great people.

Fall of 2007 was a relatively successful real estate time for me. I finished the year strong and was named rookie of the year by our firm. We were actually well on the way to have a good follow-up year until the financial world fell apart this fall.

I think this fall might be remembered as my first fall of serious fishing. Last fall I was learning out to handle our boat, this year I am more focused on fishing.

There have been many pleasant days on the river and along the beach. The weather has been great, and we have caught enough fish to enjoy a few meals and to keep us excited about fishing.

Fall is always when I start to take stock of where I am and what I want to accomplish next.

Real estate continues to suffer, but at some point I know it will recover.  I am not sure that I will hang on those many years.  There are a lot of factors are going to make it a very tough place to make a living. I have my eyes open for other opportunities.

I continue to believe that the Internet will play an ever increasing role in helping people find and sell their homes. My skill set makes me well positioned to take advantage of the Internet as a marketing tool but it might be for something besides real estate.

___________________________________
Update- 2014

While I am still a licensed real estate agent, I stopped actively listing properties in the fall of 2011.  I have published several books and gone back to my roots in technology.  I am now vice president of sales and marketing for WideOpen Networks.  I still managed to keep up a very active writing career on the Internet.  There are lots of links and updated information on my homepage.

Using "Dip" thinking to review decisions

It is always easier to be the quarterback after the plays have been run.

Still once in a while it makes sense to evaluate what has happened and the context surrounding major events.

I like to do it because it helps me learn from my mistakes and successes and the ones of others. I have never been ashamed of learning from others, either what to do or what not to do.

One of the big turning points in my life started in the summer of 2003 when I was director of federal sales for Apple. My team had been on a tear. We had grown sales massively in the very tough federal market. We had done it with very few resources and lots of hard, smart work.

Yet it had been like pulling teeth. We seemed to be taking Apple into a market which the company really did not want. It was hard to get Apple to even acknowledge that a federal team existed.

It was then that I learned once again that you should always be careful what you wish for, because you might get it.

August of 2003, Apple appointed an enterprise VP. It was actually the beginning of the end of my career at Apple though I did not know it at the time.

Our efforts at selling to the federal government had flourished as a skunk works but was about to die from the company trying to help us.

I have pondered how this could have been played differently. After all I had been successful through nearly twenty years in Apple's very challenging sales environment.

The reality was that I should have left Apple at the moment that Apple half-heartedly tried to help the enterprise effort with a vice president who was not only toxic but clueless to the point of embarrassing us in front of key customers.

I recently read the post, The Big Dip: Ten Questions with Seth Godin. It provides an interesting framework for figuring out why my efforts at hanging in there at Apple during a tough time was exactly the wrong decision.

It’s time to quit when you secretly realize you’ve been settling for mediocrity all along. It’s time to quit when the things you’re measuring aren’t improving, and you can’t find anything better to measure...

I knew in the summer of 2003 that our numbers were not going to match what the company wanted. The biggest reason was the shortage of G5 systems during the critical buying season.

However, there were a number of other reasons, and most of them were related to settling for mediocre support from Apple when trying to achieve our goals.

We were promised key executives who would regularly visit Washington. It never happened. We ended up with an Oracle retread who could not have sold half priced new Mac products at MacWorld.

Apple promised us that we would be on the GSA Schedule, but ended up changing their mind and delaying it until years after I left Apple.

We were told that we would get publicity and interviews in federal trade papers. What we got was near invisibility in the world's largest IT market.

I could go down a whole list of promises made and broken by the corporation when it came to the federal market, but the truth is that Apple had no intention of really pushing their products in the federal market. We were living a pipe dream.

In my mind I knew that sales would improve in 2004 because we would have product again, but what I did not understand is that Apple's commitment to the market would never improve.

My mistake was using sales growth as a measurement. What I should have been watching was the company's delivery on its promises which turned out to be abysmal.

The "Dip" in 2003 was actually something that I should have realized as a signal to get out of Apple. I did not see it, and I wasted ten months when I could have been doing something else instead of being a target.

I encountered another "Dip" in late spring of May 2006.

I eventually got put into one of those situations where I had little to do in spite of being a VP. I could have worked at hanging around and trying to find a way to contribute, but who wants to work where their skills are not appreciated and their efforts are not acknowledged? I certainly had no interest in doing that, so I left.

The theory of the "Dip" has been a good way to understand when to continue fighting and when to move on to another set of challenges.

The pleasure of having the last word

Often it is late in the evening when I have time to find some time to catch up on my writing.

I have a number of websites and blogs which demand constant feeding if I want to keep my readers interested.

Most of the time I am in the grove and really enjoy putting together a post. Sometimes I get a comment which tweaks my interest. I try to be fair when I reply to a reasonable comment.

Occasionally I get a comment which just begs for a response. Yet I know from past experience that the person making the comment will respond back with another comment that still misses misses the original point of my article.

I have learned over the years that you don't win those arguments. Some people have such a high opinion of their own opinions that no else can possibly be right.

Maybe I have some of that in me, but I have always worked at learning from others except when the other person is overly full of himself.

I don't like people who look down on others. I get irritated by those who expect everyone to fall over in awe when they grace us with their highly suspect thoughts.

Unfortunately I have just described the dyed the wool Apple believers that challenge me the most.

I am pretty good at a few things, and I have nearly twenty years of inside the spaceship views of Apple, the guys who decided to take computer out of their corporate name recently.

As an admitted sucker for Apple product, I know that it is awfully easy to rationalize spending a premium price on Apple hardware products.

I also know that you can make a Mac work almost anywhere even if you put yourself in a mostly Windows world. Sometimes a Mac in a foreign environment lets you thrive.

I have also been to the point of almost giving up on Apple because of problems with my MacBook.

Surprisingly I have become more satisfied with my Macs now that I have a Windows laptop which keeps me from having to force my rounded corner Mac into a square PC hole.

Still Apple is far from a perfect corporation, and most Apple users take whatever product Steve decides to sell them even if it is at a premium price for not so premium specs.

Apple users are perhaps the only consumers who will defend the higher prices they pay to the death.

It seems a little weird that someone buying a product wants to pay a higher price for that product. Yet that is often the inescapable conclusion when it comes to Apple products.

It is not like Apple is unprofitable or about to go out of business. Yet people will make the argument that Apple products are worth the price.

If you complain that Apple's prices are high, expect to be taken to task.

The same people would probably haul an Internet invoice in on a car and beat the dealership down to $50 over cost if that was possible. Yet they have no problem with Apple making hundreds of dollars profit on an under $2,000 laptop.

Perhaps it is because Apple was so in danger of disappearing that Mac users are so quick to come the company's defense.

If any of them had seen the inside of Apple and heard where customer opinions rank, they might have a different opinion but somehow I doubt that would even work.

I have seen Apple employees so in love with the technology that they would work for abusive bosses for years at a salary they could easily beat in another technology company.

Perhaps that's Steve's special power over the masses because no hardware or software is worth that kind of abuse.

But to get back to the point on having the last word. There is no rational argument with some Mac lovers. I have written about the Reptilian Apple Fans whom I just ignore.

However, there are some very smart Apple users out there who still can't see the forest for the trees. When I unfortunately get engaged in a discussion with one of them, I know they will not give up. There is no persuading them.

So the only solution is to have the last word and leave them dangling. I rarely even read their responses. It's not worth it.

In the end Apple users who pride themselves on being discriminating buyers because they have bought a Mac are only partially right.

They have gotten a great product, but it would be an even better product if they worked at getting Apple to listen to customer feedback.

I wonder how much customer feedback went into the MacBook Air. It pretty clear to me and to Businessweek, Building the Perfect Laptop, that Lenovo likely has a more competitive product at least in hardware. Of course OS X makes up for a lot of sins.

Lenovo refused to accept that style had to win over function. They managed to get a DVD in their machine and even Ethernet.

However, I am sure that I am about to hear from some Mac users who are convinced that the world no longer needs DVDs or Ethernet ports.

I would not expect anything less for the dedicated fans of Apple.

But I hope they remember that I do have the last word.

Sour Grapes

Our society has changed dramatically this century.

The new church is that of the corporation.

While many will deny their worship of the corporation, you can understand it best in their reaction to those who have been excommunicated from the corporate church.

There are still people at Apple who will not talk to me because the company got rid of me. Even more surprising, Apple people continue to be afraid to either send or receive an email from me. From that you might guess that I committed corporate murder.

Most of these corporate worshipers have little understanding of their new religion. With little questioning, they assume the decisions coming from the CEO, the nominal head of the church, are law that supercedes any law of the land. Their salvation is their job, and they will do almost anything to retain that salvation. They will not question the law.

Before I go farther with this metaphor, I need to make clear how I have worked in a corporate world so the differences between religious fanatics, and those who come to the church to fulfill their own needs can be made clear.

First off I believe in the power of teams, and the right of each individual to have a chance to prove themselves in an environment designed to further the goals of the corporation with maximum efficiency. I believe that each member of the team will in their own self interest drive the performance of others in the team if the compensation plans are constructed properly.

I do not believe in mixing friends and business. While some people whom I have hired have become friends, I have never hired anyone because they are a friend.

Individuals in my ideal corporate world need to be empowered to do everything needed to achieve the goals of their corporation while living within the framework of the corporate environment and not violating the outside world's ethical standards.

Those are lofty goals and only work when a manager can become a leader and is willing to take the flack for his team so that they can get their jobs done.

It has been my experience that corporations know what they want done, they just don't know how to go about it, and often they are willing to trust their fate to people who talk a good story, but really don't know what they are doing.

As a salesperson, and a sales manager my job at Apple was to sell computers. Most of my career it was to sell computers to the enterprise for a company that openly claimed to not be interested in the enterprise.

I was very successful in my nearly twenty years at Apple. I captured both manager of the year and account executive of the year in my career. I finished second in the world once. My wall full of sales awards includes numerous national and regional awards. The record shows that I and my teams over achieved quota for all but a few years in the twenty years I was there. Every single performance review that I have is a glowing one. There are no negative ones.

In my last role at Apple, I was director of federal sales. I worked my way into that job through almost unbelievable odds. I was given a defunct part of Apple's business the US federal government, one rep for each coast, one system engineer, and my area associate. It was expected that we would fail. The federal revenue for Apple had been dropping precipitously for seven consecutive years.

The thing is that we didn't fail, in our first year we grew our business over 60% at time when Apple continued to loose market share, and other enterprise teams were falling flat on their face. We got a few more resources the next year, and again grew the business over 60%. We were the darling of Apple, invited to present to other teams on how we created success in the middle of failure with so few resources.

Just as we were hitting our stride, a whole new team of managers were brought into Apple to fix the field sales team. My manager who before the coup had sixty people reporting to him ended up with me and my small team as his only reports.

All of the managers brought in came from Adobe and all were under forty years of age. None of them had experience selling hardware, and few even knew one end of a Mac from another.

The Vice President who took the helm even shared with us that he had been brought in to fire the Apple field sales team and fix the sales process.

After a year of trying hard to be helpful to the new people, my manager left after he got put in a job with no reports. He was one of the most successful enterprise sales people in the history of Apple.

In the space of the two years after my manager's departure, I got to report to four different managers, none of which had ever worked for Apple or even used a Mac.

One of those managers was apparently given the job of driving me out of the company. My team of very successful veteran sales and engineering people who had grown to twenty by this time were treated like new sales reps just in off the street.

They were assigned quotas which even sixty percent growth couldn't achieve. I was not allowed to speak in forecast meetings and was even told at the national sales conference that my team was going to publicly spanked and taken behind the woodshed for a whipping.

In a year when Apple couldn't ship G5 desktops in Q4 we were awarded the Plunger award for not shipping G5s in Q4.

The gory details aren't worth repeating except that I stood up and complained about the unfair treatment of my people who during that year did not receive correct commissions for over nine months.

The manager that took us to the woodshed left in January of that year. I got another manager in March. In June during an operations review, he complained that our growth of over 60% was falling short of our over 70% quota growth. I was asked to prepare a recovery plan.

The morning I was told to present the recovery plan, I was called and told the presentation would be in a hotel instead of our office. When I showed up at the hotel for the presentation, there was an HR person present, and I was placed on leave so an investigation could be conducted into my conduct.

Of course anytime something like this happens, you know you are already toast. Even as someone over fifty being fired while doing a great job, there was little I could do, so I headed off to a new non-corporate world.

Doing it the way Apple did it, cost me most of my retirement options which had been given to me but had not vested, but that is the high tech gamble and at this point water under the bridge.

The real sadness comes from the dismantling of a very successful team. One by one my managers were forced out. All the sales people but one are now gone from federal sales. They have all been replaced by ex-Oracle sales people.

How they are doing, I don't know and really don't care. I haven't seen any huge federal successes for Apple but perhaps they're keeping them secret.

This story isn't an unusual one in corporate America. It demonstrates who you know is more important than how well you do your job. You could write plenty on those who tacitly help get rid of people who are successful only so they can look successful. It is not worth the time.

Corporations are full of those types of people who unfortunately will do whatever is asked to keep their job or make more a little more money. They have to live with themselves so that is probably punishment enough.

The corporate church thrives on cronyism, money, and the willingness to say whatever upper management wants to hear and ignore any other values that might have been learned in life.

While truth is valued outside the corporation, saying the right thing and having the ear of the top dog is the most important thing in a corporation.

I certainly do not regret leaving Apple. I was lucky to have survived with my values intact. My career at Apple confirmed to me that I am the type of person that I knew I was.

One manager once told me that I was too much of a Boy Scout, and he could never count on me to lie when I needed to. I'm actually proud of that.

Having survived Apple, I feel much greater reverence for the "Honor, truth, duty" motto from my military high school and the "Veritas" that adorns my college diploma.

I escaped the corporate church with soul, and I continue to sleep well after a hard day's work.

So if that is sour grapes, then they actually taste pretty sweet to me.

Fear of salespeople

I am wondering if it is a particularly American thing to be reluctant to talk to salespeople. I will admit to visiting car dealerships only on Sundays until I am ready to engage in the battle of wits.

I wrote about auto buying in America in the "That peculiarly American dance, the auto two-step." Still I like talking to good salespeople who know their products.

That's probably the reason that I avoid many of the big box sales people in electronics stores since it is so rare that they know their products. There are exceptions to the rules as I found in my purchase of one of the HP all-in-one printer, scanner, copiers.

Actually I have always considered myself something of a knowledge sponge, willing to soak up whatever wisdom I can glean from an expert. In real estate, we have used a Realtor® every Itime we bought a place but once. That once reinforced my belief in using Realtors®.

I have been in sales most of my adult life. Even when I was farming for eleven years, sales was never very far in the background. I firmly believe that sales done right is an honorable career.

I have found that in most cases, people have already sold themselves by the time they reach a sales person. The best that a sales person can do is make certain they do not end up buying the wrong product and become unhappy.

I am sure there are plenty of sleazy sales people in the world, but I cannot believe that people have become so divorced from their critical thinking skills that people ignore the opportunity to learn valuable information from people who actually know what they are talking about when it comes to a particular product.

We are almost ready to buy a boat, and I have been wandering around boat show rooms for months since I know almost nothing about boats. Aside from one guy who tried to convince me that if I bought a skiff I would stay wet all the time, the salespeople and nearly half have been women have been very knowledgeable and helpful. In fact most of them haven't been real sales folks since I have gotten almost zero follow-up on my visits. That includes email requests for pricing which have mostly been ignored.

I recently had another experience which made me wonder how some people make decisions. I was participating in a forum where people are trying to find out about cities and towns where they either live or might want to live. Though I thought I was being very careful to adhere to the rules of the forum, one of which was not advertising my services as a Realtor®. I was, however, uncomfortable with people not knowing that I was a Realtor® when I was talking about real estate. I ended up being banished from the forum by what was likely an over zealous moderator who I am sure thought he was protecting people from me. Unfortunately for the readers, I was just trying to help some people learn the facts instead of hearsay.

I have a long history of posts about Apple and their computer products. I recently did a post about my letters to a friend who was considering buying a Mac. A couple of my readers there have suggested that I was doing everything I could to stop him from buying a Mac. Actually all I was doing was making sure that he went into the purchase with his eyes wide open.

In the end his friendship is worth more to me than whether he buys a Macintosh or not. I could tell from his letters that he has already decided to do it, so he might as well know the complete truth about the products instead of the Apple fanboy version of reality. Sugar coating the truth would only lead him to question our friendship.

It's easy to own one product and think that you have had the greatest experience in the world as an owner or user. When you have been involved in the industry or had a history with a particular company, things might not look so rosy.

I will no longer buy a Volvo, and I know a couple of Volvo owners who say the same thing. I only got to that point on my third Volvo. I will not buy a Maytag washer or dryer no matter how many cute the commercials they run are. If my current Apple MacBook breaks again, I might well buy a HP or Sony Laptop. In spite of what some of the Mac users want to believe the reality is that the reliability on my recent Apple purchases has not been good, and dealing with Apple on them has not been a lot of fun.

Still having said that, I am not afraid to engage a salesperson for Volvos. A good one would run back to the company and tell them how they lost someone who could have been a Volvo customer for life.

In this age of full disclosure on the Internet and with the power of Google, I find it hard to believe that there are people who are still afraid of being tricked by Realtors®. I spent nearly three years trying to find the right spot on the Crystal Coast. It was only with the help of a true local expert and Realtors® that we found it.

Expertise might be hard to find, but anonymous expertise is impossible to find. Engage the salespeople and learn what you can. You might find someone whose knowledge keeps you from making a mistake.

If you want to know about living along North Carolina's secret coast, the Crystal Coast, visit my website, "Coastal Paradise." I promise not to sell you anything since the facts speak for themselves, and you might even learn something from someone who is learning from the real local experts as fast as he can.

Produce stand ethics

After college in the seventies, I moved to Nova Scotia. I wanted to own some land. There was nothing affordable on the east coast of the United States  like the 140 acres, house and barn that I got on the Bay of Fundy near Bridgetown, Nova Scotia.

Having lived in Boston for the previous four years and awakening one morning to find nothing but a pile of glass where my car once was, I was initially surprised that many of the produce stands in the Annapolis Valley would operate on the honor system.

There would be produce, a scale, and a box or can for money. Sometimes the money containers would be attached to the stand, but often you could have walked off with the money with little effort. Though I am sure robbery happened, I never heard about it.

Even today in our fairly rural area, I know a fair number of spots where people could make off with products that aren't locked down yet I don't think it is huge problem with those businesses that are still in areas like ours where most of the people are trustworthy.

Still I doubt that many places remain like the small village of Tay Creek, north of Fredericton, New Brunswick in Canada where our farm was for 17 years. I can't ever remember taking the key out of our pickup truck, and we never had a lock on the house until we moved. We just didn't need it.

I spent nearly twenty years at Apple and got to see first hand how the drive for success can change people.  It occurs to me that whether intentionally or not Steve Jobs created a pressure cooker environment where resources will forever be tight and the expectation is that there will be no excuses unless you are so high on the corporate tree that mistakes are never your problem.

It creates something of a moral wasteland where people tend to look out for themselves and just be thankful that they have survived another year. It is something like a fruit stand where selling the fruit and making the most money off of it eventually becomes more important that producing great fruit.

You hear lots about what a creative place Apple is, but I doubt you will ever hear anything about how ethical Apple is. The simple reason is that Apple is a company which has pretty well institutionalized the idea that the ends justify the means. If there are a few employee bodies scattered along the way, what does it matter as long as the end result is that another great product makes it out the door to help grow the company's reputation? When the products begin to lack greatness, the body counts will grow.

I doubt that type of environment has made Apple products great. I do know that it has created an environment that most people would rather forget than talk about when they leave the company.

I worked at Apple nearly twenty years, and I never saw any ethics training in my career there. I heard a vice president say you should make sure you didn't save any of your email because it might get the company in trouble.  I know lots of employees who lost their jobs because they were on the wrong side of a corporate struggle that they did not even know was happening.  It is unfortunate that 

collateral casualties during internal struggles have become such a part of corporate culture in America.

There are plenty of companies just as bad or even worse than Apple. The challenge is that Apple lives in a glass bowl.  Lots of people assume life on the inside of the great Apple mother ship is wonderful and yet they have never walked inside the halls of Cupertino much less worked there.

I was in real estate for a few years and ethics were a big part of the job.

While having a code of ethics certainly is not a perfect solution to bad behavior, it is certainly better than the free wheeling world of technology where anything goes.  Of course Realtors® in most states live with the knowledge that consumers can easily complain about their behavior with just a few mouse clicks. I am sure knowing the NC Real Estate Commission is watching is a good thing for many people who might stray from the straight and narrow.

Having that code of ethics behind you, makes it a little easier to stand tall for what you believe, but in reality it only reinforces what you have grown up with from your youth.

If you grow up a Boy Scout and graduate from McCallie, during its days as a military school you learn about Honor, Truth, and Duty. My college had the simple Latin word of Veritas as a motto. All of that builds character as my mother used to say.

Still we can all learn from the fruit stand vendors of Nova Scotia. If you build your business on trusting your people instead of creating a climate of fear, you might have an organization that does the right thing by default.

You can read about our early years in Nova Scotia in our $2.99 Kindle book, A Taste For The Wild - Canada's Maritimes.

The challenge that all businesses face

I just wrote a post, "The real challenge for Apple & OS X." In it I talk about how it isn't good enough for Apple to be just "better" than the new Windows version, Vista.

In order to just hold their own, Apple must be geometrically better than Windows offerings. This is no different than the scenario faced by many other businesses that do not hold the dominant position in their market. It's even the case for local businesses. If you are the new guy in town, just being "better" is not enough.

The question boils down to how do you show enough real value to a customer in order to convince them to give you a fair shot at their business. In the computer business, it is really hard, because staying where you are is often easier than doing something different. Change can be tough.

When I helped to sell email services, often the key differentiator was just being there when the customer called and being able to jump through whatever hoops needed to solve their problems. Most often that meant having enough well trained people to answers their questions and guide them through the initial sign-up procedures. Surprisingly we had a few people who thought Saturday or Sunday would be good days to switch email providers. That meant some Saturday afternoons doing coverage like I wrote about in "The Saturday afternoon technologist, electronic hair."

The real estate world which I've recently joined has long been accustomed to working Saturday and Sunday afternoon if necessary. If we aren't around to catch the customers when they walk into the door, someone else will be.

Even companies like Apple that are product focused really need to keep their customer facing side as effective as possible. Just having stores where people can meet with dedicated and knowledgeable Apple people has been a huge success for Apple. Still as it is with all large companies, finding the right person or the right answer can be challenging. When I was at Apple, at least once a month some poor lost soul would finally get routed to my desk after a month long decent into phone tree hell while looking for someone at Apple Federal.

The other key to responding to customers is actually listening to them. In the last three years I've had a fair amount of experience with real estate agents. I also been hauled to a large number of houses that the minute I saw them, I knew we were wasting our time and the time of real estate agents. The agents had not listened to me or they would have figured out that I wanted a house with some beach characteristics instead of a two story colonial.

I'm really curious to see how Apple does with the iPhone. Apple is of the belief that you have to tell customers what to buy instead of building products with the help of customers. That's one of the main reasons Apple products seem to be headed more towards a closed ecosystem. If you aren't trying to make your products work with your customers' stuff, my guess is that it won't.

In real estate we have to listen to our customers who often become our clients. Once they become clients, we have to put their interests before ours.

It's a totally different relationship than you find in the computer world. There companies buying products have been known to be stuck with equipment made obsolete by an announcement of new products. Sometimes it happens before the purchased products even make it to someone's desk.

Of course that doesn't make for happy customers.

It turns out that the best way to get another customer is to do a really good job for the one that you already have. Happy customers can be very effective sales people for a company

In Apple's case the customers have gone that one step further and in effect become tremendous evangelists for the company. Should Apple ever lose that army of Mac users, it would be very hard to continue to be successful.

I'm actually glad to be in a world where my success is measured by how successful I am in meeting the customer needs not just today but over time. If more companies measured their employees that way, we would see more companies responsive to customers and fewer ones who just throw their products over the wall with the hopes that someone will purchase them.

Incremental improvement to meet customer suggestions might not be the best way to define new product categories, but it is a great way to build customer loyalty even if you aren't the biggest player in town or the market.

The Apple iPhone Day

Today was a big day for Apple, they stripped "Computer" from their company name and firmly entrenched themselves as a consumer products company.

The company that once produced the computer for the rest of us, is now trying to cement its reputation as the place to go for all the coolest gadgets.

As a long time user of Apple's computers, I hope this even greater dedication to consumer gadgets doesn't mean the computer part of Apple is going to be ignored, but based on today's announcements, it seems that just might be the case.

I am not exactly a heavy cell phone user, so spending $499 for one of the iPhones is probably something I'm not going to do. I am sure there will be a rush to buy this newest Apple gadget, but my life is not complex enough that I need all the features that Apple has packed into iPhone. I often can't even find my cell phone. I figure that I'm better off with a Noika that is two years old.

I made a prediction today. I am guessing Apple may have reached its pinnacle today. We will see if I'm right or wrong in six months to a year. I think Apple will do well with the iPhone. I just don't think it will be another iPod. I could be wrong, it won't be the first time when it comes to Apple. The one thing that might change my prediction is if Apple releases OS X for Intel hardware made by other manufacturers. That would be huge, but it's not likely to happen unless the dynamics of Apple's business change.

Based on what I have seen Apple is fully committed to requiring proprietary hardware to join the chosen circle of Apple users. I don't think that is going to change.

I wonder how big that circle of Apple users can get before they get tired of dancing only to Apple's tunes? I hate to drag up this, but seems to me that Steve once promised never to introduce products before they would ship. Actually that the only kind of products he seems to introduce these days.

On another note, if you're a small or medium company interested in email, today I posted an article, "Email Services for Businesses," which explains why I think this should be the year of email service outsourcing.

Blogs and personal product marketing

We absorb so many marketing messages that it can be very hard to make intelligent buying decisions. I doubt that is a surprise to anyone.

What might be a surprise to those who aren't paying attention is the way that bloggers are providing some interesting twists on marketing. There are so many products on the shelves these days that picking the best one can be a huge challenge. Sometimes it doesn't matter. I probably won't be upset by which Tide detergent my wife picks from the six different scents.

I would, however, be very upset if someone that I knew went out and bought a Volvo without listening to the challenges that I have faced. I wrote the post, "High tech car, low tech dealer," back in the fall of 2005. I am still getting comments on it. In fact one came in today. It closed with this comment.

I have completely lost faith in Volvo.

Now a few people complaining about Volvo isn't going to do huge damage to the company. Still in a world where people are becoming more and more connected it isn't going to Volvo any good either.

The thing is that as more and more intelligent buyers start to depend on each other's opinions, it will matter. In fact as marketing gets more questionable, the opinions which gain credence on the web will start to make a difference.

Today I had an article, "What Jobs told me on the iPhone," published in the Guardian Unlimited in London, England. In less than twenty four hours eighteen thousand people had taken the time to click on a link from the article and visit one of two main blogs, "Applepeels" or "View from the Mountain." My Ocracoke Waves blogger site is one where I don't track the traffic, but I am sure some folks wandered by here.

I had numerous notes and comments which lend me to believe that people trust what I say. I take that trust seriously. As someone who has been selling things since he starting knocking on doors in the first grade and selling first aid kits, I have always sold things in which I believed. That includes Angus cattle, Vermeer Balers, Apple's computers, G3 Systems Inc. integration services, and outsourced email from Webmail.us. It hasn't mattered whether I was selling it in a face to face meeting or recommending it in my writing. My integrity has always come first. I am not going to sell or recommend a bad product.

I have also tried to separate my personal dislikes on companies from their products. Some places it is easier to do that than others. Writing about Apple, it's pretty easy to love many of the products while not be very excited about the company. Yet even with Apple, when I have a product that has problems, like the MacBook I recently bought, I'm not very shy about saying something.

I would like to think we are heading into a world of products which receive personal reviews that I can trust. The trouble is that most of the time I cannot find the right information. A good example is my latest purchase of an "AIO" or "all in one printer, scanner, copier, and fax machine" I searched the web for good information. All of it was rather worthless.

I talked to friends, no one had current experience using a Mac with one of the machines. I went to the big box electronic stores and most couldn't even make them work. I ended up gambling on the purchase. Yet when I got it all working, I wrote about it and the articles, "HP AIO Photosmart C6180 and Mac OSX," and "The not so reluctant home system engineer," have been very popular. I am now the expert and get questions about the product almost daily.

I try to answer as many as possible, but the interest I have seen in these posts borders on more than I can handle for free. This interest in finding real answers is very indicative of the lack of trust that many people have in the standard over-hyped marketing that we're seeing today. People are accustomed to buying things where the performance doesn't match up to the marketing materials.

Over time the smart people become cautious and look to other ways to evaluate important purchases.

Companies haven't figured out how to utilize people like me since I don't want anyone to give me a product. If that happened, my review would probably be worth as much as the reviews done by magazines that are trying to protect their advertising revenue. Maybe people like me are a disorganized low budget free Consumer Reports without any consistent standards but with lots of personality.

I'll take a personal recommendation from someone I know over any marketing that I see. It might be interesting if Blogger or Typepad developed a rating system for bloggers like eBay has for buyers and sellers.

Just maybe we would find it a little easier to find out what we need before we give these companies our hard earned money. I encourage everyone to speak honestly about the product you use.

I love where I live, I tell people about my experiences on North Carolina's Southern Outer Banks (SOBX). There are certain restaurants that I really like. I want them to stay in business so I write about them. My favorite place to buy fresh shrimp prompted me to write about how to fix shrimp in the post, "The easy way to perfect shrimp." The shrimp then need the right cocktail sauce so I have to tell people about Kelchner's Cocktail Sauce.

I don't consider it wrong to give a plug for something that I enjoy or which has provided me with good service or great taste. I don't make it any money for my positive comments, and most people like to have recommendations to help them filter through all the marketing hype.

I have started recording some of my recommendations on a new blog, "Coastal NC Daily Record." I hope it ends up being useful for at least a few smart consumers.