SELF-ESTEEM, GRATIFICATION & ADDICTION

Simon Sinek discusses digital addiction & self-esteem.

Described as “a visionary thinker with a rare intellect,” Sinek teaches leaders and organizations how to inspire people. With a bold goal to help build a world in which the vast majority of people go home everyday feeling fulfilled by their work, Sinek is leading a movement to inspire people to do the things that inspire them.

A trained ethnographer, he is the author of two books: the global best seller, Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action and his newest book, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal best seller, Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t.

Fascinated by the leaders and companies that make the greatest impact in their organizations and in the world, those with the capacity to inspire, he has discovered some remarkable patterns about how they think, act and communicate and the environments in which people operate at their natural best. He has devoted his life to sharing his thinking in order to help other leaders and organizations inspire action.

He is best known for popularizing the concept of Why and for the talk he gave on the subject that became the second most watched talk of all time on TED.com.

Sinek’s unconventional and innovative views on business and leadership have attracted international attention and have earned him invitations to meet with an array of leaders and organizations, including: 3M, Costco, Deckers, Ernst & Young, HSM, jetBlue, KPMG, Pfizer, NBC/Universal, the military, government agencies and entrepreneurs. Sinek has also had the honor of sharing his ideas at the United Nations, the United States Congress and with the senior leadership of the United States Air Force, United States Marine Corps, and United States Army.

Sinek shares his optimism with all who will listen. He speaks around the globe and has commented for local and national press, including The New York Times, Inc. Magazine, NPR, BusinessWeek. Sinek is active on Twitter and writes his own blog, simonsinek.com.

Sinek is an adjunct staff member of the RAND Corporation, one of the most highly regarded think tanks in the world. He is also active in the arts and not-for-profit world, working with charity: water, an organization devoted to helping bring clean water to the over 700 million people around the world who don’t yet have it. He also serves on the board of the Tami Stronach Dance Company.

Steve Jobs’ amazing marketing strategy

Steve Jobs shares his amazingly different approach to marketing and how he used it to build Apple into one of the largest companies in the world.

To me….marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world. It’s a very noisy world. And we’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is! And so, we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us.

Now Apple, fortunately, is one of half-a-dozen best brands in the whole world. Right up there with Nike, Disney, Coke, Sony — it is one of the greats of the greats. Not just in this country, but all around the globe.

But even a great brand needs investment and caring if it’s going to retain its relevance and vitality. And the Apple brand has clearly suffered from neglect in this area in the last few years. And we need to bring it back!

The way to do that is NOT to talk about speeds and fees. It’s NOT to talk about bits and mega-hertz. It’s NOT to talk about why we are better than Windows.

The dairy industry tried for 20 years to convince you that milk was good for you. It’s a lie, but they tried anyway. And the sales were falling. And then they tried “Got milk” and the sales went up. “Got milk” wasn’t even talking about the product. In fact, it focuses on the absence of the product.

But the best example of all, and one of the greatest jobs of marketing that the universe has ever seen, is Nike. Remember, Nike sells a commodity. They sell shoes!!!

And yet, when you think of Nike you feel something different than a shoe company. In their ads, as you know, they don’t ever talk about the product. They don’t ever tell you about their air soles and why they are better than Reebok’s air soles.

What does Nike do in their advertising? They honor great athletes. And they honor great athletics. That’s who they are, that’s what they are about!

Apple spends a fortune on advertising — you’d never know it….you’d never know it!
So…when I got here, Apple just fired their agency and there was a competition with 23 agencies that…you know…four years from now we would pick one. And we blew that up and we hired Chiat\Day, the ad agency that I was fortunate enough to work with years ago and created some award winning work including the commercial voted the best ad ever made, 1984 (by Advertising Professionals).

And…we started working about eight weeks ago, and the question we asked was, “Our customers want to know who is Apple and what is it that we stand for…where do we fit in this world?”

And what we’re about isn’t making boxes for people to get their jobs done — although we do that well. We do that better than almost anybody, in some cases.

But Apple is about something more than that! Apple at the core…its core value — is that, we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better. That’s what we believe!

And we have had the opportunity to work with people like that. We’ve had the opportunity to work with people like you; with software developers, with customers, who have done it. In some big, and some small ways.

And we believe that, in this world, people can change it for the better. And that those people who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world are the ones that actually do!

And so, what we’re going to do in our first brand marketing campaign in several years, is to get back to that core value!

A lot of things have changed. The market is in a total different place than where it was a decade ago. And Apple is totally different — and Apple’s place in it is totally different. And believe me, the products, and the distribution strategy, and the manufacturing are totally different…and we understand that.

But values and core values — those things shouldn’t change. The things that Apple believed in at its core, are the same things Apple really stands for today.