Dan Pallotta writig for the Harvard Business Review blog network:

I’d say that in about half of my business conversations, I have almost no idea what other people are saying to me. The language of internet business models has made the problem even worse. When I was younger, if I didn’t understand what people were saying, I thought I was stupid. Now I realize that if it’s to people’s benefit that I understand them but I don’t, then they’re the ones who are stupid.

Just speak in plain english. You can tell a lot about a person (or company) based on how simply they speak. Explaining ideas simply requires deep understanding – and we already know many business people don’t have a very deep understanding of the concepts they work with.

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The input method – the way people interact with a product – is the most important product decision made.  Horace Dediu writes and makes a compelling case for this: ”The Primary Cause for the shift of profits from Incumbents to Entrants has been the disruptive impact of a new input method.” Who do you think suggested the input method for the iPod?

Leander Kahney writing for Wired in October 2006, five years after the first iPod was introduced and five years before today:

The idea for the scroll wheel was suggested by Apple’s head of marketing, Phil Schiller, who in an early meeting said quite definitively, “The wheel is the right user interface for this product.”

Schiller also suggested that menus should scroll faster the longer the wheel is turned, a stroke of genius that distinguishes the iPod from the agony of competing players.

Apple’s head of marketing.  Schiller is what marketing guys should be.  The marketer’s job is to think of what makes sense to consumers.  How would a consumer use this?  What would make a consumer buy this?  How can we make users love this?  These are often the same questions the people developing the products are thinking about.  But marketers and product managers restrict their thinking.

Schiller clearly thinks about these questions more broadly than your average marketer.  The question to him isn’t “what campaign/TV spot/ad would make a consumer buy this?” it’s “what decisions should we make to get a consumer to buy this?”  More than ever before, it’s the product decisions that influence purchase.  Great marketers are consumer-oriented thinkers who think about the end-to-end consumer experience.  At one end of that experience is using the product itself.  I’m certainly not suggesting most marketers are great (or even decent) product managers, I’m suggesting they should be.  It’s their job to be.

Product management requires a deep passion and understanding of design (and technology in the common case of software products) that is far beyond today’s average marketer.  But in five years this passion and understanding will be required for every marketer.

Schiller was and still is way ahead of his time.  Apple has thrived by making all decisions – business, product and marketing decisions – by thinking like marketers: consumer-first, or better: consumer-only.  That’s how Steve Jobs thought.  More and more companies are following suit.

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Helen Walters, writing at Thought You Should See This, relaying insights from Roger Martin, dean of Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto:

The problem society faces, says Roger Martin, is that the best way to become rich is to trade value, not create value.

Trading value may be lucrative, but creating value through software can be tremendously lucrative too. Growing up I was often reminded I would work in a service economy. What I didn’t learn at the time was the role software would play in providing services.

It sounds almost silly to put it in these terms in 2011, but Internet-connected software products are services. Products like Facebook, Nike+, Siri, Square apps, etc. all provide a valuable service to their users. Developers and programmers make up a key organ in the service economy. The best part is software products are inexpensive to build and distribute but have the the potential to create as much value for the creator as trading value through equities or other investments. And the software is creating value for the user and society as well.

Here’s the advice Martin offers for creating value:

Focus on serving customers, not on maximizing shareholder value or on making money.

It may sound like that would get a CEO who does this would get fired, but the way you maximize shareholder value is not to think intently about making money. It’s to think intently about making great stuff. That’s what will make money, and thereby maximize shareholder value. Steve Jobs famously advocated laser-like focus on products people love instead of profits – and that may have been his most important insight in building his greatest creation. The most important thing he did after he returned to Apple in 1997? It wasn’t creating the iMac or the iPod. It was firing the whole board, which was a stipulation of his return as full-time CEO.

Any other board probably would have fired him for focusing on customers instead of profits.

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Fred Wilson, principal of Union Square Ventures on his blog AVC:

We wrote in business school, but I don’t recall a lot of effort being put into making us better writers. And for almost two decades in venture capital, writing meant memos and quarterly reports and not much more.

Then, at age 42, I started blogging. And I’ve been writing daily ever since. Something like 5,600 blog posts have been entered into my Typepad CMS. Almost all of them by me. I’m getting close to Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours. My writing has improved immeasurably. But more importantly, I have learned to love writing. It’s creative. It’s a puzzle. How do I tell the story? How do I get my point across? How do I do it crisply and clearly? How do I end it on a strong note?

Communication skills are so important in life. The investment I’ve made in my communication skills over the past eight years is paying huge dividends for me now. I want to help my kids make the same investment, just much earlier in life. I know it will come in handy and I know it will be a great source of pleasure for them throughout their life.

My grandfather and namesake was an attorney at law and constantly reminded me to become a great writier, emphasizing that every business requires outstanding written communication. Now my girlfriend is a writer by profession and I’ve seen first hand how critical writing is in my work.

This is part of the reason I write here: because I need practice. Since I started I’ve noticed many writers aren’t very precise (or even accurate) and some aren’t even good storytellers. Writing, like programming and business strategy, requires both accuracy and story telling; precision and creativity; clarity and flow. That’s why I’ve come to love it more than I thought I would. So I’m planning to practice every day starting at 24 instead of 42.

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It’s his first smartphone. Siri is the reason he got it. After a few days of use, he now interacts with Siri flawlessly but still struggles with simple tasks on the touch interface, like slide to answer calls and typing with the soft keyboard. The technology is nascent, but for the first time I saw that voice could be an effective input method for an everyday computing device – as in an alternative to the mouse, click-wheel and multitouch.

If you want to understand why I (and many others) are obsessed with Apple as if it’s a religion, listen to this podcast on disruptive interfaces from Horace Dediu, founder of Asymco. The company, Apple Inc., is what I (we) revere, respect and love – not just Apple products.

Horace Dediu has three main theses in the podcast:

(1) Disruptive input methods are what revolutionize industries
(2) Apple’s DNA allows it to disrupt industries (“pirate” projects)
(3) Data and knowledge provide an important foundation, but decisions are made on intuition

He makes compelling cases for all three – and he seems to think voice input has a serious chance to be the next disruptive input method for computing devices. Of the three popular interfaces for communicating with computers over the last 40 years, Apple introduced all of them to the mass consumer market: The mouse. The click-wheel. Multi-touch. We shouldn’t be surprised if Apple brings the next major interface to the masses either – and maybe they’ve already begun.

It’s been said many times before, but you really can’t understand how good Siri is until use it. Or at least until you see my grandfather use it.

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Fred Wilson, principal of great New York VC firm Union Square Ventures:

On Thursday night I gave a talk at NYU Poly and in the Q&A a young man asked me for advice for “those who aren’t technical”. I said he should try to get technical. The next morning I met with a bunch of Sloan Business School students doing a trek through NYC. A young woman asked me the same question. I gave her the same answer.

I don’t mean that everyone should become a software engineer. I do mean that everyone should understand software engineering (or whatever technical subject/industry you want to work in). I don’t speak French fluently. But when I go to France, I know enough French to speak it badly until the person on the receiving end changes the language to English.

Dennis Crowley claims to be a terrible programmer. And yet he and Naveen built the first version of Foursquare together. Their third team member was Harry and Harry’s first job was to rewrite all of Dennis’ code. Dennis is the kind of technical I’m talking about. Learn how to hack something together so that you can get people interested in your idea, your project, your startup. If you can do that, then you have a better chance of success.

I don’t always agree with Fred Wilson, but this is great.

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