So I was reading an online article yesterday about the iPad (because, as we all know, there haven’t been enough articles about the iPad). The article itself wasn’t earth-shattering—something about how the iPad is outselling Mac computers—but I thought one of the comments was hugely insightful. The thread was about why Apple products, particularly the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad, are so immensely popular. The comment that caught my eye (or, in AppleSpeak, my “i”) was this:
Everybody else is creating things that people want. Apple creates things that people will want.
And isn’t that a great philosophy for your business?
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Bill Stainton
Bill's keynote presentations combine
Business Smarts with Show Biz Sparks!
Author of
The 5 Best Decisions the Beatles Ever Made
Speaker, Author, Beatles Expert
By Bill Stainton on May 23rd, 2010 in Creativity & Innovation, Leadership, The Beatles and Success.
You’ve got a nice little business with all the things that a nice little business requires: a great product or service, a company web site, maybe even an expensive sales and marketing campaign. The only problem is, you’re not getting the customers. You’ve built it, but they’re not coming. What’s the problem?
You have no hook.
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Bill Stainton
Bill's keynote presentations combine
Business Smarts with Show Biz Sparks!
Author of
The 5 Best Decisions the Beatles Ever Made
Speaker, Author, Beatles Expert
By Bill Stainton on May 7th, 2010 in Creativity & Innovation, Leadership, The Beatles and Success.
As a professional speaker, I get to visit with many different businesses in a cross-section of industries. I’m noticing some trends that I find encouraging—trends that I’ve confirmed with several of my speaker colleagues. Now, I’m not going to sit here and try to convince you that we’re completely out of the economic doldrums. You’re too smart to fall for that (except for you—the guy in the yellow flowered shirt—you’ll believe anything I tell you). But in broad terms, here’s what I’ve noticed:
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Bill Stainton
Bill's keynote presentations combine
Business Smarts with Show Biz Sparks!
Author of
The 5 Best Decisions the Beatles Ever Made
Speaker, Author, Beatles Expert
By Bill Stainton on April 19th, 2010 in Change, Creativity & Innovation, Leadership, The Beatles and Success.
How much time are you wasting trying to solve problems that could simply be eliminated?
I once spent nearly an entire summer trying to solve a problem. But when I finally came around to eliminating the problem instead, the “solution” seemed so simple! Here’s what happened.
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Bill Stainton
Bill's keynote presentations combine
Business Smarts with Show Biz Sparks!
Author of
The 5 Best Decisions the Beatles Ever Made
Speaker, Author, Beatles Expert
By Bill Stainton on February 4th, 2010 in Creativity & Innovation, Leadership, The Beatles and Success.
I’ve never run a pre-school daycare, but for fifteen years I was the boss of ten multi-Emmy Award winning comedy writers, which amounts to pretty much the same thing. As the Executive Producer of Seattle’s sketch comedy TV show, Almost Live!, it was my job to keep a highly creative team motivated and productive. I learned a lot of things along the way, but primarily I learned that a creative team needs two seemingly incompatible things in order to thrive: direction and freedom—with a little fire thrown in along the way. Let’s take these one at a time. But first, a disclaimer:
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Bill Stainton
Bill's keynote presentations combine
Business Smarts with Show Biz Sparks!
Author of
The 5 Best Decisions the Beatles Ever Made
Speaker, Author, Beatles Expert
By Bill Stainton on January 5th, 2010 in Creativity & Innovation, Leadership, Team Building, The Beatles and Success.
I’m tired of hearing people talk about “quantity vs. quality,” as if the two were mutually exclusive. [You: "Really? You're tired of that? You're hearing this conversation so much that you're actually tired of it? What kind of lame parties are you going to, man? I never hear people talking about 'quantity vs. quality!'"] Well, perhaps I hang out with a more erudite crowd than you. But the point is this: quantity and quality are not mutually exclusive.
In fact, when it comes to creativity, quantity leads to quality.
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Bill Stainton
Bill's keynote presentations combine
Business Smarts with Show Biz Sparks!
Author of
The 5 Best Decisions the Beatles Ever Made
Speaker, Author, Beatles Expert
By Bill Stainton on December 22nd, 2009 in Creativity & Innovation, The Beatles and Success.
I’ve been talking a lot about ideas lately. I love ideas. I love coming up with them, I love watching others come up with them, I love seeing them brought to fruition. It’s been said that, in business, nothing happens until somebody sells something. That may be true, but you know what? In virtually everything—business included—nothing happens until somebody has the idea for it. Look around you. Everything you see (at least everything human-made), from the shoes on your feet to that episode of Lost that you’re watching, is the result of an idea. It’s the product of a human brain exercising its creativity. Read More…
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Bill Stainton
Bill's keynote presentations combine
Business Smarts with Show Biz Sparks!
Author of
The 5 Best Decisions the Beatles Ever Made
Speaker, Author, Beatles Expert
By Bill Stainton on February 19th, 2009 in Creativity & Innovation, The Beatles and Success.
So I was reading through a book of Mark Twain quotes last night (did the guy ever say anything that wasn’t pure gold?), and I came upon one that was particularly relevant to my last post:
“The man with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.”
Bill Gates was an idiot whose idea of “a computer on every desk” was patently absurd. Those wacky Wright kids, Orville and Wilbur, with their crazy “flying machine” idea—what were they thinking? And who can forget Johannes Gutenberg? “Movable type? Wow Johannes—what have you been smoking?” Cranks, all of them. Until they succeeded. Then they were visionaries. Pretty thin line, huh? Read More…
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Bill Stainton
Bill's keynote presentations combine
Business Smarts with Show Biz Sparks!
Author of
The 5 Best Decisions the Beatles Ever Made
Speaker, Author, Beatles Expert
By Bill Stainton on February 18th, 2009 in Creativity & Innovation, The Beatles and Success.
Do you ever feel like you missed the boat? Do you ever feel like opportunity has, once again, passed you by? Do you ever find yourself saying, “If only I had…
…invented the Pet Rock;
…bought into Microsoft when it first went public;
…come up with the idea for Facebook?”
Somehow the innovations always seem to go to the other guy. It’s not that you’re not smart; it’s just that your timing is off, right?
Bull crap. Read More…
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Bill Stainton
Bill's keynote presentations combine
Business Smarts with Show Biz Sparks!
Author of
The 5 Best Decisions the Beatles Ever Made
Speaker, Author, Beatles Expert
By Bill Stainton on February 15th, 2009 in Creativity & Innovation, The Beatles and Success.
So I was out to dinner last night, and two guys at a nearby table were discussing Sunday’s Grammy awards—specifically Paul McCartney’s performance of I Saw Her Standing There with Foo Fighter (and former Nirvana drummer) Dave Grohl on drums. This led one of the two to say “Well, Ringo never really was much of a drummer. But I guess he was an okay timekeeper, and that’s really all the Beatles needed.” The other one agreed. At that point, I’m pretty sure I was visibly shaking, and it was all I could to keep from setting fire to their table. Read More…
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Bill Stainton
Bill's keynote presentations combine
Business Smarts with Show Biz Sparks!
Author of
The 5 Best Decisions the Beatles Ever Made
Speaker, Author, Beatles Expert
By Bill Stainton on February 10th, 2009 in Change, Creativity & Innovation, The Beatles and Success.