Quit Trying
to Be Like Steve Jobs
The
opening question the venture capitalist asked
after I sat down to be interviewed was, “How did a marketing guy end up being
considered for a CEO job?”
After a
20-year career in high-tech that included managing development, running worldwide sales, and
heading up marketing for a few moderately sized public companies, that’s the
question the guy led with.
I won’t
lie and say it wasn’t off-putting, but I was used to it. It’s a relatively
common theme among the Silicon Valley geek
crowd. There are exceptions, but in general, they just don’t get marketing.
That
was nearly 15 years ago and things have changed. Entrepreneurs and VCs have a
greater respect for marketing and communications these days. One of the reasons for that is
a little company called Apple. Steve Jobs was a positioning genius, but he wasn’t the
only Apple executive with marketing in his DNA.
I just watched an interview
(video below) with the company’s former VP of marketing communications, Allison
Johnson, and let me tell you, this woman gets marketing. Some of what she had
to say could have come out of my own mouth, plus there were some great lessons
from her years working with Jobs.