What Steve Jobs Can Teach The Bowling Industry

I just finished reading Steve Job's autobiography by Walter Isaacson. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it. You can get it at www.Amazon.com for your Kindle reader, I Pad or even I Phone and probably for an Android device you may have.

Steve Jobs

While Jobs was mercurial, temperamental, a bully and totally lacking in social graces, he was also a brilliant "magician genius" who could charm the likes of Bill Gates to provide software for Apple, bully the likes of big music companies to help him create an Apple I Tunes store as well as to blow off Intel to develop his own A4 computer chip for the I Phone.

More importantly, his focus and intensity were unrelenting.  He had the unique ability to focus not only on the big picture vision of the product, but also to get involved in the shape and design of the staircase that he would put into the Apple store or the size, color, layout and diameter of a circuit board that NO consumer would ever see. To Jobs, even the circuit board had to look beautiful.

We in the bowling industry could learn a few things from Steve Jobs.  Of the many lessons, I learned from his book, here are, I believe the three most salient ones.

1. When he took the reins back from John Sculley, Apple's existing CEO at the time, Apple had hundreds of products in the works, far too many even for Apple to do a great job on.  Apple was basically lost, so Jobs first task was to pear down the product list to just four or five that his teams could work on.  The result was the I Pod, the I Phone and I Tunes followed by the I Pad. Makes you want to look at your products, doesn't it?  If you worked to make 2 open play programs not just better, but awesome and 2 league programs awesome, wouldn't you be more focused? Or your corporate parties or fund raisers?
2. Make the products the best they can be and make the users experience the best it can be. Focus on the products, not the profit. When Scully was in charge, Apple focused on the profits and the stock dropped to under $10. When Jobs was in charge, the stock went to over $400. Apple today is at $583 and the company is worth $546 Billion Dollars!!  That's what focusing on the product does for you and your company.
3. The challenge for good centers, profitable centers and those that are surviving and wish to be even more profitable as well as manufacturers and distributors is, and this is our strategic challenge:  How can we build a product or service that our customers don't know they want until they see it.  Now while I am a believer in market research, I think you need to start with a vision of  a model to test as opposed to just asking people what they want. After all if Henry Ford would have asked people what they want before he built the Model A, they probably would have said, "A Faster Horse."

Thank You for reading this. What do you think? What are your comments?