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In the latest episode of the Web Business Freedom podcast, I’m thrilled to share a conversation I had with tech leader and visionary Guy Kawasaki. Guy’s newest book, Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions, will be out soon. I was honored to get an advanced copy and even more excited to actually get the chance to talk to Guy personally about how to create an enchanting company. It is must reading for every entrepreneur.
For those of you who don’t know him, Guy Kawaskai is a founding partner at Garage Technology Ventures and co-founder of Alltop.com. He’s best known as the former evangelist for Apple during two stints, one in the mid-’80s then again in the late ’90s. He is the author of 10 books, including The Art of the Start, Rules for Revolutionaries and The Macintosh Way. He’s a committed Californian by way of Hawaii who now considers hockey his true passion. Needless to say, he’s a fascinating person and an inspiration to many in the business world. I’m grateful he took the time to share his thoughts on Enchantment.
Special thanks to my friends at Web101 for use of their recording studio for the interview portion of the podcast.
Without further adieu, here is what Guy had to say. I encourage you to listen to the audio for the full impact of Guy’s humor and wisdom!
Transcript of Brandon Uttley’s (BU) interview with Guy Kawasaki (GK):
BU: Guy, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today about your latest book Enchantment, The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Actions.
GK: You’re very welcome.
BU: It’s a great pleasure to talk to you Sir. Tell me first of all, where did the idea for Enchantment come from?
GK: Do you mean back in the history of mankind or the book itself?
BU: Yes, well, for you writing this book actually.
GK: Sometimes people say to me “Guy, what’s it like being the first evangelist?” I say, “Well, there was Jesus before me. You may not have heard of him. He had 30% market share.”
BU: Yes, and you don’t want to say you’re more popular than him, because that got the Beatles in a whole lot of trouble.
GK: No. There is no upside of saying that. I got the idea, because I love the work of Robert Cialdini and Dale Carnegie and I wanted to show the modern day application of some of their ideas and techniques and supplement them with my own. I’ve been evangelizing something since 1983 or so. And in that 20 or 30 some years, I’m afraid to count anymore…
BU: Yes, time flies.
GK: …I learned a thing or two about proselytizing, evangelizing and enchanting. And I think it’s a skill that more people could use these days. Maybe we would have less wars if we were more enchanting.
BU: Sure. Tell me, how do you define enchantment?
GK: I define enchantment as a process of developing a foundation of trustworthiness, likeability and a great product so that you can move people, change their hearts, minds and actions and create this long term, mutually beneficial relationship between you and the people.
BU: Sure. Do you think it’s hard to be enchanting?
GK: Well, that is a tricky question. If I say it’s hard, people might not try. If I say it’s easy, they might not buy the book. How about it’s hard without the book?
BU: Absolute, good answer. Because it seems to me that at least the 80/20 rule, 80% of companies are just run of the mill and 20% are enchanting?
GK: I think it’s more like 99/1.
BU: Yes, why is that?
GK: I think that many of the companies don’t aspire to changing the world. Many organizations are founded on the concept of making a buck as opposed to making a difference. When you’re making a bunk, believe me, you could enchant people accidentally, if anything.
BU: Sure, Rockefeller was good at it.
GK: Yes, but when you’re trying to change the world the bar is higher. I could make the case that the more innovative and more impactful what you’re trying to do, the more you would need enchantment. The more mundane and the more simple and boring, the less you need enchantment, so if you really want to change the world and really kick butt, you need to go beyond simply closing a sale. You need to get people’s hearts and minds into it.
BU: Sure, but for fiber optic cable, you’re saying that’s probably not going to be enchanting?
GK: Well, in a sense, anything is possible to be looked at through an enchanting lens. Fiber optic cable, if it enables people to have a much greater connectivity, if it enables people to have real time video, to no longer have to mail in or get DVDs, if it enables them to impact the world and watch revolutions as they happen, fiber optics can be very enchanting.
BU: Right. Good point. In the book, you talk, of course, a lot about your time at Apple at Chief Evangelist, and Apple is easily one of the most enchanting companies of our time—probably of all time—but it wasn’t always the case there. Apple hit a lot of road blocks. What do you think turned the tide and made Apple such an iconic brand?
GK: Apple started off with a very interesting DNA, two guys in a garage wanting to create a personal computer that mere mortals could use and afford, so the DNA was enchanting from the very start. I think the dark days of Apple was the ’87–’90 timeframe. At that point, Apple was supposed to die. According to the experts, Apple was supposed to die every 10 years. So much for experts.
What turned it around was really Steve coming back and those colorful iMacs. Strawberry, cherry, blueberry and tangerine, those colorful iMacs captured and enchanted people’s imagination.
The very interesting thing is that HP, Dell, Gateway, IBM, or Lenovo or anybody could have gotten a tangerine, blueberry, cherry colored computer, right? It’s not like everybody else could only have access to beige plastic and Steve got this magical plastic that was able to be in other colors. Anybody could have done that.
BU: It was so revolutionary, because I guess before it was like Henry Ford. You can get a car, but it’s going to be black.
GK: Yes, you can get a computer as long as it’s beige. Yes.
BU: Yes, that was awesome. As an entrepreneur, I want to be like Apple, I want to be like Nike or Starbucks or any of these legendary brands.
GK: Virgin America?
BU: Yes, of course, but it seems really hard at times if you’re a small fish, if you will. What do you say to those small fish in terms of how to start off enchanting and stay that way?
GK: I’ll tell you something. If you look back at the history of many of these mega successes, when they were starting, it was two guys or two gals in a garage. They thought they would create this cool computer that in the best case, they could sell a few hundred to the home brew computer club, or they could sell a few widgets or do a few things.
Lo and behold, one thing led to another, things exploded and often the people who create these huge successes are probably the most surprised of all. It never occurred to them. They thought there were 100 nerds in the world who wanted to buy a personal computer and there are millions of people.
The message to two guys or two gals in a garage is there is a process of starting something. It takes off, you nurture it and it grows. You wake up one day and you’re in charge of an Apple.
If people have this illusion that there are two kinds of companies: one company, you start and say someday I’m going to be $20 billion dollars, and the other kind says I’m just going to stay small peanuts. Frankly, that doesn’t happen.
In the venture capital business there are people who say they need to raise $50 million dollars, because they’re going to create the next Apple, Cisco, Yahoo or Google. Do you know what? Those people always fail, because first of all, the miracle has to happen. They raise $25 or $50 million dollars. Then when you have $25 or $50 million dollars, guess what? What is the first thing you do? You hire MBAs, you hire ad agencies, you run Super Bowl commercials, you run PR firms and the PR firms assign oriental art history majors from Wellesley to be your account rep, right?
BU: Yes, you get really nice Aeron chairs.
GK: Right. You need to have a good company atmosphere, and then you buy a ping-pong table and billiard table and then you have an on staff massage and all of this kind of stuff, because you’re thinking big.
The truth of the matter is, the companies that end up big started thinking small and they just grew.
BU: Great point.
GK: So, this is a long answer to your question, but the entrepreneur—let’s go back in history some more. Do you think when Ray Kroc started McDonald’s his vision was some day they’ll be McDonald’s in Red Square? I don’t think so.
BU: Absolutely not. He thought maybe he could expand to the next state perhaps.
GK: Right. Let’s just flip a few burgers here and make this successful. Then one thing led to another and he’s McDonald’s. What prevents any of you from being the next Ray Kroc or Sam Walton or Steve Jobs? Nothing.
BU: That’s what I loved about your book, because it’s got a lot of the E-Myth in it, certainly influence like you were talking about from Cialdini and others so there were a lot of things in there that definitely struck a chord with me.
The next thing I wanted to ask you about is, for me, I think there are two essential elements to a business, maybe three. People, products and if you count profits.
Let’s say you’re looking at a start-up with your company, Garage Technology Ventures. Would you rather back a company with incredible people and mediocre products, or phenomenal products and average people?
GK: My answer is opposite of what 99% of the venture capitalists in the world would say. Those 99% of venture capitalists will say, “We like to back good people, because when you back a good person, even if their first product is crap, they’ll continue to fix it, they’ll change it, they’ll do a different product, so we back people.”
I will tell you the opposite. I look for great products.
BU: Interesting. I thought you were going to say people.
GK: No. I’ll tell you why. At the time you need to make an investment decision, it is very difficult to tell if a person is good or not. It’s not like a team comes in and says “Uh, we’re stupid, lazy and slow moving.” At 8:00 o’clock, you meet with the stupid team. At 9:00 o’clock, you meet with the lazy team. At 11:00 o’clock, you meet with another stupid team. Finally, days go by and somebody comes in and says, “Do you know what? We’re smart, we’re tough, we’re aggressive and we’re hard working.” And you say, “Hallelujah. Finally I met somebody who’s smart, tough and hard working.”
The fact is that everybody says they’re rock stars. We’re proven, smart, hard working, we’re not going to give up. Everybody says that.
BU: We have a track record. Sure.
GK: The way it works is you back a lot of horses or maybe jockeys is the better analogy. You back a lot of jockeys and then one of your jockeys wins the race. At that point, someone like you comes up and says, “How did you know that Google would be successful?” Or “How did you know Apple, YouTube or Yahoo or Cisco would be successful?” And you say, “I knew that was a great team. I knew, because I’m a good judge of human character. I knew that it was a good team.”
The person may ask why you backed 19 other losers and you say, “My stupid partners backed them.”
BU: Blame it on the partners.
GK: Blame it on the partners. What I’m trying to tell you is that the big message is, retroactively, it’s very easy to look smart. Here is a hypothetical situation. Two guys come to you and say they have the 6th search engine. Would you back them? There is already Inktomi, Yahoo, AltaVista. Would you back Google?
Two guys come to you and say, “We need infinite server space with infinite bandwidth so that people can upload illegal, copyrighted video. What’s going to make our company tip is when people drop Mentos into Diet Cokes.
BU: Right.
GK: Would you have funded YouTube?
BU: Exactly and of course, that’s a big darling for Google now.
GK: Right. Now we say, “Oh, YouTube had this proven team. Apple had a proven team. Cisco had a proven team.” It was a professor. The professor never ran a company before.
Time and time again, if you really looked at the tech successes you’d have to say the best bet is an unproven team in an unproven market with unproven technology, which is exactly the opposite of what everybody says they invest in.
BU: That’s probably what makes you number 5 on the TechCrunch list of venture capital firms.
GK: Well. In a rare moment of humility, let me tell you, we’re not proven as a venture capital firm, because we have not funded a Google, Cisco or a Yahoo. Don’t get me wrong.
BU: But there is one in that mix of your portfolio companies that’s bound to happen, right?
GK: I don’t know. Bound is a strong word. If it does happen, believe me, you’ll know it.
BU: Alright. For me, one of the biggest surprises in Enchantment were all the chapters about how to be a better person. One thing you did a great job of was share a lot of stories. My favorite was the time you were at an event with Richard Branson of Virgin. He comes up to you and says, “Do you fly Virgin?” Tell us what happened after that.
GK: Okay. So, he asked me if I ever flew Virgin. I said, “Well Richard, I’m a United Airlines Global Services.” So this means I’m at the highest level. I look down on 100,000 (mile) members. Global Services is like this secret club, and United won’t even tell you what it takes to get into Global Services. It’s not just miles, it’s that you have to fly expensive miles, because someone could fly 100,000 using coach tickets bought 30 days in advance with a Saturday stay and then there are people like me who fly first class all the time full boat.
“I don’t tell you that to brag about it, I do that, because I’m always speaking for people and that’s in my contract that I have to fly first class. If it was my own money, it would be different.
So when you’re at Global Service level—as an indication of how fortunate you are—if you’re a Global Service passenger and your flight cancels, they call you and say, “Your flight cancelled and we found you another flight already.” To put it mildly, that’s not typical.
BU: Nice. Sure.
GK: So I tell Richard Branson, “I’m at Global Service. I always fly United.” At that moment in real time, he gets down on his knees and he starts polishing my shoes with this sleeves.
BU: That’s such an awesome story, and somebody took a picture, which is even better.
GK: Yes. You’ll love this story on top of this story. So I handed this person my camera, but I had the camera set to manual focus. She took the picture, but if you look at the picture in the book, it’s out of focus and it’s because I had it set to manual and not auto.
BU: Okay. I couldn’t tell. It’s a best kept secret.
GK: That is the kind of thing that makes Virgin America, and specifically Richard Branson enchanting. Like I said, the big three are trustworthiness, likeability and great product. I’ll give you an example of each.
Apple Computer is great product. Virgin America is likeability and Zappos is trustworthiness.
BU: Gotcha. Yes, that was an awesome example of customer service when the founder gets down on his knees and polishes your shoes. You talked a lot about the likeability factor. What are some of the best ways to become more likeable?
GK: It’s blocking and tackling. Likeability is blocking and tackling. First it starts with how you enter a room. You should enter with a big smile. This is a smile that uses not just your jaw muscles, but your eye muscles.
BU: Yes, what do you call it, the Duchenne muscle?
GK: It’s the Duchenne smile. This is named after a French doctor who investigated the muscles that are necessary to make your eyes crinkle. Women will be happy that I’m telling you that a good smile…
BU: Don’t get a face lift.
GK: …don’t get a face lift and don’t use Botox, because you want crow’s feet. Crow’s feet are good.
BU: Yes, you’ve got permanent crow’s feet. Right? You probably have the best electric smile of anybody I’ve seen.
GK: Well, I don’t know about that. So, the smile. Also you should dress roughly equal to your audience. If you dress way above them, it’s kind of a message that you’re telling them I have better taste or I have more money than you. If you dress way beneath them, you’re telling them that I have more power than you. I can dress as casually as I like and you can’t do a damned thing about it.
The final thing is you must have a good, solid handshake. I provide the mathematical formula for that handshake.
BU: Yes, that’s an awesome part of the book. It’s like a 12-step process to shake a hand correctly. I had no idea it was possible to break it down like that.
GK: That’s a good cross section of the book. Very tactical and practical. Things you can change immediately.
BU: Another thing to me is it seems like if you’re a founder of a company or you’re one of the top people, it’s easy to be enchanting at that level. But what about everybody else? You talk about ways that other employees can be motivated. Can you explain your acronym MAP?
GK: Yes. There is a section in the book about how to enchant employees, people that work for you. I think the foundation of that is to provide MAP, and MAP stands for Mastery, Autonomy and Purpose.
What I’m saying is that if you want to enchant people who work for you, provide them an opportunity to master new skills. If you work for me, you’ll master social media. You’ll become a better employee, because you’re going to gain a new set of skills.
BU: Sure, you will be a Posterous Ninja if you work for Guy Kawasaki.
GK: You will also do it in an autonomous manner. I’m not going to be breathing down your neck, micromanaging you, editing your every Tweet. And, you’re going to be mastering the skill in an autonomous manner while this organization is trying to reach a higher purpose of making the world a better place, ending bad things and perpetuating good things.
As opposed to simply using money to motivate and enchant people, I think providing a MAP is more important. Mastery, autonomy and purpose.
BU: I think you even referenced Dan Pink’s most recent book where he talks at length about that, which is tremendous.
In your experience Guy, what really stands in the way of enchantment?
GK: Probably ignorance. People don’t know that they should and could enchant people, that they could take it up a level, that good enough is not good enough. I think that perhaps my book can open people’s eyes and show them that there is a higher calling and a better way.
BU: Also, you remind people about your classic 10/20/30 rule for presentations as an example. Ten slides, 20 minutes, 30-point font minimum. Why is it that so many people just don’t understand the power of keeping things simple, visual, etc.?
GK: You got me. I have been talking about that rule for five years now. I think what happens is, let’s just say you’ve heard of the rule—10 slides, 20 minutes, 30-point font. You say to yourself, “Yes, that’s true. When other people speak, they should use that rule.”
BU: Yes..”I’ve got 30 minutes…”
GK: When I speak, yes. But when I speak, because I have a patent pending curve jumping, paradigm shifting new way to sell books online, I need 60 minutes, 60 slides and I have to use the 8-, 10- or 12-point font, because I have so much more information.
BU: It’s sad, very sad, isn’t it?
GK: It is sad. The person who believes they’re the exception to the rule is probably the person who needs the rule the most.
BU: Right, they need the self-help. If you started a company tomorrow, which you might, because you’ve done a lot of things, what three things would you do to get on the path to enchantment?
GK: I would focus on a great product, because I think that I know how to do the likeable and the trustworthy part. For me, the challenge would be affiliating, finding or creating a great product.
BU: Right, like Alltop? Which is a great product.
GK: Well, from your mouth to God’s ears.
BU: Yes, thank you. That was a great product that you put out there for all of us to enjoy.
GK: Thank you.
BU: One of the things in the book that I joke to some of my friends about is your advice to “embrace the nobodies”—which, thank you very much for taking this call. I put myself in that camp. Tell me a little bit about that principle and why it’s so important that you embrace nobodies.
GK: Okay, in the old days in marketing, the way it worked was that there were these “A” list, top flight journalists that you had to suck up to. They wrote for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Fortune, Forbes. You sucked up to them and you hope that they blessed you and told the hoi polloi and the great, unwashed masses of proletariats that they should like your product.
Then these people listened to those people and said, “If you say so, we’ll try it.” Okay?
BU: Right. And by the way, I hate those people, because I started my career as a book publicist, ironically, and helped authors like you try to get interviews with people like that and it was terrible.
GK: It’s impossible.
BU: Horrible.
GK: Yes.
BU: Now the shoe is on the other foot. We don’t need you anymore.
GK: That’s right. You hit it right on the head. The world is now flat, if not inverted. The way it works is, that nobodies are the new somebodies.
BU: Thank goodness.
GK: Yes. If you think about it, what made Twitter successful? Was it because someone at the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Fortune, Forbes or Business Week said you ought to try Twitter? Not at all. If anything, they thought that Twitter was a dumbass idea.
BU: Right.
GK: What made Twitter successful was …
BU: People tweeting about the sandwich they ate for lunch.
GK: Yes, or they were at South By Southwest and they were using this new thing to tell people about this was a great talk and this wasn’t. These were not journalists. This was LowlyBoy 15, Tiffany65.
My theory is that what makes products successful today are the nobodies and all of these nobodies add up to this great movement and when you have a great movement, then the somebodies, the “A” listers have to pay attention to you, because if they don’t, they look stupid.
BU: Sure. Speaking of nobodies, the guy that famously took the picture of the US Airways crash in New York used Twitter and TwitPic and he was a nobody on a ferry. That to me was a watershed moment for certainly Twitter, mobile media and the power of the individual to make a difference.
GK: Yes. The marketing of this book is predicated that people like you, who may not have a platform of two million subscribers to a well known magazine…
BU: Not yet.
GK: …but people like you will tell your followers to buy this book. They’ll buy it and they’ll tell their followers and one day I’ll wake up and I’ll be a best seller.
BU: Oh, that’s going to happen real soon since your book is coming out in early March.
GK: I hope.
BU: Let me ask you, to sum all of this up, what are your top takeaways you want people to get out of the book?
GK: I want them to get out of the book that there is a better way. That you can go beyond transactions, even beyond persuasion and influence. You can go to enchantment where you delight people and it is – a laptop manufacturer might persuade you or influence you to buy their laptop. Contrast that to Apple. Apple enchants you.
BU: Oh yes.
GK: You buy a Macintosh, then you buy an iPhone, then you buy an iPad, then you buy an iPod for your kids, then you buy iTunes.
BU: Then you buy a 27-inch monitor.
GK: Right, then an iBook, then you buy iTV and Apple TV. Pretty soon, you wake up one day and holy cow it looks like an Apple dealership here.
BU: Holy cow, KAW.
GK: That’s the goal.
BU: That’s awesome. Thank you so much. Where should people go to get more information about Enchantment?
GK: At Facebook, just go to Facebook.com/enchantment. If you just Google Guy Kawasaki and Enchantment, you won’t be able to miss it. It will be available in all the online bookstores and at GuyKawasaki.com. I have it everywhere.
BU: Excellent. I took the enchantment test and thankfully I passed with flying colors.
GK: Good for you. Now we have badges that you can brag about you passing.
BU: Of course. I will put that in this post. I will spread the word for you, sir. Thank you so much for your time and good luck hitting that best seller list very soon.
GK: Thank you very much. I’m sure I will with people like you supporting me.
BU: Alright, Guy. Thanks again.
GK: Bye.
BU: Take care.
