Month: January 2022

Responsibility bias

Every right has its responsibilities. 
People who do things without being told draw the most wages. Yes!
 
Responsibility is proportional to opportunity.
 
“I’ve got this,” is a phrase that some people will go out of their way to avoid saying. 
 
At work, where it’s incredibly valuable, or in personal relationships, where it creates deep connection.
 
What is your responsibility preference?
 
When things go wrong, is your instinct to hide in a corner and hope you won’t get noticed – or to lean into the situation and make it clear that this one is on you?
 
Like our control preference, responsibility is a learned skill. 
 
You might be born with an instinct for it, but mostly it’s something we’re taught or choose to learn.
 
There is work to be done. Responsibilities to be met.
 
A bias toward taking responsibility is one of the most important things to look for when hiring an employee, finding a doctor, appointing a CEO, building a team or making that next dent in the universe.
Humanity needs the ability of every woman and man.
We are not put here on earth to play around. Out of responsibility comes possibility.
And we can all be possibilitarians!

What was ‘Cooking ‘ at Apple the past decade?

What is Tim Cook’s Secret Sauce?

There will be case studies, books, documentaries about Apple under Tim Cook, but right now inspired by a sharp piece in FT that points out what Cook did with Apple. The piece by Patrick McGee quotes Dan Wang, professor of business at Columbia University.

“[Steve] Jobs had an amazing run, he says, but his focus on products meant revenues were inherently volatile, like that of a fashion company. ‘If you can predict next year’s consumer tastes, then you enjoy all the riches—it’s winner takes all,’ he says. ‘But if you get it wrong, you bear that cost. And what Tim Cook did well is to take Apple out of this cycle of having to search for a new hit product every time’…

“Two major products have emerged in Cook’s first decade, AirPods and the Apple Watch—big successes with market shares of 25% and 31%, respectively. But the services division has proved far more significant. Last year it delivered nearly $70bn in revenue—roughly double that of the Mac, iPad or wearables divisions—and margins were 70%.

“During his time at the helm, Apple’s annual revenues have ballooned from $108bn in the year he took over to $365bn in 2021. Net profits have grown 3.7 times, from $26bn to $95bn.



“But more significant is how Cook has built a services juggernaut to eke out every penny of the Apple ecosystem, garnering a steady stream of recurring revenues from App Store fees and nearly 800m customers paying for digital media that expanded during his tenure. That substantially reduced Apple’s dependence on the iPhone—and propelled the company’s share price to a level where its price-to-earnings ratio is now three times higher than what it was a decade ago.”

You can dig deeper in the FT article titled Apple at $3tn: the enigma of Tim Cook

ENDS

The incredible power of AWEssibilities!

Dear Us:

It is an annual ritual to glance over time’s shoulder each year and reflect on what has made it most livable and worthy of living — always the clearest mirror of what irradiated and perturbed our hearts and minds as our uncommon planet made its steady revolution around its common star.

Inevitably, patterns emerge that were not obvious in the moment-by-moment experience. Inevitably, those patterns reveal that however tumultuous the ‘ seasons of being ‘ might feel — and what a tempest of uncertainty and disorientation 2021 has been for all of us in the world, the things that make life most luminous with aliveness are variations on eternal themes, impervious to our passing perturbations.

Here’s to the stubborn symphony of aliveness, the immense power of gratitude, the significant strength of collective hope and the power of incredible AWEssibilities for a wonderful 2022 to you & yours.

Stoically always