Thanks to TiE Southcoasta small audience was treated to some interesting insights by an industry icon, Gil Amelio, former CEO of Apple and National Semiconductor.
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Here are some of the takeaways from his speech:
On TiE
Amelio jokingly said he thought of TiE (officially stands for the The Indus Entrepreneur) representing “The Italian Entrepreneur” – but then said it should be Technology, Innovation, Investment and Entrepreneurship, taking the liberty to double the Is. He structured his speech largely around these 4 topics, too.
On Productivity
He sees productivity as the key to prosperity for a society. He elaborated that the US was so successful as a country because it put away with feudal, traditional ways of doing business. “It was more important what you know, not who you know”. He spend some time talking about the US patent system and how it helped to shape the economy. Interesting enough, in the late 1790s you only needed to write up your invention and send 30$s (today 1000$s) along to get a patent issued. Today the system is taking too long to issue a patent. He mentioned that in 1800 the US economy only had a 1% productivity lead over the UK economy – but when that 1% compounded over the century – it became very relevant putting the US economy significantly ahead of the UK one. He thinks there is not enough public discussion about productivity – which dwarfs more popular topics such as the deficit and the fiscal cliff in importance.
Amelio sees productivity driven by
· Innovation – here he sees design thinking as a key methodology to lead to true innovation
· Education – not enough educators see their job as to ‘maximize a child’s potential’
· Openness – he quoted the famous ‘staple a green card to the diploma’ statement
On Breakthroughs
He thinks the following 4 spaces should be watched for soon to be seen breakthroughs:
· Using magnetism to increase electrical efficiency – 50% of power is lost in the grid
· Watching Graphene as a material
· Utilizing more Adaptive Computing Architectures
· Better exploiting of the Mobile Spectrum
On Investment
An entrepreneur should be prepared to answer the following 3 basic questions of potential investors (only 10 words):
(1) Is it real?
(2) Can you win?
(3) Is it worth it?
On Entrepreneurship
Amelio stressed the importance of real talent management – he walked the audience through the usual 4 box grid to assess talent. He also stressed the need to allow employees to fail and learn from their failures. Throw a party to close off the failure and move on. But all of that at high speed – if you fail, you better fail fast. Made a good example of employees failing in one function and excelling in another – with a manufacturing executive he fired, advised him to move to HR and who met him years later as head of HR of Honeywell. His hiring priorities are Ethics, Smartness, Experience, Sense of Humor, hard worker and Intuition.
On Apple
He claims he knew exactly what he was doing when acquiring Next and with that bringing Steve Jobs back. He mentioned how all of Apple was controlled by Steve, that he wasn’t easy sometimes even ‘cruel’ to work with. He shared how Jobs spend three month over and over evaluating the size and form of the cursor for a new OS.
Asked why he canned the Copland OS he mentioned the technical reason ,that due to shared memory issues it would never have been stable… but then why pursue BeOS? He mentioned same flaw, but it was stable… he never gave away the answer of ‘what would have been if he would have managed to license BeOS’ – but shared that his biggest mistake in regards of Apple was to sell the stock too early. (You can find an interesting article on Amelio’s 500 days at Apple here.)