Steve Jobs and three of the ways in which he communicated like a master magician

Despite – or perhaps because of – the fact he is no longer with us, Steve Jobs remains a hero to many.  I certainly include myself among that number – I am writing this on an iMac as I listen to some iTunes form my iPod.  And my house has an array of other iGadgetary on which my whole family have become scarily reliant.  The main reason for hero status in my mind, however, was his presentation skills.  Jobs communicated like the very best magicians and he therefore remains the most brilliant example for me when I coach the business community in applying the Rules of Magic to their communication. 

Long before I was fully aware of Steve Jobs, James Randi, a wise old guru of the magic world, declared: “Magicians are the world’s greatest communicators; it’s just that everything they are telling you is wrong”.  I had been struck by the magic bug midway through a career in public relations, so Randi’s words caught my attention on two fronts.  The more I learned about magic, the more I concluded that many of its principles for directing attention, persuading and convincing were rather useful in real life and Randi seemed to be confirming my belief.  Once I gained membership to The Magic Circle I was able to extend and refine my research into the Rules of Magic, which now form the backbone of both my coaching for business people and my book Presentation Magic.

Subsequently I found that Steve Jobs was applying many of the Rules of Magic in his new product launches.  You can see this clearly in one of his finest presentations – his launch of the MacBook Air.

First, Rule 5: Concentrated attention requires a single point of focus.  Notice the way he handles the MacBook Air; indeed look at any picture of him displaying any Apple product and you will see that he holds them close to his face, straight and still for prolonged periods, complete with contrasting backgrounds to make them stand out. 

Then he takes Rule 5 a step further by creating a single point of focus mentally as well as physically.  His presentations are invariably long, detailed and technical, but he wraps up all the detail in one simple sentence.  In this case it was: The world’s thinnest notebook.  All the words, the graphics and the props were about thinness.  Making the thinness message so powerfully memorable had the effect of triggering many other memories: it’s the thinnest and yet it has a full-sized keyboard; it’s the thinnest and yet it’s as powerful as anything in its class; etc.

Jobs concludes his presentation by deploying one of magicians’ most subtle yet effective tools - the power of suggestion.  Rule 19 of the Rules of Magic states: People put more reliance on something they have worked out for themselves.  This is where, having focused long and hard on just how thin the new product is, he finally produces it – from inside an ordinary manila envelope.  The first thing this does for his audience is to engage their visual sense (Rule 12 – The senses offer five different ways into the brain).  Most importantly, though, it allows them to work out for themselves – just in case they remained in any doubt - that this new product really is thin!  He has already provided details of its measurement and its proportions compared to competitors, but all that could potentially be just clever chat.  Seeing it actually coming out of an envelope confirms in the mind of every audience member that this truly is thin.  Furthermore, it fixes a visual memory of that fact in their minds. 

 

Every magician works towards a ‘ta-dah’ moment that they want their audience to go away remembering.  The production of the MacBook Air from an envelope was Jobs’s big ta-dah moment. 

Extracted and adapted from Nick Fitzherbert's book 

'Presentation Magic'

Are your stripy ties sending out positive or negative signals?

If you ask anyone at random to consider the perfect logo it is very likely they will mention the Nike ‘swoosh’. It’s delightfully simple, universally understood and it fits perfectly onto the product space available. Above all, though, its tick shape and upward trajectory suggest movement and positivity.

Interestingly, a number of the world’s most successful brands have logos that feature upwards movement. Look the way the leaf sticks up towards the right on the Apple logo; Samsung’s oval lozenge appears to be subtly on the climb; Amazon’s one-click arrow swerves in the right direction; SAP’s logo is a solid pointy wedge; and Virgin has all kind of dynamics at play from the big tick onwards.

Less obvious but still full of energy are the logos of Pizza Hut, AXA, H&M, Cartier, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Gillette, HP, Kellogg’s, Heinz, KFC and Budweiser among others, all of which employ the slope of italic typefaces to indicate energy and movement.

Some of this may come as a surprise, but then you are not necessarily meant to notice these features – the idea is usually that they work subconsciously. The concept nevertheless needs to be taken more seriously than you might imagine. Where it comes up most frequently in my Presentation Skills coaching sessions is when people use hand gestures to indicate progress. “We have come a long way”, they will typically say, “from here” (placing their hands on their left) “to here (moving their hands over to their right), in just five years” . I explain that this is nicely expressive but if their hand gestures are to match, let alone reinforce, their message they need to do them the other way around. At the moment they are saying ‘forwards’ but indicating ‘backwards’ when seen from the audience’s point of view.

So what has all this got to do with stripy ties?  The answer is that if you are American it’s very possible that you are inadvertently sending out negative signals. Americans tend to wear striped ties more than we do in the UK, where stripes are invariably reserved for ‘membership’ situations such as clubs and schools and are therefore worn more for specific occasions.  The tradition in Europe is for the stripes to rise from left to right as you look at the tie, creating a subliminal positive message as with those famous logos. In America, however, it all works the other way around, with the stripes placed in a downward pattern, as you can see in the pictures below of Presidents Carter and Reagan. 

Until recently this is the style you would see worn by almost every American with striped neckwear. Business leaders, however, seem to be getting wise to this particular quirk of American tailoring. Run a Google image search on the CEOs of top US companies and of those who still wear ties, stripes have become rare; when they are worn, the European-style upward stripe is creeping in.  And look who else has got wise to the benefits of this style - with his tie nicely in sync with the positivity of his 'yes we can'-style rhetoric. 

Apple's on track but Tim Cook needs to show HIS style, not Steve's

The iPhone 5 launch may have been lacking in blockbuster headlines, but Apple certainly maintained the highly distinctive and effective presentation style that is so much a part of the Steve Jobs legacy.

Doubts as to how Apple can manage without Jobs have been fading with time and it was always going to be unrealistic for exemplary products to make further huge steps forward on an annual basis.  In fact, we might all have felt a little cheated if our new purchases seemed a little redundant within a matter of months.  So, consolidation and gradual evolution – as we saw in spades in the September 12 launch – are now the order of the day.

Just one more thing though – and I’m afraid it’s not an Apple-like tasty little surprise with which to round off.  Tim Cook needs to develop a personality of his own.  On September 12 he was the weak spot in that he sounded too much like he was reading from Steve Jobs’s script.  Only Steve could get away with so many repeated superlatives and he simply served to remind us that Steve is no longer around. 

So Mr Cook – please let’s see you own personality and style - which surely can’t actually be a slightly paler version of your dear departed friend.  Once you apply your own stamp then the Apple presentations – excellent as they are – can start to evolve, which is what they must do to show for certain that there is plenty to come post-Steve. 

Apple on the right communication track holding back on iPhone 5

Most of us have yet to see just how the presentation style of the top Apple executives stood up in the absence of their legendary founder, but I believe the decision to announce an iPhone 4S rather that a '5' will prove to be the right communications move in the long run.


Apple fans get very (over) excited about new product announcements so they were bleating about the absence of a 5 model before the conference had even finished, by which time the share price had fallen by 3.6 per cent.  One leading newspaper must have been feeling a little foolish as its rolling live coverage concluded under an 'IPhone 5 launch' banner.


Everyone should calm down and look at it this way.  Apple announced some very significant enhancements to the inner workings of the world's best mobile phone which is barely a year old.  It just wouldn't be right to be seen to be effectively junking it and moving on to something else.  Apple is now the world's most valuable company; it has re-invented the phone; it's in this for the long haul.  It should not be doing things just to please the crowd pushing at the front.  And what if they had made these announcements and badged it iPhone 5?  I bet the bleaters would be saying "Is that it"?


From a long term communications point of view Apple have made absolutely the right move.  I look forward to buying an iPhone 4S, but actually my 3GS continues to perform so well that somehow it seems wrong.

iPad 2 launch sees another classic presentation performance from Steve Jobs

As the founder of the world’s second biggest company and inventor of truly ground-breaking technology products, Steve Jobs has plenty of plaudits to his name. Arguably, though, it is his Presentation Skills that mark him out more than anything else and his famous ‘keynotes’ have undoubtedly played a big part in Apple’s success.

I train the business community in Presentation Skills by combining traditional best practice with the Rules of Magic – principles for directing attention, persuading and convincing that come naturally to the best magicians and prove equally effective in business. When it comes to inspirational examples in the business world Jobs reigns supreme, matching the finest magicians with his every move and, importantly, doing so consistently.

Here are just some of the techniques he deployed to devastating effect at the launch of iPad 2.

Gaining attention – I usually urge the people I am coaching to do something a little different at the outset of their presentation; give their audience a surprise that seizes attention. Jobs did that simply by turning up. No one expected him to be there, so just by walking on stage he created a surprise and generated a whole lot of warmth in the process. Furthermore, the flak that Apple had taken in the build up for apparently being lax in their succession planning was swept away in an instant – and all the more so by keeping his presence completely secret. Rule 19 of the Rules of Magic states that people put much greater value on something they have worked out for themselves. Turning up and making it self-evident that he is in reasonably good health was so much more powerful than any amount of corporate pronouncements. Crucially, he didn’t make a big deal of it – Rule 18 says that doubts may be increased by over-stressing – he simply said: “I didn’t want to miss today”, so heightening the sense of anticipation.

Pacing – Rule 11 states: Attention is sustained by variation, which shortens mental time. Here the content was beautifully chunked throughout, with clear headings and timely changes to other presenters and videos. Pauses – one of the presenter’s most useful weapons - were also used to masterful effect, allowing key points to sink in and signalling applause cues.

Repetition (Rule 16: Sustained impact depends on transferring information to long term memory) – needs to be stealthy if it is to be effective and here Jobs used repetition partly as a means of showing his excitement and partly as a way of bridging from other presenters as he underlined the points they had just been making. And as with all Apple keynotes a couple of themes were used repeatedly throughout with short, memorable messages.

• ‘Post PC’ was the term used to elevate the importance of the iPad and to link it into an innovation threesome with the iPod and the iPhone.
• ‘2011 - year of iPad2’ was the message used to bat away the competition and bring the presentation full circle from its start point.

Graphics were, as usual, deceptively simple and highly effective as a result; if they had just managed to make all the bullet points one-liners (always so much more impactful) they would have been perfect.

Lack of jargon – as Jobs returned to the stage after demonstrations of extraordinary new features and apps he referred to them several times as ‘stuff’. How refreshingly straightforward!

Addressing what is inevitably on the audience’s minds – iPad 2 comes in both black and white, but there is a little history to consider here; white versions of iPhones were announced but proved hard to find and created frustration among some loyal customers. So rather than brush a niggle from the past under the carpet, Jobs addressed it by announcing: “It will be available in black and white (short pause) from Day One (slight twinkle in the eye)”.

Audience-facing messaging – the presentation showed much consistency in style and layout, for instance with the use of the same easy chair that says so much about the way that many people like to use their iPads. The big difference between this keynote and last year’s, however, was that Apple now had real knowledge about how the iPad could be used rather than simply the aspirations on which they launched. So the presentation soon moved to focus on scenarios such as hospitals and schools in which the product was being used to great and often unexpected effect. They let their customers do the talking for them and once again let Rule 19 (people put more value on someone they have worked out for themselves) support their communication.

Closing – We have already seen how Jobs got off to a great start and he played a blinder with the other most important part – the climax (Rule 13 says: Firsts and lasts are remembered.) As well as bringing the 2010 – Year of the iPad full circle, he also summed up the key points in a concise manner, supported by a perfectly-paced video. So he went out with a ‘bang’, but also used a technique favoured by showmen of old – he brought attention back for a final quiet moment between himself and his audience, which he devoted to a round of applause for the team behind the iPad 2 – and then their families.

Welcome back Steve and, once again, take a bow and accept all the applause that is due to you.