Discover how business leaders such as Steve Jobs do what they do best. Find out their secrets for success in such areas as maintaining a competitive edge and penetrating new markets:

The economy is finally on the mend, but that doesn’t mean that the year ahead will be smooth sailing. We have to prepare for a new set of problems as well as tackle persistent ones such as competitive and cost pressures. Fortunately, we can learn from business leaders who have done exceptionally well in one of the toughest economic climates in memory. Business 2.0, a well-known business magazine, rounded up these overachievers and asked them to share their secrets for success. They reveal how they manage to stay on top of the competition in the following areas:

Engendering intense customer loyalty…
Advice giver: Gordon Bethune, chairman and CEO of Continental Airlines, which is tops in customer satisfaction among all full-service airlines
Nuggets of wisdom: Pinpoint your best customers and reward them for their loyalty. Make sure employees like what they’re doing so they will serve customers better. But most fundamentally, deliver the service you promise.
Telling quote: “If your plane doesn’t leave on time, you’re not coming back. At the end of the day, we’ve got to get to the end of the runway and find L.A. If we can’t do that, we’ve got no business.”

Generating buzz…
Advice giver: Scott Livengood, chairman, CEO and president of Krispy Kreme
Nuggets of wisdom: You don’t have to be aggressive in advertising. Instead, encourage customers’ positive responses to your business. For example, Krispy Kreme supports people who camp out at store openings by making them more comfortable (e.g providing tents when it rains).
Telling quote: “We believe in playing into people’s natural connections to our brand and the ways they choose to express that. I think that creates a lot of power and energy.”

Developing cutting edge technology…
Advice giver: Steve Jobs, co-founder and CEO of Apple Computer and co-founder, chairman and CEO of Pixar
Nuggets of wisdom: Enjoy the process of discovering new technologies and markets. Get to know what’s out there. And bring your expertise to the table to create cool products.
Telling quote: “You just gotta go learn this stuff. If you’re smart, you’ll figure it out.”

Handling heavyweight competitors…
Advice giver: Marc Benioff, founder, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com
Nuggets of wisdom: Don’t directly confront your competitor but challenge what it represents or the category to which it belongs. Then attack that paradigm’s weaknesses and keep at it. Remember you should be in it for the long haul.
Telling quote: “The best tactic against someone big and entrenched is a persistent attack on his weaknesses. In our world, those weaknesses are failure rates, costs, complexity, hassles—all the negatives associated with the big software paradigm.”

Keeping employees motivated…
Advice giver: Larry Page, co-founder and president for products, Google
Nuggets of wisdom: Find a way to keep everyone informed about what everyone else is up to.
Telling quote: “We wrote a program (using e-mail) that asks every engineer what they did every week…so for every week of our company’s history we have a record of what everyone did. It’s good for performance reviews, and if you’re joining a project team, in five minutes you can read what your team members did the last few weeks or months.”

Penetrating new markets…
Advice giver: Michael Dell, founder, chairman and CEO of Dell
Nuggets of wisdom: Identify the opportunities that fit your business model and that complement your existing markets.
Telling quote: “We first understand how the customer is being served, how can we add something unique, and how can we eliminate cost. We look also for large adjacent markets that are standardizing. These are often characterized by prices that are too high.”

Maintaining a company’s competitive advantage…
Advice giver: Fred Smith, founder, chairman, CEO and president of Federal Express
Nuggets of wisdom: 1) Encourage change; 2) Evaluate your strategy and once you’ve defined it, communicate it clearly and consistently; and 3) Make certain that management is respectful toward employees and contractors.
Telling quote: “We hammer home that not to change is to be in the process of dying, of not meeting the market as it is. We applaud people who instigate change. We don’t hang people who try something new that doesn’t work out, because that’s the easiest way to ossify an organization—to crucify the people who are trying to innovate.”

Source:

How to Succeed in 2004
Interviews by John Battelle, Brian Caulfield, Michael V. Copeland, Bridget Finn, Amy Johns, Matthew Maier, Om Malik, Susan Orenstein, Brent Schlender, Erick Schonfeld, Paul Sloan, Betsy Streisand, and Owen Thomas
Business 2.0, December 2003
www.business2.com/b2/