An established company must innovate or risk decline and extinction. Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation. The aim of marketing is to deeply understand customers so the product fits them and sells itself. To predict the future, organizations must create it through continual change, learning, and adapting to new opportunities. Effective leaders focus on strengths, make weaknesses irrelevant, and build on what works well.

5. An established company which, in an age demanding innovation, is not able to innovate, is doomed to decline and extinction.

6. Business has only two functions – marketing and innovation. All the rest are costs.

7. The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.

8. The best way to predict the future is to create it.

9. Within five years, if you’re in the same business you are in now, you’re going to be out of business.

10. The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.

11. …effective executives do not start out by looking at weaknesses. You cannot build performance on weaknesses. You can build only on strengths. Make weaknesses irrelevant.

12. We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.

13. Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed, nothing else can be managed.

14. Mentor Expertise GiftsManagement thought leaderStrategic focusNecessity of continual changeLifetime learning

16. Conversations among the members of your marketplace happen whether you like it or not. Good marketing encourages the right sort of conversations.

17. Choose your customers. Fire the ones that hurt your ability to deliver the right story to the others.

18. In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is failing. In a busy marketplace, not standing out is the same as being invisible.

19. The easiest thing is to react.The second easiest is to respond.But the hardest thing is to initiate.

20. Every interaction, every assignment, is a chance to make a change, a chance to delight or surprise or to touch someone.

21. Most organizations spend their time marketing to the crowd. Smart organizations assemble the tribe.

22. The act of giving someone a smile, of connecting to a human, of taking initiative, of being creative, of putting on a show – these are things that we do for free all our lives. And then we get to work and we expect to merely do what we’re told and get paid for it.

23. Products that are remarkable get talked about.

24. Mentor Expertise GiftsMarketing thought leaderLeading edge thinkingLead change Make a difference

26. Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be.

27. Change, BEFORE you have to.

28. If you don’t have a competitive advantage, don’t compete.

29. An organization’s ability to learn and translate that learning into action rapidly is the ultimate competitive advantage.

30. Giving people self confidence is by far the most important thing that I can do because then they will act.

31. Globalization has changed us into a company that searches the world, not just to sell or to source, but to find intellectual capital – the world’s best talent and greatest ideas.

32. The essence of competitiveness is liberated when we make people believe that what they think and do is important – and then get out of their way while they do it.

33. Willingness to change is a strength, even if it means plunging part of the company into total confusion for a while.

34. Mentor Expertise GiftsLeadershipChange agent CompetitionEmployee development

36. A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You can earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.

37. The most important single thing is to focus obsessively on the customer. Our goal is to be earth’s most customer centric company.

38. We were willing to go down a bunch of dark passageways and occasionally we find something that really works.

39. Our point of view is we will sell more if we help people make purchasing decisions.

40. The internet in general and Amazon.com in particular, is still in chapter one.

41. What’s dangerous is not to evolve.

42. Mentor Expertise GiftsCustomer centricPersistenceExperimentationNot afraid of failure

44. Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn’t what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked.

45. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

46. For something this complicated, it’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.

47. That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.

48. Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me.

49. The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament … May, 1999.

50. You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

51. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.

52. I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.

53. Mentor Expertise GiftsCreativity, innovationDesignSimplicity focusPassion

54. Final Thoughts

55. Continue your learning based on the lessons of these, and your own, silent mentors

56. Never stop the learning process

57. About Dr. SchoultzDr. Schoultz has thirty five years of business development, marketing, technology, and business operations experience.He served as VP / President of Distribution Technologies, a company he helped to found and grow to a 700 M + / year market leader.Dr. Schoultz Ph. D. is from the University of Virginia.

58. Thank You !mschoultz@yahoo.comTwitter: mikeschoultz

59. Coming Soon !Digital Spark Marketing Consulting, LLC