Carmine Gallo shares this interesting story on Forbes, shortly after becoming CEO, Mark Parker talked to Steve Jobs on the phone asking for some tips:

“Do you have any advice?” Parker asked Jobs. “Well, just one thing,” said Jobs. “Nike makes some of the best products in the world.  Products that you lust after.  But you also make a lot of crap.  Just get rid of the crappy stuff and focus on the good stuff.”

Jobs was “absolutely right,” Parker admitted, adding that Nike “had to edit” when making business decisions:

Parker said Jobs paused and Parker filled the quiet with a chuckle.  But Jobs didn’t laugh.  He was serious. “He was absolutely right,” said Parker.  “We had to edit.”

Parker used the word ‘edit’ not in a design sense but in the context of making business decisions.  Editing also leads to great product designs and effective communications. According to Steve Jobs, “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on.  But that’s not what it means at all.  It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.  I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done.  Innovation is saying ‘no’ to 1,000 things.”

But “Can anyone innovate like Apple?”

The simple answer: While anyone can learn the principles that drive Apple’s innovation, few businesses have the courage to do so.  It takes courage to reduce the number of products a company offers from 350 to 10, as Jobs did in 1998.  It takes courage to remove a keyboard from the face of a smartphone and replace those buttons with a giant screen, as Jobs did with the iPhone.  It takes courage to eliminate code from an operating system to make it more stable and reliable, as Apple did with Snow Leopard.  It takes courage to feature just one product on the home page of a Web site as Apple does with each new major product launch.  It takes courage to make a product like the iPad that is so simple a child can use it.  And it takes courage to eliminate all of the words on a PowerPoint slide except one, as Steve Jobs often does in a presentation.

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