Keeping your own counsel

An article in MacWorld about the backlash over Final Cut Pro X says this:

Apple keeps its own counsel. Sure, lots of folks have advice for Apple. I think some of the suggestions, such as introducing this new version of Final Cut Pro under a slightly different brand name, might be good ones. But in the end, Apple does as Apple sees fit. When financial analysts kept offering “advice” for Apple to introduce a netbook, time and time again Apple said it would stay out of that market and held its price points even as the products sold well each quarter. From the iPod to iPhone to iTunes music to Apple retail stores and the iPad, Apple has faced a host of critics who all suggested Apple’s approach was wrong. In the end, Apple keeps its own counsel on what it will and won’t do, and has generally been proven right.

Which, of course, is exactly why they win so big.

Where do you turn when you need to make these big and important decisions for your business, in your life, or othrewise?

Do you read blogs, books, and ask others? 

Or do you tune into your own source of knowing, your own inner guidance and truth.

Nothing wrong with consulting books, blogs, people, and other sources, of course. They can add insight and angles that you’d missed, they can fill in your blind spots.

But when it’s time to decide, you’ll have to trust something deeper inside of you—your heart, gut, intuition, call it what you will—or you’ll end chasing too many projects at once, zig-zagging, and spreading yourself too thin.

A great example is Google under Eric Schmidt and Microsoft under Steve Ballmer. They have no vision, nothing to guide them, other than their rational left brain mind, and that is a very poor guide indeed.

I love what Steve Jobs said in the interview he gave at the D8 conference last year:

“Apple is a company that doesn’t have the most resources in the world, and they way we’ve succeeded is to bet the right technological horse, to look at technologies that have a future. We try to pick things that are in their springs. And if you choose wisely, you can be quite successful.”

Mind you, this is a company of 50,000 employees that makes over a billion dollar in profits per month, and he talks about being resource-constrained.

They choose to do a lot fewer things and they do them a lot more carefully, and that turns out to be a winning strategy.

Who would’ve thought?