John Sculley - Moonshot!: Game-Changing Strategies to Build Billion-Dollar Businesses

Moonshot!

Game-Changing Strategies to Build Billion-Dollar Businesses

John Sculley

Moonshot!
Game-Changing Strategies to Build Billion-Dollar Businesses
Copyright 2014 by John Sculley

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Cover design by Brad Mooberry
Cover and interior photography by Doug Menuez

ISBN e-Pub edition: 9780795343360

In memory of our parents,
Jack and Margaret Sculley,
who sacrificed so much for their three sons,
but tragically died too young
to see their sons become men.

And to my loving wife,
Diane Sculley.

INTRODUCTION AND HIGHLIGHTS

CUSTOMERS COME FIRST

Unless you have a deep understanding of the concept of exceptional customer experience, you may find your company out of business in a few years.

Why? Because the biggest Moonshot in years is happening right now: a dramatic, rapid shift from producers-in-control to customers-in-control.

This Moonshot is being propelled by a tsunami of exponentially expanding technologies never seen before: cloud computing, wireless sensors, Big Data, and mobile devices. This wave is causing economic power to shift, from business producers who worked hard to be in control of their customers, to increasingly smarter and smarter customers. This time the customers will be in control. As a lifelong business builder and consumer marketer, I am realizing how this Moonshot is so incredibly world-changing.

Those who fail to grasp what is happening will miss the future.

Those who learn to take advantage of serving a very smart customer will be the builders of future billion-dollar businesses.

Moonshot! is a book that will guide you through a journey, explaining, with solutions, how to do it.

Jeff Bezos says his customers are incredibly loyal; that is, until the moment someone else makes them a better offer. Customers are getting smarter. They dont even have to do much to get smarter. Thats because we are in a new era of digital technology that will increasingly be about machine-learning systems and machine-to-machine communication, with no conscious human intervention required. The scale of customer data processing in the cloud will be so massive that the customer will have immediate information and individual power on an unprecedented level.

The Virgin brand has a reputation for exceptional customer experience so powerful that Richard Branson has been successful with it in all kinds of industriesfrom music, to mobile phone service, to airlines, and soon to consumer travel into space. One knows that a Virgin customer experience tolerates no compromises.

Elon Musk didnt just create an electric automobile. Tesla is an entirely new customer experience of how good personal transportation can be; it engages the customer in a complete end-to-end experience system.

Mayor Mike Bloomberg was already a legendary disruptive entrepreneur before he became New York City mayor for twelve years. He didnt have to bow to the lobbyists or special-interest groups. He treated New York City voters like customers. His efforts to collect data on so many aspects of New Yorkers lives meant not only could the government operate more efficiently, but voters could find out what crimes or noise complaints have been reported in their neighborhood, how clean their local restaurants are, and even where the snowplows are after a blizzard.

MOONSHOTS

Moonshot is a term in Silicon Valley reserved for just a few of the most important innovations that reset everything following after them. The invention of the microprocessor was a Moonshot. So was the first useful personal computer, the Apple II; as was the first affordably priced desktop publishing system for creative people, the Mac. The creation of the World Wide Web was a Moonshot. So were the launches of Google Nexus One and Apples iPhone. What each of these Moonshots has in common is they helped make ordinary, nontechnical, people smarter. They enabled what Steve Jobs used to call tools for the mind.

The Moonshot I will unpack in this book is the leap computers have recently made from productivity tools to intelligent personal assistants. A new generation of automated intelligent systems using machine learning and advanced data science has made this possible. IBMs Watson, Microsofts Cortana, Googles Now and Apples Siri are examples. This Moonshot is shifting economic power from traditional business producers to customers-in-control, and its making customers incredibly smart. This Moonshot will change every industry of commerce in the world.

Propelling this Moonshot are four amazing digital technologies, each of which is growing at an exponential rate. Two of these technologiescloud computing and mobile devicesare already touching billions of users. Soon, billions of miniature wireless sensors and a new generation of mathematical algorithms in data science incorporating artificially intelligent systems will analyze consumer behavior right down to the individual person, and automatically predict outcomes, helping people to make better informed decisions. Never has such powerful technology been commoditized so quickly, and become both so affordable and pervasive.

THE ADAPTIVE INNOVATOR

A new breed of entrepreneurs is emerging, putting customers first. They are raising the bar in customer-experience businesses with the incredibly ambitious goal of being ten times better than anything previously available. Thinking about your business plan as just an incremental improvement over the past will not be enough to succeed anymore. There has to be a better way, and I believe that somewhere in the world, some curious, optimistic, and very motivated people, in industry after industry, will figure out what that way is. The process starts with a few geniuses leading the way, then others become inspired. They are the entrepreneurs who attract others who will help them build transformative companies of the future.

I call this new breed of entrepreneurs the adaptive innovators and, as you will learn in this book, there has never been a better time to build a billion-dollar business. I will take you on a journey explaining why this opportunity is not only possible but probable, presenting the lessons Ive learned from the best innovative minds, and offering many valuable insights and solutions that will help you become an adaptive innovator. Im a hands-on builder who has been curious my whole life about the search for a better way to do things. Ive had some big success and some big failures; being an adaptive innovator can be personally high risk but incredibly rewarding, too.

For adaptive innovators, as you will see, its the customer plan, not the business plan thats important. What are the metrics of a customer plan? The rate of customer engagement and re-engagement; the conversion rate from consumer engagement to becoming a transacting customer; the scoring of customer satisfaction; the cost of customer acquisition; customer churn rate; the effectiveness of the cycle of customer management; the retention rate of a customer; and the lifetime value of a customer.

THE ADAPTIVE CORPORATION

One of the most important themes of this book is what I call the adaptive corporation. Alvin Toffler wrote a groundbreaking book about The Adaptive Corporation