Apple CEO Tim Cook Apologizes To China For Warranty Policies (AAPL)

Apple CEO Tim Cook has written an apology for the company's warranty policies in China. It is posted on Apple's Chinese site.

The Chinese government's media outlets had been hammering Apple for the last week over its warranty policies, which it said were in violation of local law, and not comparable with its practices elsewhere in the world.

Cook has said that he believes China will be Apple largest market eventually. The attacks from China's government put that in jeopardy. At first glance, this looks like an attempt to smooth things over.

Here's a pretty terrible translation from Google Translate. We're trying to get our own, better translation.

To our Chinese consumers:

In the past two weeks, we have received a lot of feedback about Apple in China repair and warranty policy. We are not only a profound reflection on these views, together with relevant departments to carefully study the "Three Guarantees", and also look at our maintenance policy communication and combing our management specifications of Apple Authorized Service Provider. We are aware that, due to the lack of external communication in this process and lead to the speculation that Apple arrogance, do not care or do not attach importance to consumer feedback. We express our sincere apologies for any concerns or misunderstandings this gives consumers.

In order to further improve the level of service, we are implementing the following four major adjustment:

• Improved iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S repair policy


• Provide a concise and clear on the website of the official Apple repair and warranty policy statement


• Increase the intensity of the supervision and training of Apple Authorized Service Provider


• Related issues to ensure that consumers can easily contact Apple Feedback Service

At the same time, we also realize that operating in China, and communicate much we need to learn the place. Here, we assure you, Apple for the commitment and enthusiasm indistinguishable from other countries. Bring the best user experience for consumers and satisfactory service is our ideals, our commitment, and it has been deeply rooted in Apple's corporate culture. We will make unremitting efforts to achieve this goal.

iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S repair policy improvements are as follows:

So far, iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S repair this in one of three ways: as from the purchase date of 15 days found the problem, we will be entitled to a refund or replacement for consumers recalculated 1 year warranty period iPhone; 15 days after discovery problem, Apple will replace the part depending, such as camera modules or batteries; replacement parts also can not quickly repaired the iPhone, Apple will provide consumers with a part reassembled new parts, retaining only the consumers existing iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S back cover.

Nearly 90% of customers expressed satisfaction with our repair services, and consumer satisfaction is the most important criterion for Apple to measure its own success.

But others suggested that part of the re-assembly of repair almost replace the machine, so the direct replacement of a device will be more beneficial to consumers. Therefore, since April 2013, Apple iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S service pack upgrade for all 1-year warranty on new equipment replacement parts and replacement date recalculated.

Consumer iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S Apple or an Apple Authorized Service Provider has been part of the re-assembly kit maintenance, we will replace them as whole and for maintenance after the iPhone recalculated from the date of repair year warranty. Apple's warranty system has been updated for the information and, therefore, affected consumers do not need to take any additional action.

Now, all consumers can see on our site clear and comprehensive maintenance and warranty policy terms and conditions.

We are pleased to provide consumers with information who wish to learn more about the after-sales service. For example, we have been to provide 2 year warranty for the MacBook Air and Mac computer motherboards and other major components. Likewise, the the iPad main components has been entitled to a 2-year warranty period, and other components for 1 year warranty.

We realize that our site before this is not clearly stated policy. Hope the following will answer all the questions about Apple provides services.

Apple is to make greater efforts to ensure that Apple Authorized Service Provider to follow our policies, and make every effort to provide consumers with the highest quality service.

Week since March 18, 2013, we made a new training materials for all Apple Authorized Service Provider to ensure that each staff provide services for Apple products is not only familiar with our policies, but also to grasp three guarantees "provisions and related policies. The same time, we have taken the initiative through face-to-face meetings and other forms of verification and to ensure that each Apple Authorized Service Provider have opened training courses to update the knowledge of the staff for the maintenance and warranty policies. We will make unremitting efforts and continuous monitoring of the performance of the Apple Authorized Service Provider to ensure that consumers can get the highest quality service.

Now, the feedback service-related issues is also very convenient.

As the consumers of the services provided by any Apple Store retail store or an Apple authorized service provider doubt, to Welcome www.apple.com.cn/support/service/feedback/ directly get in touch with us. Our goal is to consumers where to buy Apple products or receive services, users can enjoy world-class experience.

Heartfelt thank you to give us valuable feedback, we always harbor immense respect to China, the Chinese consumer is always the top priority of our hearts.

Tim Cook

Apple CEO

This story is developing, so more is coming ...

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The Skills Most Entrepreneurs Lack

Entrepreneurs are a unique group of people, but they behave in patterns. In fact, as I recently wrote here on HBR, my firm's research shows that most serial entrepreneurs display persuasion, leadership, personal accountability, goal orientation, and interpersonal skills. But in that same study, we also discovered a set of skills they do not possess.

To rehash our methods, we assessed subjects identified as serial entrepreneurs on what personal skills they possessed. Then they were compared to a control group of 17,000. As before, this group was assessed on their mastery of 23 practical, job-related skills. We measured whether skills were well developed, developed, moderately developed, or needed developing.

After analyzing the data, we found four distinct skills lacking in most serial entrepreneurs, three skills statistically significantly and one other also noticeably lacking. The statistical significance is derived by comparing the lowest ranking skills to the entrepreneurs' top skills, as evaluated in the first study.

Empathy is one of the qualities serial entrepreneurs lack most. Entrepreneurs build things and solve problems for people, but according to this study they do this in hopes of a return on investment. Entrepreneurs may have high empathy on an intellectual level, in that they want to produce a product or service that will help someone. This is often, however, also tied to the entrepreneur receiving a return for their time and effort, which people with high empathy do not generally expect.

Entrepreneurial-minded people are not proficient in managing themselves and their time. In many jobs, managing personal day-to-day tasks might take away from accomplishing larger company goals, which are critical to entrepreneurs. Since entrepreneurs typically have many projects underway at one time, they simply do not have time to micromanage each. Often they need assistance managing everyday tasks and should hire or delegate them to someone who has mastered this skill.

This leads to another skill entrepreneurs lack: planning and organizing. Similar to self-management, if entrepreneurs spent time planning and organizing every task or meeting, they would never get anything else done. Once again, hiring someone to keep their calendar, organize meetings and events, keep the office de-cluttered, and help keep them on schedule can put them at an advantage.

Entrepreneurs also do not excel above the control group when it comes to analytical problem solving. They have high utilitarian motivators (potential future gains, monetary returns, new products or ideas), so their focus is often on making a quick decision. They have a sense of urgency in decision-making, and by nature they do not have time to collect and analyze the data. They see numbers as getting in their way, and they should - everyone who has told them an idea wouldn't pan out has used data and logic to illustrate that point. For example, Martin Luther King Jr. stated, "I have a dream." He did not say, "I have a plan and strategy." Entrepreneurs have the vision, but need to employ people to create an executable strategy and carry it through.

Entrepreneurial-minded individuals possess a distinct set of skills that lead to great leadership and ideas. Perhaps the skills they have not mastered are equally important. With an understanding of those weaknesses, they can compensate for them by surrounding themselves with people who excel in these areas. As a leader, realizing other's strengths and dovetailing them into your own weaknesses is key to developing a team that will carry out your grand vision and achieve goals.

via HBR.org http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/04/the_much-needed_skills_most_en.html

Will Moneyball Analytics Kill Loyalty and Leadership?

Future potential matters (much) more than past performance. That's the new quantitative consensus reshaping professional sports worldwide. After looking hard at the numbers and algorithms, the smartest — and richest — general managers and franchises have made up their collective minds: They're not paying a premium for yesterday. Period. Iconic athletes from Barcelona to Manchester United to the Chicago Bears to the New England Patriots to the New York Yankees have been effectively cut loose.

Thanks for the memories. See you at the Hall of Fame induction ceremonies, dude. We simply can't — or won't — afford you anymore.

Multivariate predictive analytics render "What have you done for me lately?" an anachronistic cliché. The questions now are, "How well will you do tomorrow?" and "How can we be sure?" The better the answers, the richer the paychecks. The past is, indeed, a foreign country, albeit one with a debauched currency. This next-generation "moneyball" ethos now transforming pro sports has enormous implications for how high-performance managers will incent and inspire tomorrow's high achievers. The cultural values of loyalty and leadership are being redefined by the economic value of forecasting methodologies (PDF). "Yesterday" is a sunk cost.

"Yes, the trend is towards paying for future performance; by that I mean future 'forecasted' performance," observed Daryl Morey, General Manager of the NBA's Houston Rockets franchise and a pioneer in bringing moneyball statistical/quantitative analytics to pro basketball, in a conversation with me. "My job is to up our odds for winning games and winning championships, and those things happen going forward, not looking backward."

Exactly. Where past performance was once the best and most reliable proxy for the future, says Morey (a friend who launched MIT's successful Sports Analytics Conference), algorithmic and biomedical innovations increasingly give coaches, managers, and owners greater confidence in predicting which players have peaked and which ones will step up to greatness. "We have a luxury in sports," says Morey. "We can so clearly measure success and failure; we can know when people start fading with age...we can make a better bet on someone with talent."

Unlike for a Procter & Gamble or Unilever, Morey muses, there is no "aging curve" for marketing prowess: "We can't say that, after 50, this guy won't have another good marketing idea again."

But why not? If you're running Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Google, Exxon Mobil, or Ford, you have comparable concerns about making sure you're getting the best possible returns from your talent and human capital investments. You should be concerned about the aging curves of your marketing people; you should want to know if your tech support folks will deliver better outcomes tomorrow than today; you should be predicting which sales teams will procure the most lucrative contracts with the minimum risks. Think of it as Six Sigma predictive analytics for talent.

The catch, which Morey freely acknowledges, is that it's still very difficult to measure what role personal loyalty plays in inspiring extra efforts that yield better results. It's still very difficult to assess the positive influence of an aging leader whose physical skills have demonstrably diminished but whose acuity and character gets everyone on the team to step up their game. No one denies the reality or importance of these organizational phenomena. But that's not the direction that moneyball's metrics have been going.

"All of my actions have to be on the individual level," Morey acknowledges, while freely conceding that oftentimes a team's greatest professional challenge is chemistry and cohesion. Of course, encouraging the kind of loyalties and leadership that enhance collaboration becomes inherently more difficult when performers fear they may fall on the wrong side of the aging curve. Similarly, coaches lose credibility with their players if they champion schemes and approaches that predictive analytics might undervalue or ignore come contract time.

The classic response, of course, is to insist that, ultimately, these decisions come down to human judgments rather than computational dictatorships. But that's exactly why acknowledging the current trend is so important: The leaderships of the richest and (ostensibly) best-managed franchises in sports have effectively declared that the costs of preserving past values are too high relative to the potential for tomorrow's performance.

Bill Parcells, the Super Bowl-winning coach, was famous for saying, "You are what your record says you are." Today, that's no longer true. You are what the analytics predict you will be. That changes the social — as well as the professional — contract.

Does anyone really think a 50-year-old marketer with a terrific track record is immune from the same economic and analytic forces affecting the career of a 40-year-old pro athlete who was a two-time all-star? Does that knowledge make the marketer a better leader or more loyal employee? Or doesn't that matter anymore?

Do you know where you are on the aging curve? Does your boss?

via HBR.org http://blogs.hbr.org/schrage/2013/04/will-moneyball-analytics-kill.html

How SAP Labs India Became An Innovation Dynamo

In April 2010, V.R. Ferose became the managing director of SAP Labs India, one of fifteen global R&D centers of the German software giant SAP. At 35 years old, Ferose was the youngest-ever managing director of a global multinational firm in India — overseeing a staff of 4,000.

SAP's senior management asked Ferose to shore up employee morale at SAP Labs India, where the attrition rate had reached a painful 19% in 2009. Ferose's mandate was to reduce employee turnover to below 10% by 2012.

Rather than rushing into action, Ferose took time to identify the root cause of employee dissatisfaction by listening to and observing employees. He noticed that discontented employees were posting negative comments on the lab's internal blog about the local management team, which they viewed as unresponsive to their needs. Frustrated employees were complaining about the lack of amenities — such as child care facilities — on campus and the stifling bureaucracy which, for instance, made expense reimbursment a time-consuming process.

Ferose realized that SAP Labs India had to engage its young employees — whose average age was merely 29 — differently. He believed that it is not the CEO's job to find ways to make his or her employees happier. Employees already know what will make them happy. According to Ferose, the CEO's job is to give employees the freedom to test and deploy their own solutions that will in turn make them happier at work.

This belief led Ferose to overhaul SAP Labs India's hierarchical, 'top-heavy' corporate culture, allowing bottom-up creativity and innovation to blossom. In particular, Ferose empowered his 4,000 employees to experiment with bold new ideas during their work time. He requested that their managers free up time for their staff members to work on solving the very problems they were complaining about. He believed such a move would not only directly and positively impact SAP's core business, but also improve employees' level of engagement, working conditions and morale.

Ferose also encouraged his 4,000 plus employees — primarily engineers — to expose themselves to new environments and situations that would challenge their existing perspectives, unleash their innate ingenuity, and accelerate their learning. He believed that the most disruptive innovations don't occur inside a single domain, but at the intersection of multiple diverse domains (such as the arts and the sciences).

In one instance, when a group of employees expressed an interest in brushing up on their communication skills, Ferose didn't enroll them in structured training programs delivered in a formal classroom. Rather, he sent these employees to a theater located near the campus of SAP Labs India where they learned to extemporize and become better communicators by performing in live shows that they put on. To further broaden his employees' worldview, Ferose launched a monthly lecture series that introduced employees to the unique perspectives of well-known personalities in the arts, culture, sports, and politics.

Motivated by Ferose's participative leadership style, many self-organized teams at SAP Labs India have since tested and implemented dozens of innovative solutions to boost productivity. For instance, one small team has piloted and rolled out a system to expedite expense reimbursement: today, if an employee at SAP Labs India files an expense claim, he or she will get reimbursed within 24 hours. Another team of employees designed and deployed a daycare for working mothers. Most of these projects were initiated and executed within one week by utilizing existing resources — thus requiring limited additional budget. During Ferose's first twelve months as head of SAP Labs India, empowered employees successfully implemented a total of fifty-two new morale-boosting projects.

Ferose was also keen to infuse into his organization the mindset and principles of jugaad — a cost-effective and flexible approach to creating affordable solutions using limited resources. To that effect, he set up AppHaus — an open space within the SAP Labs India campus where designers, engineers, and marketers work collaboratively and intensively on new products — compressing the whole concept-to-market cycle to 90 days (versus the 2 years it would typically take SAP to develop a new product using the linear and structured software development processes). By leveraging rapid prototyping and continuous customer feedback, the cross-functional teams that operate in the AppHaus are able to innovate faster, better, and cheaper — managing each project as if they were running a startup. To date, the AppHaus has successfully designed — or redesigned — and launched several software products in global markets — including SAP Collections Insight, a software suite that enables frontline employees such as sales reps to make informed decisions rapidly. AppHaus truly embodies SAP's frugal innovation philosophy.

In addition to serving the company's commercial needs, SAP Labs India is using AppHaus to serve a larger purpose by creating socially relevant applications. For instance, a small 10-member team worked in the AppHaus using limited resources to quickly develop a social networking site called Charitra (short for Charity Transformation), a first-of-its-kind portal for driving positive social impact. The web site connects people with needs (NGOs or volunteers driving a social cause) to people who can give (volunteers who can donate their time, skill, or resources).

Ferose has helped SAP Labs India reap big rewards by encouraging frugal and flexible grassroots experimentation of novel ideas: within two years of taking over, attrition dropped from 19% in 2009 to 10% in 2011, to 7% in 2012. The India lab now ranks #1 in employee satisfaction within SAP's global network of 15 R&D labs. In the annual ranking of best employers in India, SAP Labs India has risen to the #4 position in a very short time. SAP HQ has taken note, and is now shifting more strategic R&D projects and even global product ownership to SAP Labs India — an acknowledgment of the lab's ability to innovate faster, better, and cost-effectively for local and global markets.

Ferose stands out among global corporate leaders: he didn't graduate from a prestigious university nor does he have a MBA. However, empathy and a high emotional quotient (EQ) enabled him to provide the wise leadership that amplifies and leverages other people's intelligence to drive innovation and revenue growth while also serving the greater good.

Ferose was recently promoted to become the head of SAP's Globalization Services organization.

This post is adapted from the book Jugaad Innovation: A Frugal And Flexible Approach To Innovation For The 21st Century (Random House India, 2012).

via HBR.org http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/04/how_sap_labs_india_became_an_i.html

Morning Advantage: Rebranding Secrets from Narragansett Beer

How do you breathe new life into an old brand? Writing for Inc., April Joyner looks at a handful of companies that have managed that transition, chief among them Narragansett Brewing. One lesson: while you might be tempted to win back the brand's original (read: older) customers, that might be a fool's errand. If a brand tanked, the original customers might never really trust it again. Instead, go after a younger crowd that may feel nostalgic for something they never got to try. (If that sounds sort of crazy, just think about bellbottoms or legwarmers. No one who tried them the first time went back for seconds when the trend returned).



But relaunching a retro brand is a careful balance between retooling it to make it more relevant, and keeping it authentic. Narrangansett overcame that challenge by going back to the original recipe — easy enough, since the switch to cheaper materials had predicated the company's fall. But for brands where the path forward is less obvious, it may be necessary to bring in new leadership. Says Rohit Deshpande at Harvard Business School, they'll be less likely to be "prisoners of history."

NO ONE WANTS TO BE LAST

The Race from the Bottom (Columbia Ideas at Work)

In a series of experiments, professors from Columbia, Harvard, and Stanford found that, in lab simulations, people with a very small amount of money are more likely to take risks to move up the economic ladder (e.g., by gambling) and, when directed by researchers to give money away, less likely to donate funds to those even poorer. Instead, they gave cash to people with more money — since making a donation to those with less would have let those in that lowest income bracket leapfrog them. This parallels real-world studies that show that the workers most likely to oppose minimum-wage increases are those that make slightly more than minimum wage. The researchers' theory? No one likes to be on the bottom of the pile.

THIS MIGHT HURT

The Best Way to Save Banking Is to Kill It (Bloomberg)

Bloomberg View's Matthew Klein offers a brief history of a very interesting idea that's been backed over the decades by some brilliant economists (among them seeming ideological opposites Milton Friedman and James Tobin). It's that deposit taking and lending really have no business being combined in the same institution. A safer system, Klein writes, would "back the deposits one-for-one with reserves at the central bank. Then fund loans not with deposits or other money-like liabilities but by tapping investors who understand they've put their savings at risk." —Justin Fox

BONUS BITS:

Take Care, Now

How to Create a Culture of Organizational Wellbeing (Gallup)

Leadership Lessons from Game of Thrones (Fortune)

The Rise of Executive Feminism (HBR.org)

via HBR.org http://blogs.hbr.org/morning-advantage/2013/04/morning-advantage-rebranding-s.html

Comic for April 1, 2013

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12 Useful 'Easter Eggs' Hidden In Your iPhone (AAPL)

There are so many features packed into the iPhone that one demonstration from Apple couldn't possibly cover them all.

We put together a few of our favorite hidden tips and tricks on the iPhone.

You can teach your iPhone to turn phrases or acronyms into anything you want. Go to Settings > General > Keyboard > Add New Shortcut to give it a try.

If you want to save an image from a website to your phone, tap and hold it until this menu pops up. Tap "Save Image" to store the photo on your phone. You can retrieve it later from your phone's Photos app.

Under Settings, you can switch on the iPhone's Do Not Disturb feature. That means you won't get notifications or calls while your phone is locked. It's best to switch this on while you're sleeping.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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