Marylène Delbourg-Delphis: A Pioneer’s Perspective on the Innovation Journey

Guy Kawasaki:
I am Guy Kawasaki. Wow, maybe for this episode I should be Gee Kawasaki, but I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable People. We're on a mission to make you remarkable. Helping me in this episode is a very close friend, Marylène Delbourg-Delphis. She's a serial technology CEO, executive consultant, and board member.
For over thirty years, she has empowered organizations to reshape their future by creating breakthrough platforms and applications. Marylène started her entrepreneurial journey in France. She founded a company called ACI. It published the first relational database for Macintosh in 1985. In 1987, she became one of the first European women to establish a tech company in Silicon Valley. I was co-founder with her of this company.
She was also, by the way, instrumental in my writing career by encouraging me to write The Macintosh Way, my very first book. Marylène holds a doctorate in philosophy from, and I'm going to let her say the name of the school because I will never get that pronunciation right. So you're going to listen to her pronounce the school right now.
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
Ecole normale supérieure.
Guy Kawasaki:
She was rewarded the French Legion of Honor in 2018, the highest order of merit for military and civil accomplishments. Marylène has served as CEO for companies such as Exemplary Software, Brixlogic, and TalentCircles.
In addition to these achievements, Marylène has written a new book. It's called Beyond Eureka!: The Rocky Roads to Innovating. It's a remarkably executed explanation of innovation and entrepreneurship. I had the honor of writing the foreword for this book. I'm Gee Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. And now here is the remarkable Marylène Delbourg-Delphis.
What is the French Legion of Honor Award?
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
The French Legion of Honor is the highest civil and military honor that you can deserve for your outstanding action of what you have done. And so, it was created by Napoleon, I think. So it's for remarkable people. Okay.
Guy Kawasaki:
And how does one win that award?
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
You are nominated by people, and actually I don't really know how it came to me. I think I was nominated by one of the French Consul, Pierre-François Mourier, who used to be a remarkable consul in San Francisco. And he came from the same school as I was, Ecole normale supérieure. And he's a phenomenal Latinist, by the way.
Guy Kawasaki:
And after you win this award, what happens when you fly into Charles de Gaulle? They just walk you through customs or what happens?
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
No, nothing happens. It's really a personal honor. It's not a stage. It's a prestigious but low-key honor. And you don't strut around and say, Hey, I'm a member of the Legion of Honor and whatnot. No, you don't do that. Yeah. It's very private in a way. It's both very public, 'cause you're on the list of people who have been honored, but it's not something that you shout about that much.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay.
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
So, I'm so surprised you asked this question.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm curious, obviously I could Google it, but I want to know from somebody who actually won it. On this podcast, we've interviewed a couple people who have won the MacArthur Fellowship, Angela Duckworth and Stephen Wolfram. So I asked them, what's that like too? And then we actually interviewed the woman who used to run that program to find out how it works.
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
It's in a way similar. And these people don't go around saying, Hey, here I am, and so forth. When you receive an award, the secret is remaining humble.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm waiting for the MacArthur Fellowship for podcasting. So that's my goal in life, but you have to be nominated. All right, so more on target for what you really want to talk about. So let's start with an easy question. I want you to describe Woz, was Woz an inventor or an innovator?
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
I think he was first an inventor and he became an innovator. The difference is that when you focus on the invention, you focus on the how to. When you speak of innovation, you make sure that you insert your invention into a context, a social background, into a market. And I think that Woz has this double characteristic. He has this double talent. Because he was an amazing engineer. That's true. But he also understood that he was going to have users.
So he was probably helped by Steve Jobs to understand that a market is very important. We have to live to survive. It's not enough to do a great product, you have to stage it. And so, I think that the duo, Woz and Steve Jobs was pretty amazing. But I think that Woz learn what an innovator was basically through his relationship with Steve Jobs. This is the way I perceive it. I hope I'm right.
Guy Kawasaki:
And so, you would say Steve was innovator, purely an innovator, not an inventor?
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
Yes. I think that usually people speak of inventor or invention because it sounds more prestigious. It used to, at least. In reality, an innovator is I believe, more incredible that an inventor. An inventor focused on one domain and somebody like Steve Jobs, was able to aggregate several domains and basically used the world as a big store of possibilities.
And so, he was able to dramatize sometime I say theatricalize, what was around him, and he is a phenomenal innovator. So of course he had patents over 400, but he didn't write those patents himself. And it's prestigious to have patents, but he is an amazing innovator. Does it make sense to you? You know him better than I did?
Guy Kawasaki:
Not necessarily. I think the world is full of people who think they knew Steve Jobs and they didn't.
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
Better than most.
Guy Kawasaki:
I was inside the reality distortion field, so it's not clear that I knew what I was seeing.
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
Yes, but you know what? I think you are right. You were inside the reality distortion field, but this is also how innovation operates. You have to believe that the world will bend to your will to actually do stuff, and it doesn't necessarily happen and you then have to adjust to the world. But you have to be in a sort of reality distortion field. It may not reach the dimensions that Steve Jobs gave to this, but you have to somehow.
Guy Kawasaki:
So aren't you saying in a sense that innovators, they're on the spectrum or they're on some spectrum?
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
In a way, yeah. I wouldn't be that excessive, but you have to be very realistic, but move away from reality a little bit because they have to come back to reality. Because otherwise people are not going to buy their stuff. So it's a very strange dance between reality and unreality.
Guy Kawasaki:
Now, it seems to me that you use the term innovator and entrepreneur interchangeably. And I was actually surprised at that because I think you can be an entrepreneur and not particularly innovative. So why do you use them interchangeably?
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
This is what I mentioned in the beginning of the book, okay. And given that it's about innovation, I assume that I was speaking of innovative entrepreneurs only. Because you're right, you can be an entrepreneur and you don't necessarily innovate.
When you create a pizza in your neighborhood, you don't necessarily innovate. So in practice, given that the word entrepreneur is more often used than the word innovator, so I use them interchangeably, but in the beginning of the book I put a caveat, meaning when I use entrepreneur it's innovator.
Guy Kawasaki:
Do you think that every innovator is an entrepreneur by definition, because you're not just an inventor, you're also trying to take it to the market and make it a product or a service that exists and is sold and used. So that's when you cross the line between invention and innovation/entrepreneurship?
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
Yes, most innovators try to be entrepreneurs, try to build a company. It doesn't mean that we'll necessarily succeed because when you innovate, you believe that you have a market. But how well do you evaluate the ability to have this market? Because you assume that people will need it. You assume that people will expect you. And for most innovators, actually customers don't expect us or they find out about us when we are almost dead. Think of General Magic.
Innovators are entrepreneurs, always because they want to push something on the market. The reality is that between what we hope that people will adopt and the fact that they will adopt it, there can be a huge gap and there can be a long time. So General Magic was a very innovative enterprise and built by extraordinary people, the market was not ready.
Some aspect of the technology was not completely mature, and at the time they were getting it almost, it was too late. So that's why I would say that these innovators who fail but have done amazing things are trailblazers. Usually we speak of trailblazers as the iconic figures like the Steve Jobs and Company. For me, all these people who clean the brushes and build up the possibilities of more technologies and build up the path for others are trailblazers.
In reality, there are far more trailblazers in history than we believe. All the people who created the PDAs and basically none survive, they are extraordinary trailblazers. And you don't need to be famous or to be remembered by history to be looked at as a trailblazer. I would say that many of the big icons that we know are incredibly bright trail followers.
They follow what others have done and they come at the right moment, they stage it the right way so that people will be able to absorb them. So I always want to say to entrepreneurs innovators, that even if they fail, even if their company doesn't survive, they probably have done major things that people will leverage. So all the PDAs entrepreneurs basically paved the way for things like the iPhone.
Guy Kawasaki:
Can't you make the case then that being a trail follower or a fast trail follower is a better strategy than being a trailblazer?
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
We can make this case, but the trail followers arrive when there is enough invention and innovation within a domain. When the domain has reached a level of maturity. So the trail followers who are geniuses, don't get me wrong, trail followers are geniuses who understand, who are able to aggregate all the components of a very large landscape.
For example, Edison is a genius. He's also leveraging lots of research on electricity that had been happening for I would say sixty years. He integrated this into a hole and make it a city light. The same with Bell, Graham Bell. He did not invent the telephone, but he put together all the pieces of the telephone and make it happen in a context where people could adopt it.
Guy Kawasaki:
By that line of reasoning, you would say that Alan Kay and Doug Engelbart were the trailblazers, and Steve Jobs was the trail follower, right? He took the thoughts of Xerox PARC and he actually brought it to market. So, are you saying Steve Jobs is a trail follower?
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
Yes. But I don't like the word trail follower, it doesn't sound as prestigious, right?
Guy Kawasaki:
It's not like the French Legion of Honor. No.
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
No. I rely upon you to find a good word. That's why I didn't use the expression trail follower in my book. Those geniuses have a sense of dramaturgy. They are stage directors. Maybe instead of trail follower, we should say, trail directors.
Okay, multi-trail director. I trust you'll find phenomenal word for trail follower. But my point really is to render homage to the countless trailblazers. And the same with the pioneers. The pioneers where the soldiers who would go first on the front and they opened up the space for the army. So, I would like the word trailblazers and pioneers be of a wider use than what it is and encompass more people. I'm sorry.
Guy Kawasaki:
Well then, how would you judge Elon Musk?
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
He is a phenomenal stage director and he put together lots of trends, just like Steve Jobs. He has not invented electric vehicle or self-driving vehicles. The dream for driverless vehicles started with the advent of automobiles, but the technologies were not ready. And so, at a given time, things seems to come together and the genius of these people is to see this happening and coalesce things which were disparate, scattered around. Maybe we should say trailblazers are geniuses.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. I'd love to hear your opinion of the value and what people can learn from Walter Isaacson's and various other people's biographies of Steve Jobs or an Elon Musk. What is there to learn from a biography from those kind of people?
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
For very good biographies, I have not read the Elon Musk biography so I cannot speak, but I have read the biography of Steve Jobs. What I like about biographies is that they are not hagiographic narratives. There is always a kind of sympathy for the person you speak about, but they usually explain more of the ups and downs of the career.
Most of the time in business courses, you give these geniuses as the example to follow. Without taking into account that their path has been sinuous, complicated and that in many respects they have been lucky too, they also have been unlucky. And so, what I like about biographies, it tells the story of the life of people, and it reintegrates genius within the vagaries of life with a minimal hydrographic aspect.
And so I prefer also all the biographies done by people who are not part of the business world. I love the biographies of Kodak. That's why I selected Kodak because he was recounting the ups and downs of George Eastman in a very factual matter-of-fact fashion.
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, let me ask you something. So, what do you think of books like Burn Book by Kara Swisher? Because she's part of the industry and she's writing about the industry.
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
This is the way, I have only started it so I cannot speak in detail. This is the way she felt. So, I think it's a testimony of how she perceived the world around her. And for this, I like this approach. We may have opinions about how she perceives that, how she describes it, but this is how she felt. And this by itself has value. And on top of this, she is a woman and things may reverberate in her mind slightly differently.
Guy Kawasaki:
I would put that mildly. Yes, slightly differently.
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
No, we have to respect these kind of initiatives. When I read a book, I try to understand the mindset of the people who write the book. And when I disagree, I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Guy Kawasaki:
Dare I ask, since you read Think Remarkable, what'd you think our mindset was?
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
Oh, this is really a book I love. Do you know that? And I like it because it's a summary of a life. It's your perception of the world. It's actually not judgmental, and it's trying to help people build their own personality and put it together and show that we are actually very diverse. We are a multiplicity of people. I really like this book, and it's so much better than any self-help book because it's not normative.
Guy Kawasaki:
I don't know what normative means in that sense.
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
You're not telling people you should do this, you should do that. You show them example of people who have done this and that, and then it's up to us to say, oh, maybe I could do this too.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. So from now on, when people ask me to describe the book, I'm going to say it's not normative, and I'm going to hope they understand what I just said.
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
Okay, come on, you are too hard on me. But this is an English word, right?
Guy Kawasaki:
I don't know.
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
Okay. So, you don't give absolute norms, you give goals.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. Because I don't consider myself, nor do I ever want to be a self-help guru. I don't want to be a guru.
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
Exactly.
Guy Kawasaki:
There's never going to be a Guy Kawasaki, Madisun Nuismer course at the Ritz-Carlton where in five hours, we're going to tell you how to be remarkable. That ain't going to happen, ever. Maybe Madisun will do it, but not with my blessing.
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
But there is one thing is you are able to have a real influence on people. And I'm in a very good position to say it. You helped me so much by who you were when you joined the company. When we started the company together. I learned so much by capillarity. You didn't tell me you should do this and you should do that, even though you were probably more dogmatic at the time than now. But you let me learn from you.
Guy Kawasaki:
I think we learned from each other. People listening, you should understand that, because you wouldn't know this, Marylène and I started a company called ACIUS and we had a product called 4th Dimension or a Macintosh relational database. And it was because of her that I left Apple, and I started this company, and the rest is history.
And also, let's just set the record straight that it was because of her encouragement that I wrote my first book, The Macintosh Way. Arguably without Marylène in my life, I would not have become a writer. That's a distinct possibility.
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
Well, thank you. But I am forever grateful that you accepted that we would work together because I had no idea of what the Silicon Valley ecosystem was. And it saved me probably years of learning because you had it in your bones already.
I learned so many American idioms because remember at the time, my English was fairly academic. I have kept my accent, but my English I think has become pretty decent. And I discovered Asia through you. I discovered the art of saying yes before thinking, no, this was very important.
Guy Kawasaki:
I do.
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
Very important.
Guy Kawasaki:
I do. I default to, yes, that is very true. Yes.
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
And this was very profound for me because as a European and especially French, we tend to argue a lot.
Guy Kawasaki:
No.
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
Here we are, but hearing you say, yes when I knew you were not so sure was incredibly important to me.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, okay. I don't know if we're going to keep this part in the podcast, but while I think about it, all right, I'm going to ask you two really silly questions, but I really want to know, okay, so I discussed the concept of, and I'm going to tell you these two things so that you can tell me the absolute correct way to say these French words because I am not sure. Okay. So number one is, noblesse oblige. Is that the right pronunciation?
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
Yes. Yes. You have an American accent, but it's good, noblesse oblige.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. And then we have this person in our book and in our podcast who's very artistic and very talented. His name is Halim Flowers. And many people consider him the next generation Jean-Michel, and I don't know how to pronounce his last name. Is it Basquiat?
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
Yes. With a French accent you would say, Jean-Michel Basquiat, who was an amazing artist. But you can say Jean-Michel Basquiat, American people say Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Guy Kawasaki:
Because I live in great fear that I'll say noblesse oblige and Jean-Michel Basquiat someplace. And some French intellectual sitting in the audience will say, oh, this dumb-ass American can't even say French words.
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
I disagree. The people who would think this way, would just be silly.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, back on track here. So now, let's talk about disruption. Do you think disruption is overrated and it's like a bull shit venture capital term?
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
It's definitely overrated. When you look at the history of the word, it really picked up in the eighties and nineties mostly. The word was used before in a completely different contexts, not in business contexts. The theme is if you are not disruptive, you are going to die because somebody is going to do better than you do.
Why would you need such a big word to express something which is logical? If you don't evolve, your company will die. That's about it. And it became sort of a cottage industry word for consultants. We're going to help you disrupt the world.
In reality, when you hear an entrepreneur telling you that he's going to disrupt a field, either he's naive or he doesn't know the space. The evolution of technology and the adoption of technology is really progressive. You are not going to change all behaviors overnight.
You are not going to kill IBM overnight if you want to kill IBM. It's just very naive. And it's a very negative view of innovation. In fact, innovators wants to build, construct, more than disrupt. What's the point of disrupting somebody else? The point is to build a business, right?
And I do agree with Renée Mauborgne, Beyond Disruption. And in my book I discussed the concept from a more historical standpoint because the notion of disruption appeared in the 1980s, but the researcher using it did not think of it from the point of view of one company disrupting the planet at all. And the idea of disruption also came in sociological research to show that the evolution of the world history is not linear, it's not cause and effect relationship.
And so, what happened is that Christensen used a term which was getting trendy in the seventies, eighties and use it into business. I think it's a good consulting business term. It does not describe the reality of how innovation happens. And if you as an entrepreneur or an innovator, your goal is to disrupt everything, you're most likely to fail because people are not going to buy you.
Guy Kawasaki:
Are you saying that when you mentioned Christensen, you're referring to Clayton Christensen and The Innovator's Dilemma. So are you saying The Innovator's Dilemma is not accurate or you're just saying that it's mislabeled?
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
I think it's mislabeled. He gives interesting advice, but like many business book, so you need to have a sort of grandiose term to strike the mind of people and to build a school of idea, when in reality these are logical, interesting advice to management. In the same way as many other authors. We don't need to have those big labels. And certainly, we don't need entrepreneurs to think that they are going to be disruptive because first, usually great things start small. Okay.
Guy Kawasaki:
You understand you're talking to someone who's trying to make the word remarkable, just like the word disruption, right?
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
No, I think the good thing is that remarkable is more normal. To be remarkable, this is a word that you say in everyday life. And so, what you do is that you aggregate the various components of being remarkable, but in everyday life you say, oh, this is remarkable. This person is remarkable. This book is remarkable. You show how the word remarkable has a wide range of meaning.
Guy Kawasaki:
I must admit I never use the word disruption. Never.
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
Okay. Okay, very good. So you've made my point here.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yes, exactly.
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
Okay. You're not going to buy an Oura Ring because it disrupts.
Guy Kawasaki:
To your point, I don't think people wake up in the morning saying, God, I got to buy something disruptive.
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
Exactly. No. In fact, you want to buy something which is not disruptive, which is seductive.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yes.
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
You want to be persuaded to buy, you want to be brought into buying something. You want to charm, not to shock.
Guy Kawasaki:
I knew it was inevitable to interview someone who's French and we'd get to sex somehow.
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
No.
Guy Kawasaki:
And I would also make the case that you can only label things disruptive after the fact. You can't predict it.
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
Exactly. This is an after the fact. I don't see the point. And if you say to a customer, it's disruptive, they're going to wait until other people adopt the product because they don't want to disrupt their business. So it's a very negative view. It has probably its usage, but when I hear an entrepreneur tell me that it's disruptive, it's usually that he doesn't know the space very much.
Guy Kawasaki:
You're going to get my book and podcast banned inside of McKinsey, if you keep talking about disruption being a bad word.
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
It's not a bad word, it's a kind of filler word. It's just, when people always use this kind of expression without knowing the origin and the actual meaning, it becomes empty. I would say that it's empty. People have to say disruptive to look serious. They don't use it more than other people. I think it's just part of the lingo. And one day when the people trained in the eighties and nineties are going to disappear, the word is going to disappear.
Guy Kawasaki:
I would love to hear your opinion of how organizations can remain or sustain innovation. You point out that many companies are fifty, sixty, seventy years old. And how do those companies remain innovative?
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
It's very complicated, right? There is no one recipe. But usually they hire people who can inform the upper management and they make sure that ideas are not crushed or disappearing in the labyrinth of hierarchy. So that's really the key. I think that the minute you realize that innovation is about people and not about organization, you start to take care of people.
Organizations don't crush innovation; people do crush innovation. Power crushes innovation or fear crushes innovation. But sustaining innovation in large corporations is possible, it's completely possible. For example, think of Apple. We may not always agree with what Apple has done over the years, but they have managed, and this is an old organization now. IBM, there are ups and downs, but they have managed it because they look for talent.
Look at Google, they have found talent everywhere and they acquire companies with a lot of talent, and they are able to maintain those talents, to keep those talents. The same with Microsoft. These are organizations who are able to understand that innovation is linked to people and crushed by people. Does it make sense?
Guy Kawasaki:
Not to get off on too much of a tangent, but if people are the key like this, when societies or let's say specific states, they seem be crushing people based on their race or their sexual orientation or something. It's by these superficial qualities have nothing to do with their ability to innovate. And it seems to me that's a downward cycle there.
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
This is a definitely a downward cycle because if you look at Silicon Valley, it's white guys, but it's a lot of Chinese and people from India. Okay. Let's be realistic, we are in a global world and talent can come from anywhere and from anybody, from any color, from any sexual orientation. And so, all these exclusionary processes are just absurd. And basically they're losing talent.
And another thing that is going to maybe bad for the United States and maybe other countries too, is the cost of universities. Because universities' laboratories are the antechambers of innovation. So you have to train a large number of people to basically emulate a lot of ideas, create a lot of ideas. So, if you exclude people from traditionally very effective university because of the cost, you may lose a lot of talent or they may go back to their country.
Guy Kawasaki:
This is going to go off on another tangent, but I love to hear what you say. Who do you consider more innovative, Steve Jobs or Elon Musk?
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
I don't tend to have a hierarchy. I wouldn't establish really a hierarchy between them. I only have preferences.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, who's your preference?
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
I prefer Steve Jobs.
Guy Kawasaki:
Why?
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
Because I think he was grateful to the environment he was in, and even though he was hard to deal with, I think that his personality was more open to the world. Elon Musk is obviously an extraordinary man. I'm disturbed by his radical positions and the risk of abuse of power.
This is disturbing to me because it's more of a character issue, but it's not because he's an innovator. It's more of a character issue. I think Steve Jobs was provocative, could be probably very harsh with people, but there was a personal integrity that is very meaningful to me.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. So I want to finish off with your book. Specifically, just give us the lessons of your book in one question, how do you get Beyond Eureka!?
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
You work, you work, you work. You may succeed, you may restart, you may pivot, but you move on continuously.
Guy Kawasaki:
That's it? That's the whole gist of it?
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
Yes. First off, I must tell people that you are the one who found this title, Beyond Eureka! and very grateful about this. My point was that creators of companies who want to innovate have to realize how difficult it is. And while I was trying to explain why it is difficult, I want them to feel that they are not alone. Because most of the time as an entrepreneur, you feel lonely. You feel that if you don't succeed, the world is going to look at you in a negative fashion.
So, what I did is make sure I always illustrated that others went through bad times, maybe sometime even worse. I want to make sure that entrepreneurs understand how hard it is to innovate, but I want also to make sure that they understand that they can improvise, they can change that. They can be opportunistic, pragmatic because others very big names have done it before them. So, I want to dedramatize in many respects both success and failure.
Guy Kawasaki:
I think that many people from the outside looking in think that the hard part is coming up with the idea. And then once you come up with the idea, implementation is easy and my experience is it's exactly the opposite.
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
Exactly. I completely agree with that. Because you get an idea when you work in the space, you see what the status of the space is and then you say, how come this works only like this? Let me try something else. So you usually get ideas from a terrain where many ideas can germinate. So the ideas are pretty easy to come by. And then when you have this idea, now how am I going to make it work?
So you start a company, so you learn how to manage a budget, how to raise money, how to hire people, whatnot. And then the minute you have started a product, who's going to buy that stuff? And this is the beginning of big headaches. So implementation, not of the rule of business, but of the rule that will make people adopt your product is extraordinarily complicated and challenging.
Guy Kawasaki:
Do you have any brilliant insights for us about adoption? How do you foster adoption? 'Cause I think that's what it all comes down to. I tell entrepreneurs all the time, the only thing you need to remember is sales fixes everything.
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
Yes. But you have sales when you see how people can adopt. To have people adopt, you have to be progressively charming in many respects. You have to first think how you as a consumer adopt product. Most of the time when we produce innovation, we think that what we do is so great that people will knock at our door. We forget that before we buy the next iPhone, we say, "Do I really need one?"
And so on. We hesitate not because we are unable to make a decision, we say, "Oh, that's cool, but do I really need it?" And so forth. We have to understand that people don't operate at our speed. That's first thing. Understand that customers are lazy, even if they like the product. Logouts are not idiots, simply they don't need the product, or they are able to do without it, or they have different habits.
To help adoption, you have to learn tolerance of why people are not going to buy your product. You have to basically really do a pre-mortem analysis, find all the reason why people are not going to buy you.
And then, you have to also do everything possible to make sure that if they decide to buy your products, the interface is going to be easy for them. And this is, by the way, something I learned from you, my notion of interface, because I had a tendency to look at the technology. What I really learned from you when I came to the Valley is the importance for interface, even the color of a package.
And when I was working on the history of technology for this book, I discovered that probably the genius of interface, the first big genius of interface was George Eastman at Kodak. I think that everybody was working on better ways to make photography happen, democratize photography, and all of a sudden there was somebody who said, you can click on a button, you being anybody. So I think he built the concept of interface that pervaded everything since then.
Guy Kawasaki:
That reminds me of something that maybe in your research you have a better understanding of, which is in 1975, Steve Sasson of Kodak invented digital photography and obviously they did not embrace it. So what happened there?
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
There is a very interesting interview that he gave to The New York Times at the time. It was killing the cash cow and probably the upper management of Kodak had aged too much, or the board had aged too much, so they could not project themselves ten years, twenty years down the road. They did not think of what their grandchildren would want to use. They had arrived. They were not stupid people. They were simply stuck with themselves with the age. I think it was generational.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. All right. So I have to tell you that I wrote a book called The Art of the Start 2.0, which goes over the basic mechanisms of how to start a company, but I do not at all address with any kind of quality that your book does.
I think if you're an entrepreneur listening to this or you're thinking of being an entrepreneur, you only need two books. The Art of the Start 2.0 and Beyond Eureka!, because it'll tell you how to set it up and how to get past the idea. And that's what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur.
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
Thank you so much. And I love The Art of the Start 2.0, which has translated into French, the two versions of them.
Guy Kawasaki:
And if nothing else, now I know with great confidence that I can use the French name and the French concept of noblesse oblige. I have one more question about noblesse oblige. I have a negative reaction to the noblesse part of noblesse oblige because I do not like the concept of nobility in the sense that you're born into the royal family.
And because you're a noble and you realize because you're such a wonderful person, you have this obligation that you're going to go help the peons. So I'm a noble person who's helping peons. Am I like reading too much into the concept of noblesse oblige, that it's this kind of elitist wonderfulness?
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
It is elitist, but maybe not elite by birth. The notion of noblesse oblige is respecting the sense of honor. It could be applied to anybody in the scale of being nobles, even low-born nobles. When you say, be a gentleman to somebody, you say noblesse oblige, there's a code of honor.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, so it's not nearly as negative as I was thinking.
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
It's not at all negative. No.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, I got to change my speech. I'm glad I asked.
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
It's not negative at all. It's behave honorably.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay.
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
There is the idea of privilege, but it really emphasizes the responsibility of privilege. The same way, be a gentleman, you are a gentleman, accept your responsibility and do the right thing.
Guy Kawasaki:
God, I got so much cleared up. I can go forth. I'll give you this opportunity, just pitch your book, tell people why they should buy your book.
Marylène Delbourg-Delphis:
Read my book if you want to be encouraged all the way in the difficult path you have chosen because you are not alone.
Guy Kawasaki:
I hope you enjoyed this episode with Marylène Delbourg-Delphis. She was an enormous influence in my career, both as a tech executive, as well as a writer. If nothing else, I hope you understand the concept of noblesse oblige. May we all fulfill our noblesse oblige.
Let's thank the crew. First, Madisun Nuismer. Madisun Nuismer is the producer of this podcast and co-author with me of Think Remarkable. Then there's the amazing sound design engineers, Jeff Sieh and Shannon Hernandez. And the rest of the crew, Alexis Nishimura, Fallon Yates and Luis Magaña. We are the Remarkable People team. We're on a mission to make you remarkable.
Now I'm going to give you a little bit of homework. Check out Marylène's book. It's called, Beyond Eureka!. And while you're doing that, check out our book, Think Remarkable. We are truly on a mission to make you remarkable. Until next time, Mahalo and aloha.