WHAT DO STEVE JOBS, SHAMROCK, RAVING FANS AND TECHNOLOGY HAVE IN COMMON?

I have an entrepreneur's admiration for Steve Jobs. Despite setbacks, despite illness, he is still among the most vivid and interesting entrepreneurs of our time.

While Shamrock's been around a lot longer than Job(s) (yeah, the pun's intended), I believe that, if he had taken a slightly different path, Jobs could've worked here as an intern, and been a major part of our cultural growth.

I'll even bet you that Steve, once upon a time, read Raving Fans by Blanchard and Bowles. The book, a brilliantly simple story, illustrates how to define a vision, learn what a customer really wants, institute effective systems, and make Raving Fan Service a constant feature in your everyday contact with customers, are the basis for how Shamrock does business.
When Jobs said, in a 1998 Fortune interview, "Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it," he seems to have swallowed Raving Fans, whole. (If you're interested, here are some more outstanding Jobs quotes: http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/commentary/cultofmac/2006/03/70512)

Not unlike the above quote from Jobs, our teams live every day with the ideals of Raving Fans in mind. Shamrock utilizes an internal system that allows us to track how we exceed client expectations, identify areas for improvement and address and prevent problems before they impact our customers.

The foundation of Raving Fans is simple: (1) Decide what you want; (2) Discover what the Customer Wants; (3) Deliver, Plus One (i.e., exceed customer expectations). Jobs, too, would be proud of how we developed innovative technology and wedded it to the concept of Raving Fans.

For example, our company is driven by Baan, the third largest ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system in the world. It's a stable, all-in-one platform of information that replaces the silos of technology (including finance, manufacturing, etc.). Our flagship is a web-based marketing portal that attaches to Baan, which allows customers complete control over their brand, including the capability to initiate print, print on demand, variable printing, as well as order stationary, tweak a promotion or packaging, review warehousing distribution, review items sent out, down to discovering how much was spent on postage -- from one interface system. All this, based on each individual customer's needs, and developed, not by an IT programmer, but with marketing and design expertise.

ONE FINAL THOUGHT...
Shamrock does not use new technology for the sake of just using it. We apply it to help our customers monetize their brand with it – and to make their product or service even better than before.