Many leaders have been enviously looking at Apple to try to understand the secrets of their success, especially the day after the iPad launch.

In reading a summary of Steve Jobs’ launch comments, there are 3 key insights to be gained that we can all apply to achieve success at work. These insights apply to advancing your career and improving the performance of your team and your company.

1. Clearly understand how your solution fits in and is different to the current landscape. This is how Jobs articulates the current landscape gap:
   

   “So all of us use laptops and smartphones now. The question has arisen lately is there room for a third category of device, something between a laptop and an iPhone. Tough hurdle. Has to be better than the other two.”

   It’s easy to apply this to your own career. Where does your team fit into your company? Do you understand your internal and external professional landscapes? Can you clearly explain that position to your team? To the rest of the company?

2. Clearly articulate how your solution fills the gap and what key problems it will solve. Notice the focus here. The goal isn’t to be better at everything, but better at a few key, valuable activities.
   

   “What tasks? Better at browsing the Web. Doing email. Sharing photos, Watching videos, Music. Playing games. Reading ebooks. It’s going to have to be better at these tasks or it has no reason for being… netbooks aren’t better at anything.”

   You need to understand your key problems before you can figure out how to solve them. Do you have a concise list of the most critical challenges you face? Can you clearly articulate solutions to your team? If the solutions are unknown, can you lead them down a focused path to finding them?

3. Be confident in communicating the benefits. If you have identified a problem, have a clear vision of how it fits within the existing landscape, and focus on a few key things that make your offering great, then you should be confident in communicating your story.
   

   “What this device does is extraordinary. The best browsing experience you’ve ever had. Way better than a laptop.”

   Listen closely to what Jobs says. Each keynote has a few, highly focused keywords that he uses over and over throughout the keynote. Today’s word was magic. Even for internal messages to your team, the key is to take a strong, bold position, be confident in communicating it clearly, and don’t back down.

We can learn much from Apple and their recent successes, and apply some of their key principles to enable our successes.