There doesn’t seem to be any enterprise that musician William Adams aka Will.i.am is not involved in. The 38-year-old has successfully made the transition from pop group front man to the tech industry player. As an early consultant in Beats Electronics, Adams recently launched his own hardware business.

I strive to be dope – disruptive – optimistic – progressive – entrepreneurial.

In a recent interview with Wired magazine editor David Rowan, Adams threw down his top tips for business.

1. Be a ‘maker’

You gotta move fast. Nothing stands still for too long in tech. And he who does it first, wins.

Every young person is going to be inspired to be a maker from now on. It’s like how everyone used to want to be a musician, an actor, an athlete — but a maker is what people are going to want to be.

2. Do not make assumptions, not everybody is creative

Creativity is relative. You encourage it, but you can’t teach it. Everybody is not going to make it. And that’s a hard rock to swallow. If you talk to a creative person, it’s life or death. ‘If I can’t be creative, I don’t want to live any more. Just kill me.’ Then there are people that want to be creative — that’s not how creative people think. It’s like, ‘I gotta do something, make something, because I’m going crazy just living in this thing called reality. I got to change it up. I don’t want to live in that last person’s reality.’ A lot of people, when they think of Intel, they don’t think of it as a creative company.

The oddballs are always the ones that reshape the sphere.

3. Fill in the missing pieces

Pointing out a void is priceless. With Intel, I’ll have sessions with their executives just before a conference, or they’ll show me a new line of products for my input. I’m like, ‘How come this doesn’t do that? You should want it to do that.’ Or: ‘This is cool. When I was in Brazil people were doing this, and I think that is going to catch on.’ Sometimes they’ll say things like: ‘We’re going to do that in version 2.0.’ I have to tell them that 2.0 will be 2.2 late. You’ve got to get that [feature] in right now. What I see coming is this collision between popular culture and what you call ‘tech culture’, ‘deep culture’. These two worlds are bleeding into each other so that you’re not going to know the difference between a geek and a tastemaker — and right now there’s still a big difference.

4. What nightclubs are really for

I don’t go to clubs to talk to girls — I go to clubs to see what’s happening. Everything starts in the clubs. If you’re a billionaire, or a guy in the underground, or someone doing things that are illegal, we all meet in the same place. You get to see life from all walks and if you study it right you get to see what’s coming.

5. Collaboration is key

When I met Steve Jobs, we talked for four hours at the house and then at dinner. We talked about how there was a small community that was thinking differently when he was growing up. It’s always a small pond of disruptive thinkers. He was no different from anybody else in the creative community. He thought just as obscurely as all of us weirdos, but what he was special at was how he assembled people in the creative community to work together on an idea. That’s the difference. Like, wow! You’re an amazing assembler. Not many creative people have the ability to do that.

He was such a creative force that he understood collaboration.

There has to be some person or idea associated with tomorrow’s big company around consumer electronics. And I would like that to be i.am+.

6. Champions not consumers

Consumer’ is a bad name to call people. Tomorrow the word looks more like ‘champion’. People have to champion your brand, not just consume. They add value, making you relevant. Calling them consumers undermines their power. And they can also destroy you. ‘Brand’ is a bad word too. It’s your company. Because brand is associated with branding. People aren’t cattle.

7. Never be afraid to ask questions, always listen to the answer

The first thing that I do, when I’m working with a music artist, is interview them. ‘What’s on your mind?’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘If you weren’t in the studio what would you be thinking about?’

But the same applies if you’re making anything; you address the need, the person or the people, what they already have, what’s going to come and that disrupts it.

Read the whole interview here.

Brought to you by Beats by Dre

[Source: Wired]