Most of us can’t compare to Steve Jobs. Or even Mark Zuckerberg. These guys—when it comes to envisioning products that break new ground and yet have enormous appeal to millions of people—are tapped into the human subconscious, able to extract and meet unspoken needs most of us didn’t even know we had. Or so it seems…. But what if the success of Apple and Facebook had less to do with visionary hocus pocus, and more to do with the challenging and less glamorous process of understanding what people really want?
I recently had an opportunity to expound on this topic for Fast Company (“Think You’re An Industry Leader? Not So Fast”). In doing so, I tried to shed a little light on what it really means to be a customer-focused organization. I also hoped to illustrate why being better than everyone else in the industry does not necessarily mean you are giving your customers what they need and want (and, in the end, isn’t that the one metric that matters?).
If you have a chance to read the article, leave a comment and let me know what you think.
I really enjoyed this article. Good idea on the title, it caught my eye.
Great article, I think your article really calls out two issues that plague modern businesses, and even modern America at large. The first is this idea that great products and ideas are the unique phenomenon of a singular genius. It is a kind of intellectual laziness that we have bought into that tells us Steve Jobs brought us the Iphone and the Ipad, when in actuality it was Apple computer which brought us these products and a lot of very talented people working, researching and refining a common prinicpled, methodology of designing products. Steve Jobs represented the face of this behemoth in many ways; uncompromising, talented, passionate, etc. But the intricate mechanisms that launch products and how these mechanisms are tuned to meet the needs of the consumer is where most companies tend to turn away and simply chose to replicate versus innovate. This leads me to my second point that replicating “industry standards” is equivalent to meeting customer needs. This closes ears to customer feedback because so much focus is placed on competition that the company-wide indicator of success is simple surveys and design guidelines.
Great article, look forward to reading more!