Great story about failure “Free To Fail – Forbes.com.” BorgWarner, an auto supplier, provides seed capital to internal champions to pursue innovative projects. The article describes how one engineer spent two and a half years and $2M working on a new power system — but it turned out that he was wrong about the market…
I've had two recent customer experiences that completely baffle me. First, I had to go jump through hoops to get a tiny service fee refunded from my bank for my personal account. Their service rep quoted policy after policy about why they couldn't refund the fee. Yet when I indicated that I would move my…
Recent data (see IABC Study) suggests that about half of employees in most companies do not understand the business strategy of their company. Sad, but not surprising. Creating engagement and alignment among your team is the central job of leadership. How can you expect to excel if half of your people don't know what your…
Why do you hire anyone to provide a product or service to you? Why does anyone hire you? Presumably because the result for the customer is faster, cheaper, or better than the customer would get by doing it themselves. In my work with clients on creating a business plan, the issue is not that they…
When you think about your product strategy — do you make a distinction between WHAT your customers want to buy versus HOW they want to buy it? If not, you are overlooking significant opportunities to better serve your customers. The most obvious example is Dell, who redefined HOW customers could buy an industry standard PC…
