The Business Brickyard

The personal Blog of Howard Mann. Author, Speaker & Entrepreneur. - January 7th, 2009
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Every organization is optimized to achieve the results it currently gets.

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24
Apr
08

Jeff Bezos: Get customer focused instead of skills focused

Business Week has a great short interview with Jeff Bezos that is well worth the read.  In particular, I loved his thinking on being skills focused vs customer needs focused.  The whole interview is here.

Q: Every company claims to be customer-focused. Why do you think so few are able to pull it off?
A: Companies get skills focused, instead of customer-needs focused. When [companies] think about extending their business into some new area,the first question is "why should we do that—we don't have any skills in that area." That approach puts a finite lifetime on a company,because the world changes, and what used to be cutting-edge skills have turned into something your customers may not need anymore. A much more stable strategy is to start with "what do my customers need?" Then do an inventory of the gaps in your skills. Kindle is a great example. If we set our strategy by what our skills happen to be rather than by what our customers need, we never would have done it. We had to go out and hire people who know how to build hardware devices and create a whole new competency for the company.

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