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What customers want

Gregory Ciotti has an interesting column on LinkedIn today, “Why Steve Jobs Didn’t Listen to His Customers.”

The subject is market research, and the question is: Should you ask customers what they want? My answer: Sure. Why not? You going promulgate an edict: “Never ask customers what they want.”?

The big issue is what you do with this information. Well, why not just build what they say they want? Sometimes this works. If I had to guess, I’d say it works pretty often because you can reliably predict that customers want problems fixed. As Ciotti notes:

Perhaps this is the truth behind Apple’s innovation — Steve Jobs did actually listen to customers, but only to find out which problems they faced, and to identify the biggest points of friction they had.

Continue reading →

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Figures and maps from Certain to Win

I know a lot of you have bought electronic editions of Certain to Win (“a lot” being relative, but I’m highly grateful and flattered, nonetheless) that did not have legible figures and maps. My sincerest apologies.

I’ve uploaded a PDF file with all the graphics in the book. There’s a link to this file on the Articles page.

Some electronic editions also didn’t play well with Table I on page 43. I recreated that table in an earlier post and have also added a link on the Articles page. Continue reading →

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Kill your business model. Now!

Eric Beatty has an interesting post on this subject on LinkedIn, “Challenge your business model before someone else does.”

He suggests that companies examine their customer experiences and try to find “pain points” that they can solve. He cites Simple.com, Square, and Uber as start-ups that have created new business models and asks why established companies can’t do the same.

It’s a very good question. Continue reading →

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The march to Imperial Class

Continues unabated: “Etihad’s New Three-Room Suite, for When First Class Just Doesn’t Cut It” in BusinessWeek.

The space, which costs about $43,000 for some flights, is priced to include two travelers and comes with a butler, chef, and shower.

For the background on Imperial Class, here’s the original press release, and here’s an update.

I’m not criticizing Etihad, by the way. If they feel there’s a market for this service and they can make a dirham or two, more power to them. That’s what business is all about.

It’s sometimes said that services like this indicate a bifurcation — the superrich and everybody else. That’s sort of what I was driving at in the original news release. But that’s not quite right.  This service is a consolation prize for those who are rolling in dough but can’t afford a Gulfstream. The real superrich will fly their own G650s or similar, leaving a service like Etihad’s for the merely very wealthy. It’s the distinction between the 1% and the .01%, a distinction that is, I’m sure, important to those concerned.

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Quantum entanglement, the arrow of time, and John Boyd?

Time, as every reader of this blog knows, plays a fundamental role in Boyd’s philosophy of conflict. The whole idea of fast transients, for example, which morphed into “operating inside the OODA loop,” depends on one side’s ability to change the environment more rapidly than the other side can comprehend, that is, within the time it takes them to reorient.

Does time exist? Not a question I’m going to go into here because even if it didn’t exist, what difference would it make to, say, operating inside the OODA loop? In either case, we can still imagine, and work with, an arrow of time: Just as you can tell whether Kill Bill (either part) is playing forward or backwards (hint — blood); in a business competition, you can generally tell who is operating inside whose OODA loop.
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The Smartest Guys on the Tarmac?

As I recently reported, Delta has made systemic changes that are improving many measures of quality simultaneously.  Their financials are also improving, with the airline reporting a net income of $2.7 Bn last year. Put these two together and you have a strong indication that they are successfully applying lean principles to the airline industry.

This is great, and as a long-time Delta flyer (and million miler), I wish them well. But a recent write up by Jens Flottau  in the industry standard Aviation Week does raise a red flag.

You see, the real key to lean is orientation, and a great rule for orientation is to stay paranoid. No matter how good you are, there is somebody out there who will learn from your experience and who, because they aren’t the industry leader, is hungrier. More motivated. Leaner. Dangerous. Continue reading →

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Plausible deniability?

That seems to be what many CEOs nowadays are going for: “Chiefs at Big Firms Often the Last to Know” (paywall), in yesterday’s Wall St. J. The argument goes

Bosses need to know what’s going on to make informed decisions, but that knowledge is dependent on what direct reports choose to tell them.

So you have lots of levels and filtering going on at every level. Pity the poor CEOs at the end of the chain.

To which I reply, “Only if they’re stupid.” Or their idea of management is to sit in their corner offices, ponder their enormous salaries, and receive the ministrations of minions. Continue reading →

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CEO to beancounters: Sit down!

On the one hand, it’s always to good to see sanity prevail:

Delta Chief Executive Richard Anderson studies daily cancellation reports and overruled arguments inside the airline that there weren’t enough cancellations to justify the cost.

As Wall St. J. airline columnist Scott McCartney writes (paywall), attitudes such as this help explain why Delta has the lowest cancellation rate in the industry, a whopping 50% below that of the next best airlines (Southwest and Alaska) and nearly 1/6 of the airline industry average of 1.7%. Continue reading →

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Fourth Generation War — Was I Wrong?

When I proclaimed the death of 4GW in this very blog about a year ago? Of course not. But there are disturbing developments, at least in its decline-of-the-state/road-warrior variant (aka, the Bill Lind definition).

Did you know, for example, that groups espousing an ultra-orthodox salafist interpretation of Islam, those iconic 4GW warriors we call “al-Qa’ida,” now control an area larger than that of the United Kingdom? This zone includes much of western Iraq and eastern Syria. It’s worth reminding ourselves that before March 2003, they controlled exactly none of this (or any other) territory. Patrick Cockburn offers his explanation of how we got ourselves into this mess in “Al-Qa’ida’s second act,” a five-part series in The Independent. Continue reading →

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Maneuver retail — 2

Another in our series on improving the performance of retail operations and improving the quality of life for people in it. Last post, we looked at Nordstrom; today it’s Chipotle. Yesterday, the online magazine Quartz ran a feature on their management approach.

To start off, you have to give them credit for having a unifying vision:

“The foundation of our people culture, on which everything else stands, is the concept is that each person at Chipotle will be rewarded based on their ability to make the people around them better,” [Co-CEO Monty] Moran told Quartz. Continue reading →