Dave Shen

The best preparation for managers to ‘a future war with the past’ is to develop a corporate culture where customers are considered in the decision-making process.    It seems obvious but it happens quite often.  Too much success for organizations can reduce the importance of the customer wants and needs while more attention is focused on the organization itself (company objectives and personal objectives)  – whether it’s acquiring more companies (builder-> imperialist), to developing research projects (pioneer –> escapist), to perfecting process (craftsman –> tinkerer), from decentralized to added bureaucracy (salesmen –> decoupling).  Jeff Bezos, in his message to Zappos employees (Amazon recently acquired Zappos for $900 million US) — was that if you focus on customers, mistakes are more forgiving.  Too often, companies lose sight of this — and as a result, they lose their customers.

Apple, lost in the PC war with Microsoft, focused their efforts in consumer electronics.  The lessons they learned from their experiences in the PC industry helped translate into their success in the iPod and iPhone products.   They were not first to market for both products — and the industries were highly competitive — but what they were able to offer was a simple and elegant user experience to digital music players and smartphones, leveraging their marketing, R&D, technology, and supply-chain prowess.   Microsoft, on the other hand, has unfortunately not figured this out yet (XBox is an exception) and because of their monopolistic practices in the PC industry, tried to apply a similar approach towards the media player (Zune) and smartphone product categories (Windows Mobile) but failed.  Microsoft’s arrogance towards product development and its failure to capture customers and Apple’s successes has resulted them to emulate similar practices… the challenge for Microsoft is that they were once agile and nimble but have become large and bureaucratic.    The product launch of Microsoft Windows Vista was a disaster — because they released a product which had too many bugs and it was slow and consumers looked for alternatives.

Keeping abreast of your competition, trends within the industry, understanding operations to reduce cost, getting to know your customer (feedback) are critical to challenge the status-quo, in order to create uneasiness and to combat complacency.  By doing so, companies have a greater chance in growing over the long-haul.