12.1.1. Business school

• – Provide salesman a bonus incentive based on turnover.
• – Concentrate on increasing market share, by all means.

12.1.2. Apple

– Concentrate on customer satisfaction, and disregard the rest.

12.2.1. Business school

– Stick to your customers. Be as close as possible, so you know your customer better than the customer knows himself, or herself.

– Start from the technology and create customer experience.

12.2.2. Apple

– Do not ask your customers. They do not know the future, nor what they will want.

– Detach yourself from the present conditions.

12.2.3. Development

Your customers are tied in present conditions and cannot extract themselves from them. You will be tied same wise as soon as you abide with these.

Start with customer experience and work back toward the technology.

12.3.1. Business school

– Forecast and then specify your market line.

12.3.2. Apple

– Feel the direction and maintain it as long as the feeling remains.

12.3.3. Development

Feel your inner voice.

Mainframes in the 1970s, PCs in the 1980s, mobile computing in the 2000s and Internet of Things in the mid-2010s: a planner’s skyrocketing curve never forecasts a future reality.

Forecasting returns the echo from others’ doing. Does it sound right for you? Forecasting does not explain why it looks so. So, you follow a consequence while not knowing the cause. Example, connecting objects is a big trend. But, what is your vision in connecting them? Which objects? Why and for doing what?

12.4.1. Business school

– If market improves, grab a slice and …“catch me if you can!”

12.4.2. Apple

– Detach from mainstream.

12.4.3. Development

– The PC story with PC compatibles and software powered by Microsoft.

– Own your trend.

When markets grow, their DNA is owned by somebody else and you are bound to their genes. You grow a comfort zone that is complacency on somebody else comfort.

12.5.1. Business school

Communicate with mantras.

12.5.2. Apple

Put the mantra inside the product.

12.5.3. Development

“Mantra inside” everything? Even down to the character font (see Figure 12.1).

Communication is a reflection from the product, and not of the product. Thus, you have to manage the alignment of the two. Satisfy the customer, and then let them manage the communication about your products: they will exhibit the mantra inside.

12.6.1. Business school

Benchmark yourself against your competitors.

Confront with present-day realities. Mimick. Benchmark.

12.6.2. Apple

Do not compare yourself: competitors will drift you aside, away from your core strategy. As your product is ready for launch, customers will already want something else: big loss.

Be (faithful to) yourself.

12.6.3. Development

What is your incomparability index? Product differentiation is at stakes. Sustainable differentiation is what will count.

Anticipate (Wayne Gretzky: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been”).

12.7.1. Business school

You are well off to make something that returns profit.

Be driven by profits, if not finance.

The fiscal quarter counts first.

12.7.2. Apple

Innovate. Be driven by an idealistic perspective. In quality, time, cost (internal).

What counts is what happens tomorrow (see time).

12.7.3. Development

Me-too companies.

Create a gap.

You can change the rules when you really innovate. Therefore, you exit the ducks’ pond. In the pond, profits are limited to the pond and other ducks’ attitude: friends or foes. Both limit your expansion.

12.8.1. Business school

Industry structures along categories which are structured by maturing enterprises where you can find your market position.

12.8.2. Apple

Do not go for it.

12.8.3. Development

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) in the 1990s: the nightmare of Small and Medium Size enterprises.

Why a category designed by others should suit you? Design your own category and be free of other’s structures.

Marketing was invented around the early 1980s. At that time, innovation was not developed as a focus activity as it became later since the dot com period in the late 1990s. Innovation art much matured since.

Categories are a market consensus. You do not control them, they are full with suppliers and users’ habits, even bad ones. “Bad” meaning you can only compromise.

12.9.1. Business school

If in trouble, cut costs, downsize, reduce X and Y.

12.9.2. Apple

Get out of the way. Do something else.

12.9.3. Development

Survival strategy is vigilance on deterioration.

The trouble is the consequence, what is the cause? A bigger issue: wrong market, wrong product or both? So, do not cure, it is a compensation for another issue. You will end up fighting and gradually deteriorating your value, even become unsellable.

12.10.1. Business school

Product issues are too low-level to be in the scope of top-level managers, who have better things to do: talk to the press, investors, financial institutions, etc.

Managers are more preoccupied by their own image than by their company brand.

12.10.2. Apple

The top-level management comes up on stage to present the new products, and demonstrates through this its total commitment to success.

12.10.3. Development

Every year, at the occasion of its famous keynotes, Apple’s top-level management comes up on stage to present and demonstrate the new products, like Steve Jobs used to do (although of course they cannot be as good showmen as Steve was).

Common practice? Not really. As soon as a company gets bigger, CEOs delegate such tasks, which they do not consider pertinent enough for them. Product presentation is frequently not even performed by the Head of Development, but delegated to very inferior levels of the hierarchy.

This is a disastrous signal sent to the customers. Why should they trust a manager who does not demonstrate any commitment in the products of his company?

Of course, this commitment may imply very unpleasant situations: the best example is when Steve Jobs came back from one of the few holidays he ever had with his family to handle the “Antennagate” episode.