We have all heard the saying, and I am willing to bet that most of us have even said it to
others, or inserted it in a presentation. Yet I realized that, while everyone seems to
understand this on an academic level, none of us seem to understand it intuitively. In
particular, we are very bad at understanding the full effects of culture, or taking it into
account when we are making decisions on a day to day basis. And above all, we wave culture
away, thinking that our strategy will overcome any…
These days I find myself in regular discussions about company growth, primarily with startups that are getting traction
and now need to step up to the next level. The discussions typically cover all the usual scaling topics, but
until recently pretty much ended there. About 2 weeks ago, however, I had once more such a discussion, but
this one went beyond the scaling challenges, and moved on to a different kind of growth: maturity. This is quite analogous
to human growth, where only part of the…
Customer centricity is another one of those points that is constantly talked about but often rarely actually
reasoned about. As a result, most of the discussion out there is usually trivial and essentially consists
of the equivalent of “Go ask what the customer wants, then go build it”. I would respectfully offer the
opinion that that is not customer centricity, but rather, customer servitude! There are three fundamental
mistakes in the idea of “Go ask what the customer wants,…
