"Tuned In" does some myth debunking

I knew I’d be back to Tuned In: Uncover the Extraordinary Opportunities That Lead to Business Breakthroughs, by Craig Stull, Phil Myers & David Meerman Scott, which I reviewed on Monday. I just didn’t know it would be so soon - and it’s to delve into the myths that they debunk as table stakes for their six step process for creating products and services that will really resonate in the market.

The first myth they debunk is the one that maintains that “innovation is everything”. They are by no means anti-innovation - many of the examples they cite are extremely innovative - but they never want us to forget that innovation for the sake of innovation ain’t going to get you very far in the long run. As they point out again and again, in order for our products to really resonate in the market, they must solve unresolved problems, not just provide slight betterments and variations on a theme. Let alone something that’s busting its innovative seams but ultimately meets no need. Some people may be drawn to something that’s innovative just because, but whatever market “success” is achieved will be short-lived and just plain non-sustainable.

Funny how the talk about innovation got me going into my wayback machine. When Wang Labs - where I was working at the time -  introduced a catch-up PC, one of their big innovations was that the CPU’s were vertical, not horizontal. This meant that you could put the box underneath your desk, saving real estate. A good idea! But they put the turn-off switch was at the back of the machine, which meant you had to crawl on all fours if you had to power it up or down. Some innovation.

There’s another point about innovation, which Tuned In doesn’t get into, and that’s the cold, hard fact that sometimes innovators are so far ahead of the market that they lead nowhere. I guess this just means that the company that came up with the big innovation had failed to tap a market need. But this raises an interesting question - is something an unresolved problem if nobody knows it’s a problem - quite yet?

Back to my brief (and generally miserable) tenure at Wang. I may not be recalling this perfectly, but Wang had some nifty, highly innovative technology, called Freestyle, that let people annotate documents by freehand writing (if I recall, it was on a tablet that hooked into the PC). Innovative, to be sure, but it solved a problem that I guess didn’t yet exist. Now that whiteboarding technology is readily available, we now know that at least some of us have the need for it. But not then….Interesting how these things work.

Another myth that gets the Stull, Myers, Scott debunking is the one that states that revenue conquers all. No denying that revenue’s important. I’ve worked in places where we acted as if it weren’t, as if we were half-expecting a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant just because we were so darned smart. And there’s nothing worse than a company that hasn’t figured out that somewhere along the line, you have to bring in revenue if you’re going to survive. Hey, even the least astute of sugar daddy investors will eventually wake up and demand that YOU BRING IN SOME SALES.

But when pursuing top line revenue - sales at any cost -  becomes the modus operandi for a company, we all know what happens. At least in enterprise high tech companies: bad deals get done. The top line may improve - we’ve bagged some big ones! - but the cost of those big ones tends to mean that an increase to the income line may yield a decrease in the bottom line. Too much was done to get the deal - product changes were promised, implementation/integration costs are thrown in, the price is cut to sub-zero margins. Bring in more deals like that, and we’ll be out of business before you can say “deal done.”

The final myth that the Tuned In guys take on is that “Customers Know Best.” This was the real eye-opener for me, but obvious once they explain their thinking. They’re not telling us to ignore customers. They’re just pointing out the folly of relying solely on customer input.

Eventually, the customer-driven company gets bogged down by taking baby steps to tweak features in existing offerings (to please existing customers) rather than making the bold leap to develop new products and services that solve potential buyers’ problems.

The emphasis is mine, and it’s there to underscore the point that, unless you have 51% market share, the majority of your potential customer base ARE NOT CURRENTLY YOUR CUSTOMERS. Ignore them at your peril: if they’re not your customers, they’re bound to be or become someone else’s.

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