The greatest business myth?

One of the great myths about business is:

"Build a superior product, offer a superior service, and provide
elegant solution to difficult problems, and you will be successful."

It is a shame that the best talent, the groundbreaking work,
the technical superiority is in the field that is suffering the most
with the highest cutbacks, the slimmest of margins and lowest
of salaries.

Perhaps it is because (technology) is not a glamorous industry.
We don't make the Internet faster, or the seal.. er.. seal better.
We make machines work. We make turkey bags from 11 layers
of plastic film so people don't get sick from spoiled food. We make
bolts stronger so engines don't fall off airplanes. We make drugs
that cure diseases. And yet we earn some of the lowest salaries.

Consumers drive prices down, which drives costs down, which
drive overhead down, which drive salaries and benefits down.
To me, business currently means means that some of our smartest and most talented people. With key skills and experience developed in the manufacturing industries are spinning the wheels. I know talented project managers who are now selling carpets. My neighbour used to build sophisticated head-end servers - and he is now selling kitchens at B&Q. I’m sure they are very nice people at B&Q it's not what they want to do, it's not what they should be doing - so why are so many talented people having such a hard time?

Here's why:

What you can do and how good you are does not matter.

What matters is how well you COMMUNICATE what you do
and how good you are.

That is the difference. And you know it’s true. Everyone knows the person who has been promoted above their capabilities, who suffer delusions of competence, but they talk a damn good job and know exactly what noises they need to make to move them onwards and upwards.

Every year, tens of thousands of people invent, innovate
and create brilliant products, terrific solutions to truly perplexing
problems - only to find out that it's darn hard to raise money
for their new ventures, and even harder to get customers to
listen.

Most of the time those new products and services
die on the slag heap of great ideas that never saw the
light of day.

You don't want that to happen to your great idea.

So here's how to make sure it your idea doesn't prematurley expire:

Make sure that marketing, sales, advertising and PR is
the foremost priority in your new venture.

Even if you don't like Microsoft (they're not my favourite
company either, (I converted to mac several years ago and am still waiting for my first crash)), you MUST learn this lesson from them: They don't have the best software by any stretch of the imagination,
but they do have the best sales strategy. And in business,
It’s the sales strategy that wins, not the superior technology.

So if you're waking up every morning thinking about the
minute details of your cool product or service, please stop
and re-calibrate. Understand this:

1) Having a superior product is not necessarily an advantage,
and can even be a DISadvantage - because it can distract you
from the real objective, which is to GET and KEEP customers.

2) The product you develop is rarely the product your
customers want to buy. That's OK as long as you're listening and
flexible. But if you've already spent all your money perfecting
the product, then you won't have any left to respond to customer
feedback.

3) The product or service itself is, at most, maybe 25%
of the equation. Advertising, PR strategies, and real-world
market testing (as opposed to "market research", which is
usually just "opinion research") --- all of these things are
MORE important than the product.

4) Innovate, Don't Invent -- It's much easier to go into
an existing market and solve an existing problem with
a slightly improved, more interesting product (innovation)
than to create a product from scratch that solves a problem
people don't realize they have. That's goes along with my
principle of "enter the conversation inside the customer's
head." Align your self to your customers.

Back to my neighbour selling kitchens—nobody needs to suffer this fate. But don't underestimate the challenge: If you have superior talent, then the best investment you can make is in communicating that talent to the world -- clearly, effectively, and without fail.

The Raindancer 2006