Thread: Lesson for LR, how to kill a perfect product.

I found this in my musings - yep, too much time on my hands - and the parallels are interesting.

This video is all about how to develop, make, enjoy...then lose the Core Vision & Competency ...then lose the whole company.
Lesson for any whizz-kid with a great product, - stick with it and don't get greedy.

or

'where can I buy a new Defender ?'

YouTube

Thanks superquag! That was a great link and going onto their main website shows quite a few other examples too. Will definitely be making my way through those links.

In a similar vein, I read the extract below in a novel called Stolen Valor not long before I started working for myself. I wrote it down and then looked up the references. Every once in a while I still look at the material to remind me to focus on my core business and not get distracted.


‘What business are we in?’
At Harvard Business School, the most-commonly-asked question as we analyzed actual business cases from the perspective of the executives of the company was, “What business are we really in?” For example, manufacturers of printers and copiers are really in the toner business.
The most famous article ever printed in the Harvard Business Review was called, “Marketing Myopia.” It said too many companies defined what they do incorrectly, usually overly narrowly. The classic example in the article was that the railroad companies generally failed because they did not realize they were in the transportation business, not the railroad business. When interstate highways and trucks ascended, the railroads regarded those technologies as the enemy. Had they thought of themselves as being in the transportation business, they would have embraced motor vehicles and highways and integrated them into their existing railroad capabilities.