Myth of Excellence Why Great Companies Never Try to Be the Best at Everything

Field Notes from the Commercial Wilderness This book is really the diary of a journey -- field notes from an expedition into the commercial wilderness, if you will. Our trek began with a survey, fairly modest in conception although broad in scope. After all, we thought we knew how consumers felt. Understanding consumer dynamics, analyzing marketplaces and market spaces, anticipating the impact of technological change on businesses and consumers, and looking into the future are all significant elements of our day-to-day business and personal lives. In retrospect, it is incredible how naive we really were -- naive, but not unlike a lot of other businesspeople. Since we knew what we were looking for, we wanted the data to provide verification of our brilliant insights. Like a company polling its customers and rationalizing any negative comments, we expected the survey results to support our entrenched assumptions. We assumed, for example, that consumers wanted the absolute lowest prices, the very best products, and lots of value-added services. We also expected them to tell us that they wanted shopping to be fun and entertaining. We were in for a shock. Our real journey started when the data came back. We were sitting in the conference room of a restored Victorian home in Westport, Connecticut, marveling at how it was possible for 5,000 Americans to be so wrong. Our initial research included more than 4,000 consumer telephone surveys and 1,000 additional Internet polls, covering a wide range of questions about various facets of the consumer/business relationship and the "average" shopping experience, followed up by hundreds of additional one-on-one conversations with consumers. We had asked consumers some basic questions about relatively simple business transactions, or so we thought, and they'd blown it. They didn't get it. What had gotten into them? Slowly, the grim truth began to dawn on us: They weren't wrong. We were. The survey results told us that consumers are looking for values, not just value. They wanted recognition as individual human beings, not just a 30 percent discount. While we had started asking questions about retail, we quickly began to see retail as a metaphor for something much broader. Life apparently wasn't too satisfying, and our initial respondents expected somebody or something -- apparently business -- to set things right. We began to totally reevaluate our work. The survey tool we had developed was an excellent diagnostic, applicable to any business. But what did the results mean? We had thought about the notion of business simply in terms of the successful transfer of goods and services -- basic buying and selling. Yet suddenly we felt more like social workers, wrestling with intangible issues like respect and trust. Like teenagers out for a joyride in a Ferrari Testarossa, we found ourselves behind the wheel of a vehicle whose power was much greater than we had initially anticipated. So we eased the clutch down, gingerly downshifted, and gently applied the brakes. We concentrated on understanding the tool, fine-tuned it and ran limited tests in real companies until we were sure the new insights that kept pouring in were correct. Then we spent a year focusing on in-depth analysis, conferring with our colleagues, conducting thousands of one-on-one consumer interviews and dozens of interviews with business leaders. Gradually things became clearer. Over and over again, the responses of our pilot 5,000 respondents kept echoing back to us. The critical elements of a transaction, business-to-consumer or business-to-business, weren't capital, goods, and services -- they were the human qualities of the people or companies exchanging those elements. It didn't seem to matter what business we were talking about. The lessons we first learned in the retail sector applied to any and all of the businesses we looked at, whether it was airlines, banks,Crawford, Frederick is the author of 'Myth of Excellence Why Great Companies Never Try to Be the Best at Everything' with ISBN 9780609810019 and ISBN 0609810014.