‘The customer is king.” Repeat that cliché and managers’ heads nod as they mutter, “True, true” — and then they go right on giving lousy service and selling schlocky products.
Is that any way to treat the king?
The problem is that when you look at, say, the average Wal-Mart shopper, what you see doesn’t look like royalty. (On the other hand, picture Henry V in a Big Dog T-shirt and flip-flops, getting out of a Tahoe holding a Taco Bell chalupa and a Big Gulp — he’d fit right in.)
But should you forget who’s king, it doesn’t take long for a product to encounter the consumer version of “Off with their heads.”
The condemned product is left to bleed red ink on the “discontinued merchandise” table, picked over by scavengers, and a sample container of the product ends up being the equivalent of a head on a pike on London Bridge, set out on a shelf of product failures in some company’s back room, serving as a warning to ambitious young product managers: You don’t mess with the king.
What got me thinking about beheaded products was “The Game-Changer,” by the chief executive of Procter & Gamble Co., A.G. Lafley, and consultant Ram Charan. It was in a stack of books that publishers have sent me, and as I flipped through it, I saw a page called “A.G. Lafley’s 11 Biggest Innovation ‘Failures.’” I was hooked.
Learning From Failure
I later interviewed Lafley and asked him about that page, wondering if he was referring to P&G failures in general, or if the list was more personal. He lit up at that question, immediately opened the book to that page and went through each one, detailing his involvement.
After going through all 11, he concluded, “I was part of the team that decided to take each of these to market. I’m fond of saying that I learn 10 times as much from every failure as every success.”
That’s the thing about innovators — they laugh at themselves, and especially at their failures. Meanwhile, they take innovation with deadly seriousness — they understand that business is a game played to the death (of products and careers).
Innovative Blueprint
What makes Lafley and Charan’s book different is its assertion that you can build a reliable system for innovation, and they offer a blueprint for doing just that.
They write: “Innovation requires practice. It is a disciplined, routine process. It does not happen spontaneously. Like raising children, it requires a combination of a steady hand and a certain joie de vivre — both creativity and discipline.
“Most of all, innovation requires systems, structure and the right leaders. That sounds dull, but there is an element of eat-your-spinach in doing anything right.”
At one point, the authors compare creating an innovation process with building a factory. Which is a cool image — an idea factory — but as I pointed out to Lafley, building a factory is expensive and requires resources beyond those available to many managers and entrepreneurs.
When that’s the case, I wondered, where do you start? He responded, “With the customer.” At P&G, they don’t say “the customer is king,” but “the customer is boss.” Lafley pointed out, “On one level, that sounds overly simple, but people at P&G know what it means.”
And what it means is you start with customers. Spend enough time with consumers and you’ll figure out new ways to help them, and that’s the raw material of the idea factory.
Next week: More on P&G’s idea generation.
Dale Dauten is the founder of The Innovators’ Lab. His latest book is “(Great) Employees Only: How Gifted Bosses Hire and De-Hire Their Way to Success.”
