Are you doing the simple things well?
Anthony Bourdin in Kitchen Confidential writes “Good food is very often, even most often, simple food. Some of the best cuisine in the world… is a matter of three or four ingredients. Just make sure they’re good ingredients, and then garnish them. How hard is that?”
How hard is that indeed. There’s a lesson there for building out your product set. Are you doing the simple stuff well?
Another meeting, another executive talks about the need for innovation and creative thinking and pushing the boat out and beating competitors with something new. Meanwhile, doing the the simple “hygiene” things that will delight existing customers (reducing customer attition and churn) get lost with the innovation hyperbole foccused on “capturing market share”.
Hi Marc,
Its easy to fall into the trap of “Lets just do simple things first”. There are 2 arguments here
1. Finding the simplest thing to do is the hardest job in the world. You should know how difficult it is to determine the simplest story within a project setup
2. If you keep on doing only simple things better, chances are that someone somewhere will make a giant leap leaving existing competition far behind. Every moment spent in trying to improve incrementally is a moment not spent on re-inventing.
Its an over the beer conversation…