“The debate continues as to whether and to what extent Steve Jobs is replaceable,” Steve Denning writes for Forbes. “I already identified seven myths about Apple and Steve Jobs. Here’s another one: Steve Jobs simply builds a better mousetrap.”
Denning writes, “Apple does more than build a better mousetrap. First, ‘building a better mousetrap’ embodies an inside-out mindset: it means thinking about producing a product from within the firm, rather than thinking outside-in about who are the people who are going to be using this product and what would delight them. The inside-out perspective characterizes the 20th Century firm. The underlying assumption is that if we build a better mousetrap, our sales department should be able to sell it.”
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“With the shift in power in the marketplace from buyer to seller, that assumption is no longer true,” Denning explains. “A decade of research by Professor Ranjay Gulati of Harvard Business School, summarized in his wonderful book, Reorganize for Resilience: Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business, showed that firms with an inside-out mindset were much less resilient than those that adopted an outside-in mindset, like Apple, basing everything on understanding the customer’s problems and what the customer might want or need.”
Read more in the full article here.