Good businesses listen to their customers, they give them what they want, and because of this they ultimately fail
A few excerpts from Ken Lerer’s recent speech at Columbia journalism school. The whole speech is worth a read, but these are are few of my favorite points:
the best companies in any industry will eventually lose market dominance by doing everything that a good business should do. (By the way, if I were in charge of Columbia University I would make this required reading for every incoming student) Good businesses listen to their customers, they give them what they want, and because of this they ultimately fail.
Customers are no better at seeing the future than corporations. And if something doesn’t exist yet, they rarely know that they might want it someday.
For years, newspapers made market decisions based on a specific set of values — derived from customer preferences and expectations. So these companies invested in making sure that their papers were delivered on time, that they had features and magazines and ink that smudged less. Trivial as they may have seemed at the time, these were the choices that brought us here today.
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And remember ubiquity is the new exclusivity. The way for newspapers to be somewhere is to be everywhere.
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It already costs the New York Times twice as much to print and distribute its paper than it would to just send all of its yearly customers a free Kindle. So close down those presses today.
