What Jeff Bezos Knows

Let’s not ‘turtle’ our way through the recession

Millennia of shared experience and painful years of direct experience have taught us to keep our heads down in times of crisis, lest we draw attention to ourselves. All this conditioning has trained us to think that if we don’t rock the boat, we might get through the storm OK.

From our herd instinct we have learned “there’s safety in numbers”. But marketers know that in order to get heard, this is a death wish. Only by standing out will we remain standing.

Customer to Competitor

Old Wine in a New Bottle

As late as 1999, Kodak clung to its belief in the permanence of film cameras, slowing down its foray into digital technology. The company had to fight back its way into the market when rivals from outside photography like Canon and Sony had already established an advantage. Kodak simply did not “get” the customer need for convenience that digital cameras catered to.

Power of Passion

The search for Excellence takes us back to Kindergarten

Learning the ABC’s

In the highly technical fields of information technology and medicine, there’s nothing short of a quagmire of acronyms and complex detail. When the two intersect, the swamp grows exponentially. You might think you’d need a number of advanced degrees to create success, but as it turns out, with a nod to Robert Fulghum, all you really need to know you learned in kindergarten.