Death By Stagnation: Nobody Is Immune

There is a bad habit in businesses to focus on the coalface, leaving the engine to fall out of maintenance. This happens for many reasons, the most obvious being a drive to keep the lights on and the staff paid. It’s often associated with SMEs – even as I write this my biased mind throws up visions of owner-operators running around switching hats. Yet history is littered with the corpses of corporations who got distracted from the only reason any business exists: making customers happy.

Apple, surprisingly, is learning this, again. Not even the biggest name in innovation is immune to a bad product. No, it won’t cripple them, if they learn the lesson (again) that the consumer has all the power.

What does that have to do with your business? This: your company is a product; it’s for sale. Your potential customers have expectations too: the business they purchase needs to run on a fully integrated digital foundation. At the very least, research into technologies to improve the overall running of the company must be completed.

Read the insightful article by Robert Jameson about how Apple forgot the needs of its consumers, then take the day to think about your own.