me?
Successful business people imagine themselves in their customersâ shoes. Like coaches or generals, they also imagine what their rivals are up to, so they can be ready for the competition.
Some of this disruptive curiosity relies on instinct. Steve Jobs was famously disdainful of focus groups and consumer testing, preferring to refine products based on his own judgment.
Some of this disruptive curiosity relies on routine. During all the decades he ran Wal-Martâthe largest company in the worldâfounder Sam Walton convened his top five hundred managers in a meeting every Saturday morning. The âSaturdayMorning Meeting,â as it was called, had just two purposes: to review in detail the weekâs sales, aisle-by-aisle through the store; and to ask the question: what is the competition doing that we should be paying attention toâor imitating? At every Saturday morning meeting, Walton asked his employees to stand up and talk about their visits, during the workweek, to competitorsâ storesâto K-mart, Zayre, Walgreens, Rite Aid, and Sears.
Walton had strict rules for this part of the meeting: participants were only allowed to talk about what competitors were doing right. They were only allowed to discuss things theyâd seen that were smart and well executed. Walton was basically curious about why customers would want to shop anywhere besides Wal-Mart. He didnât care what his competitors were doing wrong âthat couldnât hurt him. But he didnât want them to get more than a weekâs advantage on doing something innovativeâand he knew he wasnât smart enough, alone, to imagine every possible way of running a store. Why try to guess your way into your competitorsâ heads when you could simply walk into their stores?
Some of this disruptive curiosity relies on systematic analysis that evolves into elaborate corporate research and development programs. It took H. J. Heinz almost three years to create the upside-down ketchup bottleâbut the project got started when Heinz researchers followed consumers home and discovered they were storing their tall, thin, glass ketchup bottles precariously, upside down in their refrigerator doors, in an effort to get out the last servings of ketchup. The invertedketchup bottle that Heinz invented as a result relies on an innovative silicone valve that seals the ketchup in, releases instantly when the bottle is squeezed, then closes immediately again when the squeezing stops. The man who invented that valve is a Michigan engineer named Paul Brown, who told a reporter, âI would pretend I was silicone and, if I was injected into a mold, what I would do.â H. J. Heinz was so determined to understand its customers, it followed them home from the grocery store. Engineer Paul Brown was so determined to solve a problem, he imagined himself as liquid silicone. 9
Procter & Gamble, the consumer products company behind Tide, Bounty, Pampers, CoverGirl, Charmin, and Crest, spends more than $1 million a day just on consumer research. P&G is so determined to understand how we clean our clothes, our kitchens, our hair, and our teeth that company researchers do 20,000 studies a year, of 5 million consumers, where the goal is principally to understand our behavior and habits. Thatâs why Tide laundry detergent now comes in little premeasured capsulesâno pouring, no measuring, no muss. Thatâs why you can buy a Tide pen that will remove stains from your pants or your skirt, while youâre wearing them. 10
My approach to curiosity is a blend of the approaches we see in Steve Jobs, Sam Walton, and Procter & Gamble. I am, in fact, curious by instinctâIâm curious all the time. If someone walks into my office to talk about the music for a movie or about the revisions to a TV script, and that person is wearing really cool shoes, weâll start out talking about shoes.
I know that not everyone feels like
Successful business people imagine themselves in their customersâ shoes. Like coaches or generals, they also imagine what their rivals are up to, so they can be ready for the competition.
Some of this disruptive curiosity relies on instinct. Steve Jobs was famously disdainful of focus groups and consumer testing, preferring to refine products based on his own judgment.
Some of this disruptive curiosity relies on routine. During all the decades he ran Wal-Martâthe largest company in the worldâfounder Sam Walton convened his top five hundred managers in a meeting every Saturday morning. The âSaturdayMorning Meeting,â as it was called, had just two purposes: to review in detail the weekâs sales, aisle-by-aisle through the store; and to ask the question: what is the competition doing that we should be paying attention toâor imitating? At every Saturday morning meeting, Walton asked his employees to stand up and talk about their visits, during the workweek, to competitorsâ storesâto K-mart, Zayre, Walgreens, Rite Aid, and Sears.
Walton had strict rules for this part of the meeting: participants were only allowed to talk about what competitors were doing right. They were only allowed to discuss things theyâd seen that were smart and well executed. Walton was basically curious about why customers would want to shop anywhere besides Wal-Mart. He didnât care what his competitors were doing wrong âthat couldnât hurt him. But he didnât want them to get more than a weekâs advantage on doing something innovativeâand he knew he wasnât smart enough, alone, to imagine every possible way of running a store. Why try to guess your way into your competitorsâ heads when you could simply walk into their stores?
Some of this disruptive curiosity relies on systematic analysis that evolves into elaborate corporate research and development programs. It took H. J. Heinz almost three years to create the upside-down ketchup bottleâbut the project got started when Heinz researchers followed consumers home and discovered they were storing their tall, thin, glass ketchup bottles precariously, upside down in their refrigerator doors, in an effort to get out the last servings of ketchup. The invertedketchup bottle that Heinz invented as a result relies on an innovative silicone valve that seals the ketchup in, releases instantly when the bottle is squeezed, then closes immediately again when the squeezing stops. The man who invented that valve is a Michigan engineer named Paul Brown, who told a reporter, âI would pretend I was silicone and, if I was injected into a mold, what I would do.â H. J. Heinz was so determined to understand its customers, it followed them home from the grocery store. Engineer Paul Brown was so determined to solve a problem, he imagined himself as liquid silicone. 9
Procter & Gamble, the consumer products company behind Tide, Bounty, Pampers, CoverGirl, Charmin, and Crest, spends more than $1 million a day just on consumer research. P&G is so determined to understand how we clean our clothes, our kitchens, our hair, and our teeth that company researchers do 20,000 studies a year, of 5 million consumers, where the goal is principally to understand our behavior and habits. Thatâs why Tide laundry detergent now comes in little premeasured capsulesâno pouring, no measuring, no muss. Thatâs why you can buy a Tide pen that will remove stains from your pants or your skirt, while youâre wearing them. 10
My approach to curiosity is a blend of the approaches we see in Steve Jobs, Sam Walton, and Procter & Gamble. I am, in fact, curious by instinctâIâm curious all the time. If someone walks into my office to talk about the music for a movie or about the revisions to a TV script, and that person is wearing really cool shoes, weâll start out talking about shoes.
I know that not everyone feels like
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