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We’ve got a lot
of our favorite stories in
Getting It Right The First Time but some didn’t make it
into the final manuscript. Below are a couple of our stories that
fell off the truck.
On Being Average
Years ago we went to
visit Cisco on the event of a new Internet product introduction in
a fast growing category. We listened to the marketing spiel,
talked about the improvements and features, and even unscrewed the
case and poked inside. While driving back to our office we
pondered how we could write this up for our research clients. The
trouble was that the product wasn’t very interesting and didn’t
have many of the advanced features that their competitors had. We
searched for a catchy way to capture what they had done and
failed. Our conclusion was that it was a perfectly competent but
completely unexciting product offering. After a few minutes we
realized that, for Cisco’s customers, being average was an asset,
not a liability. Technology companies can get all wound up in the
advanced features and functions and lose sight of the fact that
for most customers the last greatest feature is irrelevant
compared to the fact that you can buy it from your established
well endowed supplier rather than a tentative start-up. The
network device business was evolving rapidly giving vendors ample
rope to hang themselves with advanced technology where the hanging
came in the additional engineering needed to build the feature,
the product instability that comes with change, and the
incremental cost of selling and supporting bleeding edge
applications. For a start-up that may all be necessarily as table
stakes for entering the game. In contrast Cisco had just the
product it needed to happily suck up 30%+ of the market with the
added bonus of lower development, selling and support costs. They
could wait another year before the advanced features in this
category would interest their mainstream customers. We concluded
that having only adequate products was the basis for a pretty
exceptional business strategy, not an example of how the lumbering
giant could succeed despite their inadequacies (the way the
startups saw it of course). Part of the leading market share
Cisco got was the result of their market dominance (the benefit of
market leadership) but part was a smart result of Cisco’s choosing
to focus on the high value part of the business. Cisco understood
what their customers really wanted and focused on delivering it
effectively.
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The
Making Of Getting It Right The First Time
We’re not kidding when
we say that Getting It Right The First Time has been four years in
the making. When we started writing it back in 2000, it was at
the height of the Internet bubble. One New York publisher gave us
a copy of a draft book titled Rational Exuberance which was
basically argued that the economic prosperity of the late 90’s was
going to continue indefinitely because the American economy
reached a new plateau. The publisher said, “Can you produce
something that’s along these lines?” Thank goodness we declined
that.
When books were hot it
was like the dot com markets: it didn’t make a lot of difference
what you wrote about if it fit the model. We wasted effort with a
good book agent who kept getting is fit into a hot style – we
could do it but the important messages got badly distorted along
the way.
The economy crumbled
faster than we could keep up with drafts of the manuscript and
then when it hit bottom, there wasn’t a publisher out there that
was willing to take a try at anything that came even close to
talking about high-tech. From the standpoint of east coast book
publishers, Silicon Valley had finally fallen into the Pacific.
We went through a
series of titles along the way starting out with things like
Getting Ahead of the Curve to Demand Anticipation. At one point,
Peter made a joke and said we should call the book Puckology
because of the Wayne Gretzky quote that opens the first chapter.
The people that we were working with at the time loved the idea
and we unfortunately spent a year with that as the working title
(hence, the Zamboni references). We’ve even got about a hundred
hockey pucks embossed with our names and Puckology that we got as
a promotion. If you want one, send us a note.
But the project
continued and we kept searching for the right name. Tracking down
Nick Phillipson, a really gifted editor who we had met back in the
“good old day,” helped put us on the right path. We really liked
the work that Nick had been done in publishing some of the most
interesting business books in the market, but when we went to look
him up, he had left his previous job and had, as they say, moved
closer to the center of the publishing business. It took a few
weeks to find him. Nick gently pointed out that, while Puckology
was a clever title, one letter change the book would be relegated
to the pornography section and that it was probably one of the
worst working titles that he had ever heard. Nick suggested that
we “loose Puckology and he came up with Getting It Right The First
Time. From there, as they say, the rest was history.
So, after years of work
and going through lots of rejections, we’re finally at the point
where we expected to be in 2001. But when you consider all that’s
happened in the past five years, being at this point is a lot
better than a sharp stick in the eye.
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