So what I've just described to you is pretty standard stuff.
For most of you, if you look at your experience as a consumer or
through your work experience, you'll realize that
that's the way that most businesses operate.
And instead of just calling it business, we can now put a label on that.
And that label I like to use is product centricity.
See, in the old days we didn't need a special label for it because for most
companies this was business, and business was this
set of steps that I just described to you.
But today, we're seeing different kinds of business models emerging.
And so we want to now distinguish
the set of practices that I just described.
In fact I like to use a metaphor about a fish swimming around in water.
So while the fish is in the water.
It doesn't realize that it's in water until it jumps into a new environment.
It jumps out of the water for a, for a moment.
And realizes, uh-oh, I'm in a different environment now.
And I kind of like the old environment better.
I'm going to stay in the water. And this
is exactly the kind of issue that many companies are facing today.
They're swimming around in their own water of product centricity.
It works. It keeps the business going.
It gives them some opportunities for growth.
And for many companies that's totally fine.
But for other companies, whether it's out of desperation or
out of opportunity, they're looking for different kinds of environments.
They're looking for different kinds of strategies.
We're seeing more and more companies, jumping out of
the water, and saying is it better out here?
How can I operate out here?
Should I operate out here?
And that's why we're now going to put a specific
label on the old way of doing things, product centricity.
So again, most of you understand that, this is business as usual.
many of the concepts that Barbara was
talking about implicitly refer to a product-centric approach.
And just to sum up the product-centric world before we kind of start
moving away from it, I have this one other slide for you here.
That shows you many of the
classic characteristics of a product centric business.
And if you look up and down the slide, you won't find
a lot that's tremendously insightful, and that's the point I want to make.
Is that the traditional product centric approach
to business, again, focusing on performance superiority or
operational excellence.
is, by now, second nature to most managers.
So if you look at as the slide shows,
the kinds of customers that we're going after, the
kinds of metrics that we're using, the overall focus
in the organization and the business, it's pretty standard stuff.
I just want to call your attention to this
one point to, towards the bottom of the slide.
The idea of the mental process.
And I love this idea of divergent thinking.
And it goes back to an idea I mentioned a few minutes ago.
We have this product expertise, what can we do with it?
How can we spread it out to other kinds of customers, and other kinds of businesses?
Again, implicity, that's the way that most businesses operate.
And we hire people who can think divergently, who can take our particular
core business, and think about ways of spreading it out, to new markets, and
new products and services.
So I want to make that explicit, because as we go
on, we're going to talk about some very different mental processes, as
well as different metrics, and all of the points that
you see on this slide are going to become quite different.
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