If customer ignorance is a profit centre for you, you're in trouble.
Interpretation
Exploiting customers' lack of knowledge can lead to short-term gains but is ultimately unsustainable.
This quote by Gary Hamel emphasizes that if a business profits from the ignorance of its customers, it is likely to face serious issues in the long run. Such a strategy undermines trust and customer loyalty, indicating a deeper problem within the company's practices and approach to their clients. It highlights the importance of transparency and ethical behavior in business, suggesting that true success comes from empowering customers rather than taking advantage of their lack of information.
In practice
In a business seminar discussing customer engagement strategies, this quote can be used to emphasize the importance of ethical practices.
The real damper on employee engagement is the soggy, cold blanket of centralized authority. In most companies, power cascades downwards from the CEO. Not only are employees disenfranchised from most policy decisions, they lack even the power to rebel against egocentric and tyrannical supervisors.
The biggest barriers to strategic renewal are almost always top management's unexamined beliefs.
To create an organization that's adaptable and innovative, people need the freedom to challenge precedent, to 'waste' time, to go outside of channels, to experiment, to take risks and to follow their passions.
It doesn't matter much where your company sits in its industry ecosystem, nor how vertically or horizontally integrated it is - what matters is its relative 'share of customer value' in the final product or solution, and its cost of producing that value.
The single biggest reason companies fail is they overinvest in what is, as opposed to what might be.
The only thing that can be safely predicted is that sometime soon your organization will be challenged to change in ways for which it has no precedent.
The greatest change in corporate culture - and the way business is being conducted - may be the accelerated growth of relationships based... on partnership.
I may be a businessman in that I set up and run companies for profit, but when I try to plan ahead and dream up new products and new companies, I'm an idealist.
Rules that may be easy for Wall Street are a death sentence for startups. They are easy to break accidentally and the penalty for noncompliance is severe.
If you don't drive your business, you will be driven out of business.
Almost all decisions based on cost accounting are utterly wrong.
Big companies have trouble with innovation. Innovation is about bad ideas, or ideas that look like bad ideas. That's the fundamental thing.
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