People pitch me all the time. But hopefully, you'll just go ahead and do it. We are trying to eliminate the need for pitches. I'd rather sit there and applaud. Customers buy products, not Powerpoint presentations.
Interpretation
Focus on creating value rather than preparing endless presentations.
Scott Cook's quote emphasizes the importance of genuine action over superficial presentations. He suggests that customers are more interested in the tangible benefits of a product rather than how it's presented, advocating for a shift towards action and results in business interactions.
In practice
In a startup pitch meeting, I would use this quote to encourage participants to focus on product development.
In my view, product/market fit is the most important thing to get right as a startup entrepreneur. There's a variety of ways to do it, but without solving some pain point that the customer gets so excited about they tell their friends, it's really hard in the modern age to get any liftoff.
**New business concepts are always, always the product of lucky foresight.** That's right - the essential insight doesn't come out of any dirigiste planning process; it comes form some cocktail of happenstance, desire, curiosity, ambition and need. But at the end of the day, there has to be a degree of foresight -- a sense of where new riches lie. So radical innovation is always one part fortuity and one part clearheaded vision. [first-line bold by author] [2002] p.23
No idea for a new growth business ever comes fully shaped. When it emerges, it's half-baked, and it then goes through a process of becoming fully shaped.
Business isn't some disembodied bloodless enterprise. Profit is fine - a sign that the customer honors the value of what we do. But "enterprise" ( a lovely word ) is about heart. About beauty. It's about art. About people throwing themselves on the line. It's about passion and the selfless pursuit of an ideal.
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.
I am still looking for the modern equivalent of those Quakers who ran successful businesses and made money because they offered honest products and treated their people decently . . . This business creed, sadly, seems long forgotten.
There is a huge body of business evidence now showing that energy savings give better service at lower cost with higher profit. We have to tear down barriers to successful markets and we have to create incentives to enter them.
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