Page 16 - The Bootstrapper Bible

ChangeThis Jerry asked if he could fly standby. After all, the plane was flying back to New York anyway, it was empty, and it would cost the airline exactly zero to fly him back now, instead of four hours from now. For companies that sell in the business-to-business world, access to customers is a tremendous advantage. The gate agent said no. Do you think the president of the airline would have made the same decision? Do you think he would have wanted a valuable customer to spend four hours seething about the airline when he could have walked right onto a plane? Do you think the president would have wanted to see his valuable brand equity wasted in such a stupid way? I doubt it. But the president wasnʼt there. A gate agent having a bad day was there instead. You, on the other hand, are the president of your company, and you have a lot of interaction with your customers. You make policy, so youʼll never lose someone over a stupid rule. You can use this power and flexibility to make yourself irresistible to demanding customers. 4 RAPID R&D. They say you canʼt hire nine women to work really hard as a team and produce one baby in one month. Teamwork doesnʼt always make things faster—it can even slow them down. Engineering studies have shown time and time again that small, focused teams are always faster than big, bureaucratic ones. Obviously, itʼs harder to pick a team of four great people than it is to assign two dozen randomly selected people to a project. And itʼs riskier too. So most companies donʼt do very well when it comes to inventing breakthrough products. When theyʼve got a problem at IBM, they assign a squadron to it. A squadron that sometimes creates bad ideas, like the PCjr. Barnes & Noble didnʼt invent Amazon.com. One smart guy | iss. 6.01 | i | U | X | + | h 16/103 f