This Week’s Focus: Earlier this week, Dyson launched their new product, an innovative and stylish hair dryer – see here. Following its market-changing launch of a bag-less vacuum cleaner a couple of decades ago, the company has sinced developed hand dryers and domestic fans, heaters and humidifiers. In other words, Dyson realised that his business wasn’t in the ‘cleaning’ business, but in the ‘air movement’ business. What next? Why not in-car air conditioning systems or a domestic body dryer for when you leave the shower?
Your perspective of the business you’re in has a dramatic effect on your future potential. When Steve Jobs came back to Apple in the late 1990s he realised the business wasn’t in the ‘personal computer business’, but in the ‘personal technology business’. Conversely, the management of Kodak realised too late that they were in the ‘photo business’ and not the ‘film processing business’.
Your definition of your business lies at the intersection of your key capabilities and your target customers’ needs and desires, but, as Dyson, Apple and many others have shown, it needn’t be limited by your current strengths. Once you have defined your business you can also build new capabilities to accelerate your growth.
So, how about your organisation? What business are you really in? And what new possibilities for growth and innovation does this offer you?
Off The Record: New York by U2
Hot as a hair dryer in your face
Hot as a handbag and a can of mace
New York
I just got a place in New York
© Stuart Cross 2016. All rights reserved.