One distinction is making your product extraordinary vs. making your self extraordinary (or your company). I like the idea of the former, that you just need an adequate company if your product and marketing are great, but the article gives me pause...
Keeping ahead of the competition is important, and so it's important for a company to be good at "keeping ahead". This includes your explicit focus, and the focus implied by how the company is organized, its methods and how it approaches tasks.
One could perhaps define companies with long-term success as being good at getting better at some specific thing, as in the article. This could a specific sub-field of engineering; or marketing to an specific industry etc. When the environment no longer values that specific thing, that aspect of the company fails. e.g. rap or minicomputers.
That reminds me of another excellent book: Good to Great by Jim Collins. Great companies have a clear single metric of profitability (profit per x) and then relentlessly iteratively optimize against it--what Collins refers to as the Flywheel.
If there was any doubt this practice of having a small confined environment with clear metrics and feedback and iterating against it relentlessly was a Pattern of Success... Hmm.. Very enlightening.
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One distinction is making your product extraordinary vs. making your self extraordinary (or your company). I like the idea of the former, that you just need an adequate company if your product and marketing are great, but the article gives me pause...
Keeping ahead of the competition is important, and so it's important for a company to be good at "keeping ahead". This includes your explicit focus, and the focus implied by how the company is organized, its methods and how it approaches tasks.
One could perhaps define companies with long-term success as being good at getting better at some specific thing, as in the article. This could a specific sub-field of engineering; or marketing to an specific industry etc. When the environment no longer values that specific thing, that aspect of the company fails. e.g. rap or minicomputers.
That reminds me of another excellent book: Good to Great by Jim Collins. Great companies have a clear single metric of profitability (profit per x) and then relentlessly iteratively optimize against it--what Collins refers to as the Flywheel.
If there was any doubt this practice of having a small confined environment with clear metrics and feedback and iterating against it relentlessly was a Pattern of Success... Hmm.. Very enlightening.