Transform Your Business Blog

I included this quote in my previous post:

If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.

- Henry Ford

We all know what a faster horse is, depending on what industry we work in. A ‘faster horse’ may be an advantage or a small improvement over a competitor, but it’s not truly innovative and doesn’t move the customer to feel loyal to your brand. In other words, a faster horse is something that, if two products or services are essentially equal, will give one a slight advantage over the other…it’s a tweak.

That might sound great, but consider price. Price is a faster horse. Maybe I sell pencils and you sell pencils. Perhaps they’re even the exact same pencils, made at the same factory. We both get them wholesale for five cents each and sell them for ten cents each. If I drop my price to nine cents, I will most likely outsell you. Same product, lower price. A faster horse.

The problem: You can undercut my price, and I can undercut yours again. Competing on the faster horse is a huge waste of time, energy and resources because we’re involved in a war of attrition. Neither of us is creating something new and eventually, we’ll both be selling pencils for six cents, until one (or both) of us goes out of business. Horses only go so fast.

In the meantime, someone will come along and actually change the product. He or she will sell something different - a blue pencil, a pen/pencil combination, a pencil that doubles as chopsticks, a pencil/mp3 player combination - something that our former customers want, but never imagined.

This person will change the industry, and probably put us out of business before we do it to each other. And we will most likely curse him or her as we race away from the pencil factory on our faster horses.

For most web developers, CGI stands for Common Gateway Interface. It’s a way to deliver dynamic content, usually using the Perl programming language.

But I’ve decided to rebrand CGI - as Change, Grow and Innovate. Those are the three concepts behind what we do, and the reasons why we even started out as a company. I could easily go back to the jobs I used to do (except for that company that went under), but I’d rather challenge myself to change, grow and innovate with my own business.

Here are some quotes on each topic that I’ve enjoyed:

Change

“It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.”
- W. Edwards Deming

“If you want to truly understand something, try to change it.”
- Kurt Lewin

“If nothing ever changed, there would be no butterflies.”
- Anonymous

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
- Margaret Mead

Growth

“There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
- Anais Nin

“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people do that.”
- Mark Twain

“I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.”
- Pablo Picasso

Innovation

“If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong.”
- Charles Kettering

“He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator.”
- Sir Francis Bacon, “On Innovation”

“If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse.”
- Henry Ford