To be innovative, you do not produce what people expect or what they think they need, you produce what they truly need.
If you had asked people what they wanted, they would have said “Faster horses”. But then, Henry Ford went ahead to build combustion engine.
Hello guys. How are you doing? I’m doing quite alright. I had a pretty productive week, and I’m looking to keep up my pace for the coming one.
To get right into the newsletter for today, here are a few things that I found interesting and connected with during the course of the week.
Apple introducing iPhone 1
I found this video of Steve Jobs introducing the very first iPhone quite intruiging. Although technology has changed since then, it was fascinating to see him explain the features of this revolutionary phone —the one that would later become the standard of most phones in the future.
Back then, most phones had keypads. Some keypads were few, so if you wanted to type a message, say Hello, you would have to press button 4 twice for H, 3 twice for E, 5 thrice for L, then another L, then finally 6 thrice for O.
If you had asked people what they wanted at that time, they would most likely have said something like “A phone with more keypads” which is quite reasonable, because no one wants to spend a huge chunk of their time trying to type Hello. So, companies went ahead to create phones with the full QWERTY keyboard. Some prided on the fact that they could add even more keypads to their phones.
But what did Apple do? they went ahead to create a phone with just a single button called Home. (One of the many reasons I stan Apple is their record of defying the norm and accompanying it with a powerful storytelling). In Tim Cook’s words, the CEO of Apple, “We're a group of people trying to change the world for the better”.
The same concept can be attributed to the old days when horses were the norm. If you had asked people what they wanted at that time, they would have said “Faster horses”. But Henry Ford went ahead to build combustion engine.
So here’s what I have to say about innovation..
To be innovative, you do not produce what people expect or what they think they need, you produce what they truly need.
Book Excerpt
In the closing chapters of Start With Why, I read a portion that further reinforces the point I was pushing in my last read. Here’s the excerpt.
…What if the next time when someone asks, “Who’s your competition?” we replied, “No idea”. What if the next time someone pushes, “Well, what makes you better than your competition?” we replied, “We are not better than them in all cases”. And what if the next time someone asks “Well, why should I do business with you then?” we answer with confidence, “Because the work we’re doing now is better than the work we were doing six months ago. And the work we’ll be doing six months from now will be better than the work we are doing today. Because we wake up everyday with a sense of WHY we come to work. We come to work to inspire people to do the things that inspire them. Are we better than our competition? If you believe what we believe and you believe that the things we do can help you , then we are better. If you don’t believe what we believe and you don’t believe the things we do can help you, then we’re not better. Our goal is to find customers who believe what we believe and work together so that we can all succeed. We’re looking for people to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with us in pursuit of the same goal. We’re not interested in sitting across a table from each other in pursuit of a sweater deal. And here are the things we’re doing to advance our cause…” And then details of HOW and WHAT you do follow. But this time, it started with WHY.
I write about my learnings on personal growth, life, lessons, and experiences. Kindly subscribe and share if you find it relatable.
Have a beautiful week,
Yosola.