Product Juggernauts

"It may be useful to go back to basics, to a more fundamental interrogation like "Why are we in business?""

"Product creation encourages long-term corporate health, not a managerial quick fix."

"Trapped inside this commodity mindset, top managers may miss opportunities to shape their companies into strong, product-based competitors."

"A success formula will be robust, that is, sustainable, only if it is founded on a set of unique, hard-to-match capabilities."

"As every marketer knows, customers do not always react rationally."

"Many companies have discovered the potential of involving customers in the conception of new products, and they do it systematically."

"It is almost impossible to keep an entire company permanently motivated by a notion as abstract and intangible as "customer satisfaction.""

"Successful Japanese companies promote a continuous improvement philosophy around three rather simple principles."

"Winning game plans typically share four characteristics."

"Defining product identity deeply influences the scope of the innovation and product creation processes."

"Innovation leaders develop a process and discipline to set bold, yet achievable, innovation and product goals."

"In an attempt to formalize their product strategy, a number of companies have entrusted marketing with a new function?product strategy and planning. "

"Focusing on processes rather than functions provides several benefits."

"A world-class process starts with a shared understanding of the process itself."

"Product plans should be used to define the general configuration of the company's product line for the years to come, to manage successive generations of products, and to schedule different types of product actions at specific points in time."

"Teams are better prepared than individual functions, even top management, to integrate the various aspects of a program?technical, commercial, financial, human resources?and to keep track of the rate of progress. "

"The first question to ask when contemplating a major improvement in product creation performance is, What resources do we need to achieve a world-class status, and how can we develop them?"

"The geographic dispersion of development and manufacturing capabilities and the decentralization of product implementation responsibilities is triggering a new range of management questions."

"The ability to convert marketing ideas and technology, rapidly and consistently, into successful new products increasingly determines long-term competitiveness."

"Going faster does not mean rushing or accelerating the conveyer, but doing only what is needed and obliterating all activities that do not create value."

"Processes, particularly cross-functional processes, are what create value, and they ought to be managed explicitly."

"For inexplicable reasons, the development of new and appropriate performance measures is something that many companies trying to achieve significant behavioral and attitudinal change pay very little attention to."

"The place to start is at the top."

"For significant personal change to happen, you have to first feel in your gut the need to change."