Understand the customer

 From 11 Lessons for Entrepreneurs From Jeff Bezos's Tremendous Success by Jason Aten

5. Fear customers, not competitors.

Don't be afraid of our competitors, because they're never going to send us money, Bezos once told his team. "Be afraid of our customers, because those are the folks who have the money." 

Early in my career in management consulting, there was a widespread concern about security.  Never work in a public place where someone might see your correspondence, especially on airplanes.  The ideas embedded in strategic planning were like military secrets.  Flash them around and your competitor might glean your plans and beat you to the punch.

Certainly that was the message within my company but I heard echoes of it from friends at other firms.  Ideas are of critical value and have to be protected.

At a certain level that can be true and discretion is always a reasonable behavioral trait.  

But my perspective has always been that ideas are only worth anything to the extent that they are successfully translated into actions, activities and outcomes.  The greatest difference between companies are not their strategic plans but their capacity to convert those strategies into reality.  

The difference is to invest in becoming very good at project management and its associated disciplines rather than in becoming very good at keeping secrets.

There is a corollary to that position which parallels Bezos's quote.  You don't have to beat your competitors.  You have to beat the inertia of your customer.  In other words, you have to present the customer with value propositions which are compelling in their circumstances and given the constraints and trade-offs they face.  

If you focus all your time on your competitor, there are several possible outcomes, not exclusive of one another.

• The competitor may be as wrong about the market as you and you follow each other into oblivion.
• You may be both right but by focusing on one another, you lose sight of an emergent competitor who steals a march on you.
• To the extent you focus largely on the competitor, you likely are less focused on core competencies such as execution.
• Changes in the regulatory framework or the customer's choice matrix are more likely to impact you than you competitor's actions.

Understand the customer.  Then understand your choices to compel their interests.  Keep your eye on the landscape of competitors and regulators but most of all - Understand the customer.