Corporate Explorer Fieldbook

CHAPTER 3Outside‐In: Overcoming Toxic Assumptions with Market Insight

Narendra Laljani

WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY, AND HE IS US.¹

Corporate Explorers use market insight to sensitize organizations to emerging opportunities and threats, so they can develop ideas for how to create new value for customers based on these insights. Unfortunately, both are easier said than done, with many traps that organizations often fall into.

From Encyclopedia Britannica to Kodak to the travel agency Thomas Cook, the corporate graveyard is littered with case histories of organizations that once dominated their markets but could not or did not adapt to a changing environment, even when the forces of change were clear to see. Often these organizations failed because they kept doing for too long what made them successful in the first place. In other words, they developed a success recipe, which became deeply embedded in the organization and blinded them to the signals of change. We call this the “inside‐out” challenge. This reinforces the established paradigms that the Corporate Explorer must confront.

The second critical task, which we call the “outside‐in” challenge, is to develop meaningful insights into customer needs. It is tempting to think that just asking customers should suffice, but we know that many remarkable innovations, from motor car to web browser to iPhone, would never have seen the light of day if customers had been asked what they wanted. Indeed, the task is to understand customers ...