(Creative Commons licensed photo from Vasta's Flickr photostream.)
Joan Magretta wrote a wonderful book called What Management Is. In the book, Magretta defines a business model as "a story about making and selling." That is, you better have a unique and compelling story about how you'll both make and sell your mousetrap. I like that definition, especially the "story" part.
But I've been thinking for about four years now that something is missing each time I quote the definition or recommend the book.
Connecting is missing.
By connecting I mean maintaining a vibrant and open dialogue with users and customers. Connecting is just as important as making and selling.
If you're working at a small company, you should be designing ways to truly connect with your users. If you're working at a big company, you should be thinking hard about how the balance of effort and energies should shift back towards connecting (or reintroducing it altogether).
You see it in successful small and entrepreneurial firms. They are often founded on an insight and benefit from a connection that the big guys can't see. Some of the Web 2.0 companies are touching their customers hundreds of time each day right now. Is Zappos poised to continue connecting?
Alas, over time a company becomes more efficient. Listening to customers seemingly takes too much time. Leaders have heard it all before anyway. And besides, connecting to users could very well lead to complications like having to change. Organizations also become more complex. Leaders get further and further away from their users, customers and the frontline employees that may actually have the connections.
I once had a client that ran a division who had never gone through the process of buying his products in the same way his customers did. He just couldn't understand it in the same way as our team that went through the process dozens of times. (Peter Merholz from Adaptive Path just wrote a great post about this on Harvard Business Digital.)
If you spent the same time and energy perfecting how you went about connecting as you did making and selling, where would you be?
You've got to get out there.
