Barbara Bund famous quotes

Business people face increasing pressure from local and global competitors. They face customers who have more and more information about alternatives and more and more access to suppliers from all over the world. Given these pressures, business people are looking for approaches that make sense and will continue to make sense. I think many are fed up with management fads that may or may not provide any benefit and don't continue to work over time.
-- Barbara Bund

#Thinking #People #World

Often people say they can't base their strategies on customers because customers make unreasonable requests and because customers vary too much. Such opinions reveal serious misconceptions. The truly outside-in company definitely does not try to serve all the needs of its customers. Instead, its managers are clear about what their organization can and should do for customers, and whatever they do they do well. They focus.
-- Barbara Bund

#People #Focus #Trying

The outside-in discipline requires that you have an explicit customer-based reason for everything you do in the marketplace. Managers need to create what I call "customer pictures," verbal descriptions of customers that highlight the key customer characteristics and make those customers come alive. Although managers never know as much about customers as they want and need to know, the outside-in discipline requires that they construct customer pictures anyway, basing the pictures on whatever hard data they have plus hypotheses and intuition.
-- Barbara Bund

#Discipline #Intuition #Reason

The decision-makers should communicate the customer pictures and the logic of the strategies and actions. That communication allows employees throughout the organization to implement the strategies and actions, tweaking them appropriately in response to variations in the marketplace. It also allows employees to recognize information in the marketplace that contradicts the customer pictures, either because the pictures were not entirely correct or because customers have changed.
-- Barbara Bund

#Communication #Action #Logic

Often, very talented technical people find it extraordinarily difficult to take the viewpoint of customers, who are often ignorant about the technology and who may have strong and perhaps incorrect prejudices about it. The technical people may believe, deep down, that they know better what customers "should" need. Customers, of course, have a different perspective. They want products that will solve customer problems and provide other customer benefits, and will do so without undue risk or cost. Not infrequently, customers view advanced technology itself as a risk.
-- Barbara Bund

#Strong #Believe #Technology

I really hope that more and more companies will become much better at achieving and maintaining outside-in. I hope that we will see more and more truly outside-in corporations and that those organizations will remain outside-in corporations over time.
-- Barbara Bund

#Achieve

Americans think the only funny Brits are John Cleese, Benny Hill and whoever makes our toothpaste. They're not laughing with us, they are laughing at us.

Fear is born of Satan, and if we would only take time to think a moment we would see that everything Satan says is founded upon a falsehood.

Indo-European peoples and Semitic peoples are today still completely different... Jews almost everywhere form a special society... Muslims (the Semitic spirit is today represented mainly by Islam) and the Europeans stand face to face like two beings of different species, having nothing common in the way of thinking and feeling...

There's the South Pole, said Christopher Robin, and I expect there's an East Pole and a West Pole, though people don't like talking about them.

I have known some quite good people who were unhappy, but never an interested person who was unhappy.

Find a need and fill it. Successful businesses are founded on the needs of people.

You either get the point of Africa or you don't. What draws me back year after year is that it's like seeing the world with the lid off.

God help us if we ever take the theater out of the auction business or anything else. It would be an awfully boring world.

A divided heart loses both worlds.

As I make my slow pilgrimage through the world, a certain sense of beautiful mystery seems to gather and grow.