Archive for December, 2008

Customer Experience and Innovation in a $29 Water Bottle

11th December
2008
written by Michael Kanazawa

By Michael Kanazawa

This week I had the opportunity to meet with an amazing group of innovators at RKS Design, including Ravi Sawhny, the founder and CEO of RKS, Tom White and Deepa Prahalad. RKS designs products for companies in a very unique way. Rather than work from spec sheets, they go first to customer needs, wants and emotions. This philosophy meets closely with my perspective on customer-driven business strategy and managing to customer experiences, so I was interested in meeting them and learning more.

I didn’t keep it much of a secret that I also wanted to get my hands on one of their beautiful RKS guitars. In 2005 the RKS guitar graced the cover of BusinessWeek in an edition covering the most innovative products of the year! Holding the guitar it was clear why it won the awards and also won the hearts of people like Don Felder (The Eagles), one of my favorite guitarists of all time as well as Ricki Lee Jones, Ron Wood and many others. (more…)

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Alignment, General, Strategy, Tips

Failure Must Be an Option: Apple and Vinod Khosla Agree…

2nd December
2008
written by Michael Kanazawa

By: Michael Kanazawa

People like to say, “failure is not an option,” in an attempt to motivate greatness and breakthrough results. However, like so many popular business phrases, this one doesn’t even make sense in real life. This phrase was made popular in the Hollywood version of Apollo 13, but business isn’t a movie and employees aren’t actors. We all lead in the real world where not everything gets resolved in a happy ending in a neat 90 minute story. Successful people and companies know that failure is always a potential and it is not something than can or should be ignored. (more…)

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Engagement, Leadership, Strategy, Tips