Week #6: Know The Order Of Influence

Your weekly "thing" to forever shape the way you build!

Two pieces of wisdom that will ruin your work if you follow them too literally.

The first is: "the customer is always right."

The second is "people don't know what they want until they see it."

Henry Ford supposedly said "if I'd asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse." which captures this perfectly.

And when you look around, history is full of visionaries which supports this sentiment. No one was asking Steve Jobs for the iPhone or iPod but most people have one. J.R.R Tolkien didn't look at trending book trends before writing The Lord of the Rings.

But on the other side... "the customer is always right" side;
César Ritz built the Ritz hotel empire under the philosophy, "le client n'a jamais tort," the customer is never wrong. Google became one of the largest companies on the planet by being relentless about what the customer was actually trying to find search for, and removing everything standing in the way of it.

Most business advice frames this as a choice... vision or customer-first? But really it's both; just in the right order.

The best builders are extremely empathetic to the people they serve. They were often their own customer at one point. Or, they have walked long enough in the shoes of the person they are building for to know their frustrations, their ambitions, their failed attempts and what makes them tick.

But then, when it actually comes to building...

...they ignore everything the customer says they want, and follow their vision relentlessly.

The question isn't "What's the balance? How do you know when to listen to the customer and how do you know when to listen to yourself?"

It's empathy first, vision second.

Final decisions are based on your vision, but informed by reverence for the people you serve. And if your vision isn't clear yet, you might need to pull attention away from yourself and onto the people you want to serve and what they need. Then plant a vision within that.

World builders usually sense what will feel obvious in five years and start to build it now. They begin from a feeling they can't fully explain and let the world catch up.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge made Fleabag based on her own experience, she was told it was too dark; six years later it swept the Emmys.
Tyler the Creator was told his music was "unmarketable" in 2010, then won Grammys nine years later.
Investors told Brian Chesky that Airbnb was "the worst idea ever"... who would sleep in a stranger's house? But he knew enough people who complained about hotel pricing and in search of community based travel.

Most people are taught "the customer is always right." But world builders believe: "The customer is right…and so am I."

They don't ignore market feedback,
but they don't let it dictate their vision either.

Links to all of the weekly "things" so far:

A little late this week as I am playing catch up from the Unreasonable conference last week + also attending your fellow World Builder Jennie McGinn's Unspoken Stories dinner (which was AMAZING), and this week I was helping my friend look after her very cute kids in the middle of a house move with a full calendar of meetings! Looking forward to this weekend, see you all on Monday and/or Friday xx