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Nice Idea. Ten Years Late.

Preliminary reports paint a bleak picture for the recently-completed holiday shopping season. Yet, two retailers - Apple and Amazon.com - appear to have done reasonably well, considering.  

Among the many reasons given for their success, I'd spotlight the power of their brands, their unerring focus on making things easy and seamless for the customer, great design - products in Apple's case and an on-line shopping experience in Amazon's - and the consistent leadership of near-tyrannical CEOs who gleefully ignore Wall Street's slavering herds in favor of customer-centric innovation and rule-breaking.

As an aside, have you BEEN to an Apple retail store lately?  A retail strategy that wasn't supposed to work, couldn't work, shouldn't work...and then it did.

But the real, untold story of last month's performance is the YEARS Apple and Amazon spent relentlessly refining their visions, building their brands, connecting with customers, honing their services, investing in spectacular, "must-have" design, etc.

And through all those years they kept at it, avoiding fads, making mistakes, learning, getting better, breaking the rules, making NEW rules.  New rules that, to an outside observer, appear refreshingly immune from annual budget-trimming and insulated against the typical executive's attention span, measured in microseconds.  Rules that massively pre-date last year's recession early warning signs.

Yesterday, a certain health care publication (that shall remain nameless and link-less) featured several provider organizations and their strategic responses to the economy.  Among the expected "kinder, gentler" layoff approaches and such, one CEO touted his BRAND NEW physician sales force which, he said, was out visiting physicians in their offices, asking how to earn more of their referrals.

OK.  A nice idea, certainly one worth doing..a decade ago.  But NEW?  You STARTED talking to your key customers LAST MONTH?  As things began to slide downhill?  Are you kidding me?  If true, I'm wondering why he'd admit it in print.

For that CEO I offer two belated holiday wishes:  (1) That "better late than never" is truth, not slogan, and, (2) That he can find a few moments to ponder his iPod as an object lesson in "get off your ass" strategy, not just another time-wasting gizmo.


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