Faster Horses, Henry Ford, Bob Sutton, and Innovation
On Wed Nov 16th Enthiosys helped plan and run the SDForum event The Foundation of Innovation at SAP Labs in Palo Alto, CA. We played our Product BoxSM game, and it was a great success. I’ll be posting a few things about this event, and I thought I’d start with an observation that the keynote speaker, Bob Sutton, made regarding innovation. He pointed out, (as did the panelists), that true innovations rarely come from asking customers what they want. He even added the (famous?) Henry Ford quote “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
Well, Duh.
The danger of this kind of comment and the quote from Henry Ford is that it perpetuates the myth that innovation is somehow uninvolved or disassociated with customers. In these models, you’re supposed to be somehow smarter than your customers, swoop down, and save the day.
I don’t think it works like that.
Instead, I think that innovation occurs from a deep understanding of your customers—their problems, their needs, expressed or unexpressed. Suppose that Henry had asked a customer “What do you want” and the customer has answered “I want a faster horse”. I’m willing to bet that Henry, one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time, would have explored this a bit further, perhaps using the 5-Why’s approach to root cause analysis.
Henry: “Why do you want a faster horse?”
Customer: “So I can get to the store in less time.”
Henry: “Why do you want to get to the store faster?”
Customer: “So I can get more work done at the farm.”
Oh. So the customer didn’t want a faster horse. And you didn’t even need five questions to find out what they did want. They wanted to get more work done. And presumably the car that Henry created provided that benefit.
Net? Don’t let pithy quotes let you fool yourself into thinking that you don’t have to understand your customers. You do.
November 25th, 2005 at 25 Nov 2005
Or maybe the answer is : I like fast(er) horses!
November 26th, 2005 at 26 Nov 2005
Quite true—purely emotionally driven responses are what drives the world. But even this can still be explored more deeply.
Henry: “So, you like faster horses—that’s it?”
Customer: “Yeah. I just really like going fast. I like the wind in my hair and I love the feeling of speed.”
Fast forward a few decades and you get the 2005 Mustang convertible. Not necessarily a “problem”, but certainly a need… for speed.
June 28th, 2006 at 28 Jun 2006
I think Ford’s point was that you need to understand your customer better than they understand themselves. Ford skipped a few steps and said “People want to get more work done and horses ain’t gonna do it” while other people were still talking to people about horses.
From my personal experience, customers are not at all good at knowing what they want. They will demand faster horses and tell you they are not interested in these “car” things.
I’m not saying you are wrong, I’m just emphasizing that the pithy quote is pretty darn right on in this case.
August 12th, 2006 at 12 Aug 2006
A factual correction. I did not use the Ford quote. Thew first time I ever heard it in my life is in this blog. Perhaps someone else said it, but it wasn’t me. I do believe that innovation comes from knowing what customers to ignore and what customers to listen to. Indeed, if you only listen to your existing customers, you are in deep trouble because you miss those who don’t want your product, have left your product, or aren’t old enough to use your product. If you just ask SUV customers – - a shrinking group—if they love their cars, they will report that they do… the problem is that you miss those who never wanted one, sold the one’s they have, or the young ones who are just now buying their first car.
But my main objection is that this blog is simply wrong. I never used that example in my life and never heard it until now, many months later.
September 1st, 2006 at 01 Sep 2006
Well, I think the real point in this is that you don’t ask the customer the direct question, “what do you want”. If you do, you will have problems if your solution differs from what they want. To do so is to call his baby ugly.
What Ford really means (I think) is that you need to ask better questions, fully understand the challenges that people are facing, and blow them away with a creative solution to their problems.
I sell enterprise software in an emerging market (Business Process Management). My peers who take the “what do you want” approach consistently fail and only compete in situations where a prospect has clearly identified BPM as the answer to their problems. Those of us who take the long way around and understand the business needs of our prospective clients are rewarded by NOT HAVING TO COMPETE with a list of other vendors.
March 1st, 2007 at 01 Mar 2007
Ford is also known for saying that you can any colour for the car as long as it is black. Ford is obviously not too hot on being customer-focused. And he can do so (ignore customer) AT THAT TIME AND SPACE because he has monopoly to a new technology that everyone wants. The quote about the faster house is relevant today for a different reason. The customer may not know enough of the technology and options to tell the company what product is good for them. Clayton Christesen observed the fall of companies caused by good managers who listened to customers’ needs too closely at the expense of ignoring disruptive technology emerging at the horizon and redefining the level playing field. Disk drive and, more recently, VoIP are examples of how business model innovation can completely undo companies who are leaders in their fields. While understanding customers’ needs remains a crucial aspect of market research in a stable market, it is paramount for the company keep a close tab on the environmental factors that can disrupt the business model and re-adjust its strategy in respond to the impending (and unavoidable) change. Blindly listening to customers will only bring about the downfall inevitably.
August 4th, 2007 at 04 Aug 2007
What Ford provided was a faster horse albeit without the horse. One of the car’s main features was of course speed and to best highlight this fact the car was marketed and sold by rationalising this key benefit in terms of the familiar i.e. horse power.
March 20th, 2008 at 20 Mar 2008
The Ford quote speaks to all of us who build things for our customers. I heard a better example of what you are trying to say at a training seminar several years ago: A product design guru was working with a design committee at Black and Decker on their new cordless drill. He asked them what their customers wanted and dutifully listed their features on the whiteboard – battery life, ergonomics, torque, variable speed… on and on. When he finished he stepped back and told them they were all wrong. “What do you mean, we have extensive market research…” No, he insisted, their customers buying drills don’t want any of those things…. they want to put a hole in something. A nice, probably apocryphal story about thinking outside the box and delivering what the customer really needs. If you don’t have your eye on the ball (meeting customers’ needs) then you will miss the truly innovative leap – the real leap for Ford was understanding that they didn’t want a faster horse, or to get more work done, what they wanted was to get themselves and their stuff from point to point faster and with less work. He solved that need with a mechanical replacement for the horse and wagon.
January 22nd, 2009 at 22 Jan 2009
As the guy in charge of inciting innovation at my company, I use both of these probably-apocryphal stories all the time. I also point out that if you are in the horse business, faster horses are good thing.
March 25th, 2009 at 25 Mar 2009
Four stages in the product/service lifecycle…Ford’s quote applies mostly to the pre-innovation stage, even before a glimmer of the product idea hits the market. Customer’s usually have no idea what they want in this phase (did you know you wanted a gameboy in 1960?), and attempts to cajole an answer usually end up by focusing your roadmap on some customer who’s leading you to the road to perdition. In this pre-ijnnovation stage, the entrepeneur that understands multiple market/technology/psychology trends must FIND a customer who is in synch with those trends, then hold on for dear life. entrepeneurs must believe in themselves in these earlier stages, more than they believe in their customers.
In later mature stages – not paying attention to customers gets more problematic. For the entrepeneur, it also gets less “fun”. So, the answer must be that the degree to which you “pay attention” to your customers’ wishes is a function of the stage of your product/service’s lifecycle.
April 15th, 2009 at 15 Apr 2009
Ford never said it. Great but invented quote.