#102 / A Faster Horse

I just read an interesting article on "The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs." According to the article, published in the Harvard Business Review, Jobs didn't have much use for focus groups:

Don’t Be a Slave To Focus Groups
When Jobs took his original Macintosh team on its first retreat, one member asked whether they should do some market research to see what customers wanted. “No,” Jobs replied, “because customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.” He invoked Henry Ford’s line “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’”

In politics, as currently practiced, focus groups are how our so-called "leaders" decide where to lead us.

Not really a great way to lead!