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 19:24
Or maybe the answer is : I like fast(er) horses!
November 26th, 2005 at 4:15
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 2:33
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 3:59
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 13:34
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 17:29
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 17:19
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.
September 5th, 2008 at 0:33
hentai of gisls hentai gisls gils
April 2nd, 2009 at 14:11
Ford is a good car
July 16th, 2009 at 13:47
“So I can get more work done at the farm”
If only Henry had heard that, he’d have built tractors as well….
..oh, wait
July 23rd, 2009 at 4:08
I think Henry was completely on track. What he meant was that people don’t know the possibilities or extent to which transformation/innovation is possible. Having a vision is absent in quite a few and it takes a few visionaries to change the game. It has nothing to do with being disassociated with customers.
December 11th, 2009 at 9:36
I love wager on horses online. It allows me to bet on horses from the relaxation of my own home. Don’t get me wrong, I also love going to the race tracks to get the all-around experience. The Good thing is that I’ve had good lucky recently and I made money on “Mine That Bird” during the good ol Ketucky Derby.
January 7th, 2010 at 0:45
I totally agree with white magpie. What that quote meant was that people didnt think of new ways of getting around. Horses were the primary means of transport and no one except Henry Ford came up with an alternative/innovative means of transportion.
March 9th, 2010 at 9:15
I would use this quote in reference to our current education system. Many schools are not preparing children for our future. Our world is very different now but we continue to use the same education model that’s been around for centuries. Yes it is tweaked here and there and modified to make it the best that it can be, but at the end of the day it’s just a faster horse when what we need to prepare our students for the 21st century is a car.
April 2nd, 2010 at 5:44
Hei , Happy April Fool’s Day!
In front of a delicatessen, an art connoisseur noticed a mangy little kitten lapping up milk from a saucer. The saucer, he realized with a start, was a rare and precious piece of pottery. He strolled into the store and offered two dollars for the cat.
“It’s not for sale,” said the proprietor.
“Look,” said the collector, “that cat is dirty and undesirable, but I’m eccentric. I like cats that way. I’ll raise my offer to ten dollars.”
“It’s a deal,” said the proprietor, and pocketed the money.
“For that sum I’m sure you won’t mind throwing in the saucer,” said the connoisseur. “The kitten seems so happy drinking from it.”
“Nothing doing,” said the proprietor firmly. “That’s my lucky saucer. From that saucer, so far this week I’ve sold 34 cats.”
Happy April Fool’s Day!
April 13th, 2010 at 16:53
For sale: parachute. Only used once, never opened, small stain.
April 22nd, 2010 at 17:47
I think Henry Ford is spot on.
Innovation comes from one person seeing further than the bunch.
Sure, it involves knowing your customers and all that. But it does in the end boil down to one man observing a possibility that other people do not observe. Therefore you cannot “ask the public” when you intend to invent something new.
New inventions come from “genius”, to a greater or lesser extent. Not public polls. That’s just the way it is.
April 28th, 2010 at 14:53
I think the point is that customers can rarely articulate their needs in a way that is innovative or very clear for that matter. Ford took “faster horses” and changed it to “better transportation”. Then he set about solving the problem (answer = car according to Ford).
You need to know what users say they want and convert that into what users actually need. Then you solve their problem
June 26th, 2010 at 15:33
I think Aran states it more accurately than the article does, though that’s not to say the article is incorrect. My interpretation of the famous Ford quote is that you cannot rely simply on self reported input from the customers. Innovation comes not from direct quotes by the customers, but by understanding their needs more deeply than they understand them, themselves.
Frankly, I find the 5 why’s good, but not the most successful approach to gaining innovative insights. For that, I rely on observational research coupled with some follow-up contextual inquiry that often includes the 5 why’s. Regardless of how good the 5 why’s method is, the difference between what people say and do is enough to mean the difference between an evolutionary and a revolutionary design.
I find designs based on self-reported data to be merely incremental improvements and designs based on observational data to be more market dominating quantum leap approaches.
July 26th, 2010 at 16:41
In hindsight it’s easy to reconstruct the chain from horse to car.
But even if Ford would have searched for an alternative for a horse, he still would have needed some conceptual solution to begin with. In other words he would have needed the knowledge or visions to build a motorcar, or whatever solution.
This is a prerequisite for the next mental step: his recognition that such a contraption would be a solution to the need (yes) for speed.
Both notions are necessary: thorough knowledge of both the need and the technology to provide a solution for that need. It’s like with the chicken and the egg.
(By the way: I don’t think the car he came up with indeed was faster than the average horse. Especially considering the dirt roads that were usual in those days. Why bother for pavement if there are no cars to drive on it?)