Number of words: 166

The people who run corporations spend too much time paying too much attention to the wrong things. In virtually every company that I have worked with for over four decades, I have seen executives spending just about all of their time on operations, on questions about producing a product or providing a service, on personnel, on cost-cutting. 

Those responsibilities seem to take up about 95% of everyone’s time at the top of the companies. What is left, that tiny 5%, is focused on a very important part of the business formula, the customer and marketing to the customer. 

What happens because of this? Car companies and up making cars people don’t want. Retailers offer merchandise that doesn’t sell in uncomfortable stores. Customers feel that they are at the end of a long whip handled by characters who just seem to know or care how it feels to be lost and unhappy. 

Excerpted from Pg 244 of ‘Lessons from the heartland of American Business’ by Gerald Greenwald