A company that truly understands its consumers will never be lost: As a company grows, it often becomes detached from its consumers. Employees generalize and stereotype “their consumer” and struggle to understand why new products fail. Successful companies realize that listening to and understanding the needs of consumers (not just reading surveys or providing customer service) is hard but necessary work. Unpacking what truly drives and delights consumers is what makes companies successful.
The solutions companies need are often outside their walls: The world is full of smart people. While companies may know their business better than anyone else, they often limit their growth and success by not leveraging the wisdom that exists in the world. Great companies put hubris aside and see the potential to learn from outside their walls.
Innovation isn’t about ideas, it’s about teams: Products are just the end result of the innovation process. Too often we become enamored with innovative ideas and see them as our ultimate goal, but we are mistaken. The real goal of innovation is the creation of a corporate culture that embodies an innovation mindset; only then can innovation be repeatable and profitable. It’s about creating teams that don’t fear the ambiguity of the innovation process, who can protect and usher ideas through the business and can stay true to the guiding insights.
Real world experimentation is the quickest path to launch: Turning insight into action requires real world iteration. Great companies start with hard won hypotheses and translate them into rough ideas quickly to gather feedback from consumers. While consumers often can’t articulate the correct course of action, perceptive, enabled teams can extract deep learning to create a profitable path forward.
Focus is at the heart of a successful business: Without focus, a company’s resources, energies and morale are weakened. Knowing where you need to go and why gives purpose and strategy to a business. However, focus is not arrived at quickly or individually. Developing focus is a process of unlearning former biases, learning new truths and hardening resolves to arrive at new beliefs and new guiding perspectives as a team.
Why Malachite?
Thousands of years ago, human tools were limited to those made of wood, rock or animal bone. While useful for simple tasks, none of these soft materials were adequate in constructing the roads, buildings or infrastructures necessary for great civilizations to thrive. Metal tools, and metallurgy, were needed to build empires. How did the great, ancient civilizations know where to dig to extract the much needed metals? They focused their efforts on the rocks that had magnificent streaks of green—now known as malachite. This mineral crystalizes in rocks with high concentrations of copper and served as an indicator for early civilizations that the easily smelted metal was abundant. Only with the advent of copper tools was the construction of the Great Pyramids, Stonehenge and the Great Wall possible.
Malachite Strategy and Research is dedicated to helping teams focus on finding the “right places to dig” to uncover the most profitable areas for their business. While other corporations are mining blindly and wasting precious resources, Malachite gives companies an informed perspective to see opportunities that others miss.