To what does the richest man in the world credit his enormous success? “What I have in mind every morning is that the desirability of a brand should be as strong in ten years. It’s really the key to our success.”

There's a three-circle venn diagram that’s flashed up in any innovation presentation: innovation occurs at the intersection technological feasibility, business viability, and human desirability. At Stanford, we emphasize the importance of being thoughtful about when to apply — and importantly, when to defer applying — the various lenses.

It may surprise some folks to discover that there is a time when it’s unhelpful to emphasize profitability. But as this fascinating Forbes profile makes crystal clear, when Bernard Arnault thinks decades out, he's not thinking in terms of profitability, but desirability.

Such long-term thinking is critical to sustained success, but it’s in short supply today. Most managers are concerned about this quarter’s results, to their own demise. When anti-trust regulations threatened to make turn an historic innovation shop into a relic, AT&T President Theodore Vail made a radical strategic shift. As Gertner describes in The Idea Factory, "In Vail's view, another key to AT&T's revival was defining it as a technological leader with legions of engineers working unceasingly to improve the system. As the business historian Louis Galambos would later point out, as Vail's strategy evolved, the company's executives began to imagine how their company might adapt its technology not only for the near term but for a future far, far away: ‘Eventually it came to be assumed within the Bell System that there would never be a time when technological innovation would no longer be needed.’ The Vail strategy, in short, would measure the company's progress ‘in decades instead of years.’”

To emphasize a long-term orientation doesn’t require innovation to be expensive. In fact, it can be much cheaper to foreground desirability data (rather than feasibility testing) in early-stage solution development

Related: Create Desirability Data
Related: Make Experiments Cheaper

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