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Your customer is the business! The purpose of business is to create a customer, to provide something of value for which an independent outsider is willing to exchange their purchasing power.¹ A fundamental question then becomes, "Do we begin with what we already have or do we begin with what we must obtain to be successful in total leadership of a market?" The risk of failure increases markedly when the ideas you develop do not fit with your existing capabilities, or force you to acquire those capabilities at too high a cost.²

Market leaders always define their business concept in terms of results produced for their customers. They build their teams based on the unique knowledge requirements of the business and orient their operating strategies and service delivery systems specifically to meet customer requirements. This is hard work. It goes far beyond the traditionally understood formulations of being "low cost provider" or "high value provider" to the idea of leveraging value for the customer over the total cost to the customer of benefiting from your product or service.³ In the process, market leaders often achieve both low costs and substantial differentiation.

Leaders can ask a number of key questions:

1. Is our business idea consistent with what customers (and non-customers) care about most?
2. Does it mesh with our organization's capabilities?
3. Are we pursuing more ideas than we can handle?

Will the idea make money?

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