And don’t fall into the trap of thinking you can just ask your customers what they want that’s different. I guarantee Lin-Manuel Miranda didn’t do that. Your customers don’t know what they want. They know they want something better—but not different. Nobody asked for an eight-track tape player. Nobody asked for a cell phone, let alone a smart phone. Nobody asked for the Internet. Nobody asked for social media. Nobody asked for Amazon.com. My all-time favorite quote about this came from Henry Ford: “If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
