Are You Distracted by Other People's Success? | Simon Sinek

I think very often companies can risk becoming reactive to things that happen in the marketplace, which may. So here's a great example. Right, let's use a real life example. BlackBerry was a really fantastic company who built a really fantastic product with a really clear sense of vision, which is we make strong, secure, extremely reliable products. And if you remember, if you ever had a BlackBerry, you could throw that thing across the room, drop it on the street, and it just didn't break, it just kept working. It was the most reliable product on the marketplace. You could type on the full QWERTY keyboard without even looking down. You could send a hole in the email. And governments and big businesses loved it because it was really secure and really reliable. Then the iPhone showed up and the iPhone was the new shiny object. And BlackBerry, instead of sticking to their core and their beliefs, became distracted by the shiny popularity of the iPhone, which is a completely different animal serving a completely different audience. And they started trying to copy iPhone. So they started putting apps on their, on their blackberries which what did it do? Made it slow and sluggish. Then they started coming out with flat screens. You're not going to make a better iPhone than an iPhone. And they basically destroyed their company because they completely went off the reservation and abandoned their fantastic cause. There could be two marketplaces which we have the shiny object of the iPhone that we use in our personal lives and our companies prefer that we use a BlackBerry because it's reliable, it's safe, and it's really, really strong. And we could have had two dominant players for two dominant reasons, like a PC and a Mac. Two dominant players for two dominant reasons, for two different reasons. But they didn't, they got distracted. And I can imagine that their business people were saying, you know, business is moving at light speed, we have to react. Or we can work to advance our cause in a different way and not become distracted. And that's part of the hard thing, which is are we stuck in our old ways or are we actually sticking to our long term vision? That's part of the difficulty of business, to know the difference.

That their business people were saying, you know, business is moving at light speed, we have to react. Or we can work to advance our cause in a different way and not become distracted. And that's part of the hard thing, which is are we stuck in our old ways or are we actually sticking to our long term vision? That's part of the difficulty of business, to know the difference.