I disagree with Jobs and Bezos

Customers do get a vote

Customers do get a vote

The idea of strategy as a high-level vision does more harm than good, even in the past. This misconception is probably why 50% to 67% of strategic plans fail — the gap between strategic intentions and day-to-day operations is too significant. In a world where companies struggle to shorten the interval between acquiring signals from the field and strategic reactions, seeing a strategy only as a broad vision is dangerous.

The authors of the book Designing for Growth, Tim Ogilvie and Jeanne Liedtka, clearly distinguish design thinking from strategy. They insist that “strategy tells us where we want to contribute — who we will serve, what makes us uniquely suited to serve them, and what we hope to accomplish as an organization by doing so.” Design thinking, in turn, “helps us actually solve those problems by exploring how” because “design thinking won’t tell us who to serve, or why.”

“Design thinking” is a set of tools helping connect product decisions with customers’…