You need to have sufficient resources against your priorities. Your eyes have to be open every day.

Companies that get in trouble have a failure to see two realities: market trends and competitor attacks.

Failure to make the tough but necessary choices means slow painful death.

Don't ask your customers what they want. This rule is based on the view that they probably don't know. You have to fully understand them, the context for their needs and their major dissatisfactions.

Respond to your customer's dissatisfactions with precision and power.

Consumers are time constrained, budget restricted and less loved than they would like. Give them a wonderful experience and they will share it. Capture their soul and win big time.

I like to take CEOs into consumers' homes to see the "real world." CEOs have privileged lives with big incomes, lots of help, access to just about anything they wish. The average consumer lives on $53,000 a year and has daily tradeoffs and compromises that must be made. I took a CEO into a trailer park so he could observe first-hand - and understand - how consumers use his product.