Woo your biggest fans. This rule says concentrate your efforts at understanding on the 2 percent of consumers that personally drive 20 percent of sales and invite their friends and colleagues to enjoy you.

The starting point is to create a qualitative understanding of market drivers. You need to get into the head of the consumer and be able to tell her story. It is both art and science. The purpose of the market map is to define dissatisfactions, hopes, dreams and fears. Winning solutions respond to the distinct and specific needs of a group of consumers.

Woo your biggest fans. This rule says concentrate your efforts at understanding on the 2 percent of consumers that personally drive 20 percent of sales and invite their friends and colleagues to enjoy you.

I believe in classic ideas. They are timeless. They are forever. There are many fads in management.

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

Too many companies are happy to have workers to dread working. They have the wrong attitude because they have the wrong leadership.

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.