Just like the weather at The Open championship inSt. Andrews the media can giveth and taketh away.  Apple has been riding the wind of media hype for awhile.  Now Steve Jobs is calling out the media for blowing the antenna problem out of proportion.  He may be right, but that sword cuts both ways.

Lesser organizations do not get the attention either way, but there is a lesson here.  One of the key customer purposes of a phone is the ability to make phone calls.  Jobs is alleged to have fallen in love with the design and wanted to keep it a secret. 

As with most command and control management, Jobs infatuation over-ruled the internal engineers who were concerned about the design.  Can anyone say “BP Oil Spill?”  No one was injured or killed or will antennagate lead to an economic disaster, but it is a smaller scale disaster of sorts.

Apple has surely done some innovative things over the years to make phones interesting and fun.  However, what matters to customers still is the fundamental use of a phone.  Compromise customer purpose (what matters) and the result is unwanted demand in the form of complaints.

Failure demand in complaints cause costs to rise and revenue to fall.  There are degrees of egregious failure demand, but they are all expensive in terms of brand, phone calls and bottom line.

Too many companies struggle with mistakes in understanding customer purpose and demand.  With so much riding on ignoring customers it seems to make little sense.  Some fall in love with design, some to cut costs and possibly a plethora of other reasons.  In the end, it is just expensive.

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Make the new decade a profitable and rewarding one, start a new path here.  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about how to get started at tripp@newsystemsthinking.com.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

Tripp Babbitt is a columist (Quality Digest and IQPC), speaker, and consultant to private and public service industry.