Company growth is a wonderful thing. Start-­ups developing on a huge scale, established companies penetrating new markets and developing new products while large corporations create significant regional or global impact with what they do best. There is one problem.

While facing growth and achieving success, companies and managers often introduce more policies, more new ways and means of extracting profits, focus becomes internal, the company loses touch with its customers and suddenly they are faced with markets decreasing.
The moment companies start to “forget” their customers is when they should redefine their strategy and shift focus. How do companies “forget” about their customers?
Well, for the same reasons they forget about their “first-lines” or education. They follow others,look only at data from their market research and believe they have everything figured out because they are growing and are successful (at the moment).

“Curse of success” is the reason why companies fail over and over again. The more a company is successful, greater the confidence and greater the prob­ability of failure because they stop questioning and redefining every­thing, human capital development becomes a cost-efficiency machine and innovation becomes a random event caused by luck.
“First-­lines” are companies`inter­action points with the customer throughout their customer journey. Companies often perceive “first-lines” as commodities, where they should actually be one of the differ­entiation points bringing that added value for every customer.  It is exactly the same with education. Companies often perceive it as a “necessary evil” and a commodity, where actually it offers a continu­ous possibility to question the world around and look for new opportunities.

“First-lines” and education are similar. You have to in­vest in them constantly to potentially achieve future benefits from a happy, loyal customer or manager that will redefine your business or create innovation.
If you don`t, you`re potentially fac­ing negative perception, unsatisfied customers and employees ignoring change, growth and new opportu­nities. Either way, if you ignore them, you`re probably influenced by the magic spell called “curse of success”. One that makes both big and small companies disappear and rich people poor. Good thing there`s a cure. Look it up at www.innovation-institute.eu.