Who is defending your customer?

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When you are setting strategy, who plays the customer advocate role?

Geoff Wilson

In a meeting this week with a very thoughtful management team that was in the midst of a heated discussion, the CEO made a comment that stuck with me.

He noted that one of the more direct and opinionated voices in the room was “defending the customer” while talking about strategic priorities.

And that got me thinking:  When you are building your strategy, do you ensure that the customer has an advocate in the room?  We talk about the voice of the customer as if having it in the mix automatically means something, but what if the voice of the customer doesn’t have an advocate?  What if it’s just another “opinion” in the room?

That would be a tragedy.

When you are planning your strategy, think about how to ensure that the customer’s point of view is not only known, but actively represented in the room.  That may be as simple as designating a customer advocate in your strategic discussions, or it may mean actually bringing customers into the room.

You never know what you might learn, or what you might prevent yourself from doing.

What do you think? 

 

Strategy like an immigrant

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Strategy has to be a synthesis of old and new.

I spent the weekend with my daughter walking around New York City.  The city is a great one. It is, at its best, a fantastic combination of culture, ethnicity, language, foods, and styles.  While walking the Lower East Side, a thought come to mind, and I’ll do my best to develop it in 500 words or less.

U.S. political leaders like to romanticize the United States of America as a “nation of immigrants.”  We have heard this platitude so many times over the past several decades (JFK first published his book by the same name in 1958) that it has attained a sort of knee-jerk validity in everyday discourse.  Our guide on a short walking tour loved to allude to this notion.

But, the notion is actually very wrong.  And we are worse off for using it.  I’ll try to articulate my simple version of the truth, and what it means for any American business leader.

Here it goes:

We are, at our worst, a nation of conquerors.

We are, at our best, a nation of builders…a nation of synthesizers.

Our country is built on conquest. You may not like that notion but it doesn’t make it less true. Our most pervasive mindsets are built on conquest. Our most polar political ideals are based on “mine” and “not yours.”  Almost since the founding of the country, we have reveled in ideals of “winning” meant only as “doing it our way.”

But, what makes us great is synthesis.  When it comes to what really made our country great, it’s building from introduced parts.  It’s assimilation in the best sense of the word. It’s not merely coexistence or “tolerance” (a fantastically risky word), but symbiosis.  It’s immigrant Jews on the Lower East Side patronizing immigrant Chinese restaurants during the high holidays…if you will.

To be a little more tongue in cheek, it’s Mexican Pizza.

So, we have to build with full recognition that we have the conqueror’s ethos that permeates our country.

What’s the message here for a blog on business strategy?

It’s this:  In your business today, you have a way of doing things.  You have systems, processes, approaches, value propositions, cultural elements, and memes (in the traditional sense of the word) that drive your business.  Your strategy can be to either “conquer” or to “build.”  You can either take “who you are” and “what you do” and apply it to all situations old and new; or you can search for piece parts to assimilate and synthesize into a higher order of success.

This might mean forgetting some of what you knew.

It might mean inviting in new perspectives (and actually listening to them).

It might even mean looking at competitors you’d previously want to conquer as potential collaborators.

If you do strategy like an immigrant, you do strategy as synthesis.  You make better out of a few pieces of really good.

Now, I’m going to go have a bagel with ham and cheese.

 

 

Actually, the issue is that you have no vision

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Single issue focus is just as bad for business as it is for government policy.  It’s vision that counts.

This post springs from the debates surrounding the tax reform legislation currently gestating in the bowels of D.C.

Interviewed on one of the many news programs early this morning was a leader of a home-building special interest group.  With great bluster, this gentleman spoke of how the capping of mortgage interest deductions for mortgages above $500,000 would be detrimental to home values, and because of that it is ultimately a bad idea.

This guy was a single-issue representative–the very personification of a “special” interest lobbyist with a single issue to flog up on Capitol Hill.  The interview was admirable for its pureness; but it was cautionary for a single reason: It lacked any nod toward vision for what the government ought to subsidize through tax policy.  When you are a homebuilder, a lot of what you focus on is the amount of money that can flow to homebuilding.  You care a lot about whether the government decides to stop subsidizing mortgages for homes that only really wealthy people buy because, well, those kind of homes represent a lot of income for you.

What you might NOT focus on is whether the government ought to subsidize luxury housing of any kind.  A reasonable person could ask whether tax policy ought to subsidize jumbo mortgages at all.

The interview didn’t get into the role of government, it only got at the desires of a single-issue interest group; and it brought to mind an important management imperative for almost any of us:

Never, ever, allow an issue of any sort take the place of a vision.

How often do you see managers focused on productivity in a single part of the plant or shop floor, or efficiency of a single department in a company, only to have no concept of–or, indeed to work against–how the overall company delivers value for customers.

You may think you don’t see this, but you do.

You see it every time you sit on hold waiting for a customer service representative whose time was determined to be more valuable than any specific customer’s (if that weren’t the case, then why make the customer wait and the rep not wait? Hmmmm?).  You see it every time you walk around a big box retailer…searching for a person to help you find that item you are looking for.  You see it every time you receive an appointment window of 4 (or 6?) hours for a service call at your house.

These are the outcomes of single issue votes in the business world.  They are the results of a focus on efficiency (or inefficiency) in one place at the expense of the whole or, in the worst of cases, the customer.

A customer-centered vision for service would envision no customers waiting, just as a citizen-centered focus on the tax code might envision no subsidies for luxury homes.   Yet, we have special interests that win in the corporate office at the expense of the customer; and we have special interests mining the tax code in spades.

The next time you entertain that consultant who just wants to help you cut “inefficiency,” make sure you ask how that inefficiency fits within your vision for value delivery.  That consultant’s issue isn’t a vision.

Just make sure that your issue isn’t that you lack vision.

What do you think?