The Customer Copernicus - Preview

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INTRODUC TION

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of broadcast channels. It’s not just the customers that beneft; the compa- nies do well too – reaping signifcant and lucrative rewards. Customer- led success can be extreme, e.g. catapulting O2 from laggard to market leadership in telecoms, tripling easyJet’s profts in the competitive airline business, taking Tesco from third in the UK retail supermarket league to third in the world. So, it’s obvious, it’s valuable, it’s talked about by everyone and yet … We have been working in this feld, wrestling with this question, for more than 20 years. But in the process of writing this book, we realised that what goes on in organisations that’s visible is not the full story, just as symptoms do not always easily reveal their cause. When we are in a social environment like a workplace, we are guided by an invisible hand – the shared beliefs of the group, or the discourse , to give it its anthropologically more accurate name. What do people believe success looks like? How do people believe success is achieved? Two questions that are answered not by asking but by observing, i.e. fnding clues in how people speak, what gets their time, how offces are arranged, what earns a pat on the back and what gets ignored. This all resides in the organisational subconscious and yet, as anyone who has worked in an organisation for any time real- ises, we all feel the forces at work, we formulate beliefs about what is valued, and critically, we fnd ways to ft in. We recognise and live the shared beliefs of the organisation. Then, on top of this recognition, we saw two competing belief systems that are pivotal to answering our ques- tions about the rarity and feetingness of success – inside-out beliefs and outside-in beliefs. Looking inside-out is natural – you sit every day inside the organisa- tion with your colleagues close, customers distant, and you make assump- tions about the way things are done that don’t get challenged. This is not customer-led. Looking outside-in is not natural. In fact, it’s downright odd. It means fnding ways to stand in the shoes of customers, seeing the bigger picture of their problems and all of the solutions – not just competing ranges of supermarket ready meals, but alternatives including going out to eat or ordering a takeaway or having a snack and using the money to go to the cinema. And then it means being utterly determined to fnd new and better solutions, unlimited by preconceptions of a defned market and the obvi- ous competition.