The Customer Copernicus - Preview

Copyright Material - Provided by Taylor & Francis Not for redistribution

12

INTRODUC TION

outside-in conviction as other stakeholders become more infuential. There is a painful return to the more common inside-out belief system alongside a decline in business and customer success. We then outline our proposi- tion and introduce our framework. Chapter 2 reviews what good looks like – the visible, crucial activities and leadership style of a customer-led business. There are six activities that especially matter – making clear choices about which customers to serve and which needs to meet, developing guiding insights that give the busi- ness an edge, creating innovative propositions, empowering colleagues, using approaches that encourage rapid learning, and having a customer- planning process. The leadership style that works has three components: being genuinely outward-looking, being clearly committed to the cus- tomer internally and being assertive externally and, therefore, prepared to lead in the market. Although this kind of formula is well established, leadership teams generally struggle to embrace the complete set. In Chapter 3, we describe what good feels like. The importance and power of the prevailing shared beliefs is recognised and the way they guide everyday behaviour and critical decision-making, providing a lens through which colleagues in a business make sense of the world around them. Recognised in anthropology, the study of group human behaviour – and, as already mentioned, more formally labelled discourse – includes not only the language but also the range of other observable manifestations of deeper, unspoken, shared assumptions about the way the world works, what success is and how success is achieved. Having highlighted the pivotal role of shared beliefs, we explore how organisations create these beliefs in the frst place in Chapter 4. We show how they can be changed from the conventional inside-out to the remark- able outside-in. We argue that having an outside-in belief system is rare because it is unnatural and very hard to create. This would explain why so many who profess to be or intend to be customer-led never achieve it. We observe that efforts are frustrated if they don’t break free from the strong gravitational forces relentlessly pulling mature organisations back to the more natural inside-out belief system. They are missing an essen- tial ingredient, a kind of rocket fuel providing thrust and momentum – Moments of Belief, which are customer-led actions or initiatives that are good for customers but risky for the business. When they work, they show people across the organisation, for real, that customer-led success can be