The Customer Copernicus - Preview

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INTRODUC TION

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achieved. When people en masse see the results in their own organisations, they start to believe that being customer-led ‘might just work around here.’ Repeated Moments of Belief solidify the belief that this is what we are all about, this is what we must do more of to really succeed. Simple, but not easy … In Chapter 5, we explore the inevitability of losing customer-led beliefs. Why, even when a business has transitioned into a customer-led success, it remains unnatural and therefore diffcult to sustain over the long term. We show how time extracts a price by diminishing the strength of belief in the group of individuals who frst established it, and how the people who joined in the formative years come to take it for granted. We also show how growth brings increasing complexity, scale and distance from the world outside. These forces, akin to a kind of organisational gravity, continu- ally pull the belief system back down to earth. Without a special kind of defence, the business eventually reverts to the more natural inside-out way of working. Often this descent is painful – a crash landing rather than a gentle touchdown. Only deliberate action to nurture shared outside-in beliefs will keep you aloft, something even more unusual than the actions that fostered the outside-in-ness in the frst place. In Chapter 6, we show how you can protect these customer-led beliefs. What’s needed are three things. First, paying attention to your belief sys- tem, an unusual activity in most organisations where it is mostly unspoken; second, ensuring Moments of Belief fow continually to show everyone what matters around here is just as unusual as it’s always been; and third, being boldest when challenged most, protecting the trailblazing customer- led ethos, not the business model that expressed it but which is now challenged. In these ways, despite being unnatural, the North Star of the customer stays front and centre, and the business continues creating cus- tomer value in new and better ways to attract, retain and grow the value of its customer relationships. In our Conclusion, we provide more insight into why this is so dif- fcult, and why so few organisations sustain a successful customer-led approach in the long run. The problem is that inconvenient actions, like challenging your own business model because a better alternative is emerging, are painful. To become customer-led in the frst place, to take action that is outside-in and therefore risky, requires a pre-condi- tion, one we call ‘burningness.’ This emerges from one of three things –