Complexity is the defining character of our age. We see it encroaching on us from every direction. Complexity seems to have infected even those things that were at one time very simple. Remember S&H Green Stamps, one of the first customer loyalty programs? My parents and grandparents collected them whenever they made a purchase at a participating vendor. They licked and placed them in books until they had enough to redeem for an item in the S&H Catalog. They sent the required number of books and pages of green stamps off to wherever and a short time later we received the item in the mail. A model of simplicity compared to what we have now.

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Yes, I’ve had my shorts in a knot for quite some time now when I think of executive leadership in most companies, which have positions that don’t make sense, and those very companies may be missing the most important leadership post of all. First of all, technology is just a tool we use to get work done.

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A theme of recent global conferences has been the mix of different approaches to improving business performance. This quest for business performance improvement as measured by reducing costs, improving revenues and enhanced service (also known as ‘the triple crown’) is a worldwide phenomena brought on by increasing competition, greater customer promiscuity, chaotic business cycles and more generally ‘globalization’. The pressure continues to increase and companies are seeking to extract every last opportunity out of their various initiatives and approaches. So what works best then?

The last three decades have seen a gradual refinement of management thinking and practice to now present a strategic choice for organizations. The route people take should be determined by the place companies find themselves in, the place they would like to get to and the speed with which they need to move. Unfortunately all too often companies are choosing inappropriate methods and tools, investing large amounts of money in dubious technologies and training their people in techniques already proven suspect in the last century. Why is this so?

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For years I have used the question in interviews of employment candidates, “Is the customer always right?” It was a tricky question to answer, and it told me a lot about the experience and maturity level of the candidate. If the candidate answered yes, I knew they had not worked with many customers directly and for very long; or they were just telling me what I wanted to hear. Anyone who has worked directly with customers for very long and paying attention understands that customers only completely understand what they want and what it looks like to succeed for them. This concept has nothing to do with being right or good for the customer.

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Do you know who your customer is? Would you know them, if you saw them on the street? Do you know what they look like, sound, act, feel, smell, and and even taste like? The question of “who is our customer” is the foundation of every business or organization. Peter Drucker wrote, “It is the customer who determines what a business is.” Yet from the performance of so many companies, it appears this is far from being as concisely defined as needed.

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