We focus so much on change that we can drift away from the origins that made us compelling to customers without noticing it. So, this is a reminder to check that, in the melee of change all organizations go through, you haven't drifted away from what made customers come to you in the first place:

“The biggest threat to an organization always comes from within. It stems from complacency: losing touch with the customer and losing touch with the outside environment. It is called losing the corporate memory. When a number one brand hits the buffers, its fall from grace can be surprisingly fast. Marks & Spencer, once famed for its 15 per cent share of the women’s clothing market and for selling a third of all women’s underwear in the UK, had a spectacular slump in the late 90s shortly after delivering a record £1.2 billion in profits.

"After that the chain, one of Britain’s oldest, most solid names, stumbled from one turnaround strategy to another, really recovering only in the past few years. One thing you can be sure of now is that the architect of its recovery, chief executive Stuart Rose, is not going allow the chain to become complacent again. He refused to declare a recovery at M&S until January 2007, after months of successive growth, and is determined that his team will not lose focus, despite the admiring remarks of business commentators."

That's from Allan Leighton's new book On Leadership. I'll post more customer-related snippets here as I come across them.

Labels: Allan Leighton, change, corporate memory

I was just reminded of this story:

A consultant at Black & Decker was giving a talk to his clients and held up a drill. "Is this what you sell?" He asked. He got a resounding yes. "So, do you think this is what your customers are buying?" Again, he got a yes. "No, they're not," he says. He produces a piece of wood with a hole in it, and points to the hole. "THAT's what they are buying."

'Customer solutions' not 'products' is the way to think of what is going on between you and customers. So, are you selling drills when your customers are buying holes?

In the last few years of his life, W. Edwards Deming, the father of Total Quality Management, refused to use the acronym TQM or the phrase Total Quality Management.

He said he could count on the fingers of one hand the companies that get it and do it right. And that had nothing to do with the thousands of companies claiming they were doing it.

Deming said the problem was that language had replaced action; new words and procedures had been laid down like wallpaper over existing attitudes and ways of doing things, giving an illusion of change but the same underlying reality.

Littering your annual report, your training and your procedural manuals with ‘customer focus’ and ‘TQM’ won’t get you anywhere. It’s the transformation of the prevailing system of management you need.

Peter Senge (see below), knew Deming and was a student of his. He says this gap between what organizations say and what they actually do is prevalent and astonishing. It's the "Your call is important to us" recorded message that denies the reality that the system is structured to make you wait, because that's cheaper for the supplier.

The real test of integrity over illusion is if an organization says the same thing in its business plan, in its Board meetings and to its shareholders and investors as it does to its customers. But, in 90% of cases, there are two versions of reality here; one driving the business and one the veneer presented to customers: in the former, the agenda is to achieve maximum 'share of wallet', in other words, to take as much of the customer's money as possible on as regular a basis as possible. The latter is the rhetoric of 'customer first' and customer service as lip service.

But, of course you wouldn't do that to your customers...would you?

Labels: Deming, TQM