12 Customer-centred tips – whatever your business

1 Serve others or yourself: your choice

We have a choice every day of serving or being self-serving. Too many leaders are self-serving. We need new role models for leadership.

2 What business are you really in?

The financial services industry should aim to be in the "peace of mind" business. Disney doesn’t say "We’re in the theme park business." They say ‘We are in the happiness business."

3 What are your values?

Only 10% of companies set values. Those that do tend to make two mistakes – too many values (research shows people can only handle three or four) – and failing to rank the values. Life is about value conflict.

4 Stop killing creativity

What kills creativity? In large organisations you have to prove that a new idea will become a £50 million business before you can launch it. Those kinds of projections don’t work. You don’t know if it’s going to be a £50m business. I don’t know. Nobody knows.

5 Stop accepting other people’s frameworks

Once you have learnt someone else’s framework, you are bound to think within it. Michael Porter and others will tell you your strategy is based on how you create value through your value chain. But, good strategists by-pass the value chain completely. Michael Dell’s business plan was rejected by his Professor because it defied Porter’s reliance on a value chain. So, Dell launched it anyway. Don’t use frameworks or case studies to learn. Think about the product, service or company five years from now and how it should be. That is where your strategy starts: it frees you from having a limiting framework.

6 Knowledge is obsolete. Sense is not.

It’s not the knowledge economy. The Japanese compulsory education system takes nine years, in which you have to memorise masses of knowledge. That knowledge can be condensed onto a pound coin. But, you can’t automate ‘That sounds right’ or ‘That feels right.’ Today, those two things are far more important than the ability to say ‘That’s the right answer.’"

7 Know what motivates people.

It’s different for different people – including yourself. Sir Steve Redgrave, the five-times Olympic Gold Medal winner summed it up: “Some people train to win. I used to train just not to lose. Know what your motivation is. That’s what will bring consistency of perfection.”

8 You can’t manage customers

I hate the use of the words Customer Management. It assumes we can do things with them. When we talk about Customer Relationship management or CRM, what is the assumption we make? That WE can manage the relationship, that the consumer is passive and a recipient.

9 You cannot market an experience

Just think of high net worth experiences for a moment – a meal in a top notch restaurant, an concert with your favourite band, choir or orchestra, an exotic holiday. The people who sell these things aren’t selling at the cost of provision, because you pay for the experience. You cannot market an experience, You co-create it. It’s contextual and depends on who you are with.

10 We misunderstand customer-centric

Prof CK Prahalad, the distinguished corporate strategist said "Becoming customer-centred does NOT mean the firm becomes more customer oriented. It means the consumer becomes part of the unit of analysis, becomes part of the value creation."

11 No more sectors

Stop thinking ‘sectors’. The consumers decide what sectors they are in, what their ‘portfolio’ is. For example, the individual consumer decides what their personal health portfolio of products and services is – their wellness portfolio – not Merck or Pfizer, who only have 10% of it. When you realise there are no sectors, you can create hybrids. Tesco and Asda are now in financial services. The traditional boundaries are irrelevant.

12 Failure isn’t all it’s cracked up to be

“The secret of success is the capacity to survive failure,” said Noel Coward. Failure teaches you about life. My life is, at the moment, much sweeter for it. - Gerald Ratner

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