The (old) Alpha Mind

Excellent post by Shel Holtz on customer focus.

The Alpha Mind has a somewhat different perspective. One of the main themes of my research agenda is how ideas succeed and how persons contribute to the process.

Shel’s focus is on a company’s need to develop and sustain solid customer relationships. Along the way, he tells how some companies whose mission statements focus on shareholder value do less well than some companies whose missions statements include strong statements about customer primacy. For Shel, there’s no puzzle, or at least a kindergarten-obvious one, the key to which is right on the surface: customers supply the company with income, and making them happy will make them happy to provide money.

I am fascinated by a different puzzle, a question whose key is less obvious: If customer focus succeeds so well (and there’s lots of evidence that it does), why are any companies still in love with SVE-centric mission statements?

Despite his different angle of view, Shel nevertheless supplies an important clue when he says in response to a shareholder-centric statement, “Yeah, but what do you do?”

From that simple question, my hypothesis leaps full-blown: it’s not companies that are in love with SVE-type mission statements, it’s managements, managements that are fundamentally out of touch not only with their customers, but even with ther employees.

Let’s face it. Employee in the trenches of most companies don’t know how to create shareholder value. If they did they’d be management. Thus, as Shel’s question implies, a mission statement that’s all about SVE tells them nothing about what they’ll do. For many of them, serving customers is what they actually do day to day. A mission statement with the customer at the heart tells those employees several things about management. It says:

• We know what your work entails.
• We value your work.
• We fully support you in your work.
• In fact, our main job in management is to support your work.

When employees are told these things, they know the answer to Shel’s question. They know what they’ll do–why they’ll get up in the morning, why they’ll go to work, why they’ll be truly engaged in their work and not always looking or wishing for some other way to feed their families.

A mission statement about shareholder value tells them none of this.

AT&T was once a great, a truly examplary company. It was made so by Theodore Vail. One of his contributions was the decision to issue tiny shares, stocks that masses of people could purchase. The result was that America owned AT&T and cared about its success. Vail got the whole country on his side, and he did it by making it possible for “little people” to contribute to the company’s capitalization. A Customer-centric mission statement does the same for employees: where they may never have been able to see how they enhance shareholder value, they know perfectly well whether they have given the customer good measure, or whether they have actively supported the efforts of their workmates to do the same. Their small actions are big enough to give them ownership in the company’s success.

Their employer’s mission statement is then a meme that can take root and grow.

P.S. Vail did something else to make AT&T great: he put customer service at the heart of the business. Another point for Shel.

Neville Hobson has added a “Terms of Use” page to his blog.  Alas, it will probably be something we’ll all need to do.  Neville has modelled a pretty good way to do it.  His Terms page also includes his own commitments, such as that he will

• act in good faith
• check facts
• correct errors
• give proper attribution for re-used materials
• not plagiarize
• …

All in all, a thoughtful, well-written document, absent legalese, and one which may be very helpful to Neville and to his readers.

In this document he also explicitly applies a Creative Commons license to his work. I heartily approve.

Today I had a silly problem with FeedBurner.  I had some difficulty subscribing to a couple of blogs. Most of the silliness was mine, although I could point out a flaw or two in FeedBurner’s tech writing.

But the delay caused by my having to puzzle something out before I could subscribe to my first-ever FeedBurner feeds permitted me to entertain what is really an important question, to wit: do I want to use FeedBurner? And I don’t mean as a blogger, but even as a reader of blogs. I’m fundamentally in agreement with Winer on the issue of centralizing a technology whose very purpose is decentralization. I’m not sure I want to buy into it.

But Feedburner seems to have sold a lot of bloggers on the idea that they need no other feed than FB’s. I really want to read some of these blogs, but I’d rather have a choice whether or not to encourage another organization’s effort to port the Dominance Paradigm to the web.  Frankly, the more I see this kind of centralization take place, the more I’ll want to buck the trend.

Who’s this “sir”? Is it is the one G. M. Hopkins addresses in “Thou art indeed just, Lord/if I contend with thee; but so, sir, what I plead is just…”?

Did I in some rash moment, now forgotten, utter the prayer, “stop me before I blog again!”?

Many of us who blog are plagued, when we return to the sphere after more than a week’s silence, with the red-cheeked need to explain why we’ve been gone. To make excuses. Maybe even to promise this was the last time, really, I’m going straight honest please oh please honey just give me one more chance.

Just now, I’m way past that. Right now I just want to kvetch.

Why me? Why must I live in a universe where cheapskates who signed up for free blogs from blogspot can blog, while I, who pay good money for my own domain on my own host, will wait 90 seconds or longer for this post to post, and this after waiting three days for my hosting company to fix the file server that dishes out my pages, and that after two database failures in the prior two days?

Why?

Okay. That’s done. I feel better now.

Look for posts here about the shopping I should have done for a hosting provider before I signed with a new one last month.