Doug Leather

Let’s face it! Organisations that focus on building short-term and long term customer value significantly improve the sustainability of their business performance.

Many organisations ‘wax lyrical’ about their undying customer focus and their customer centric organisational structure and culture designed to deliver a unique and differentiated customer experience. In some, albeit few, organisations this is true. In others, partly true and in the majority, this is little more than an erotic dream in ‘cloud cuckoo’ land. Research has shown that up to 5 times as many executives believe they and their companies are customer centric relative to the number of customers who agree. Talk about different perspectives!

Desired Capabilities:

We’d be hard pressed to find an organisation that publicly states that it has no desire to be customer centric. Whilst I’m sufficiently open-minded to recognise that certain organisations in certain industries may...

Roger Martin, in his Harvard Business Review article (Jan-Feb 2010) entitled ‘The Age of Customer Capitalism introduced a new principle called Customer Driven Capitalism. He introduces this as the third era of modern capitalism and builds an argument that society should rapidly shift towards this principle which is based upon a logic that shareholder value can be best optimised by focussing on the customer. This is radically different from the two previous eras of modern capitalism – the first, Managerial Capitalism, began in 1932, and was defined by the then radical notion that firms ought to have professional management. Business leadership moved from entrepreneurs and founders to an elite group of professional managers. The second era of modern capitalism began in 1976 and, known as Shareholder Value Capitalism – defined and built upon the premise that the purpose of every organisation should be to maximise shareholders wealth.

If you google Customer Experience you have the option of reviewing 158M results. Scary isn’t it?

It’s scary because in spite of all the talk about organizations building their ‘sustainable and competitive advantage’ through the design and delivery of a unique and distinctive customer experience the majority still screw it up.

I’m not sure about you but I’m really sick and tired of being on the receiving side of RANDOM experiences. In our many client engagements I almost always hear of the intention to ‘delight’ the customer. Why I ask? Can’t you simply deliver a consistent experience everytime ? I’d be happy with that!

The reality is that the 21st Century organization requires interoperation and integration. It needs to be ‘joined-up’ with a clear understanding of the intentional customer experience it’s trying to deliver as well as the capabilities of executing against...

Competing in and completing an Ironman triathlon is to accomplish one of the greatest challenges of the human body and mind. The Ironman is a true test of oneself. The event requires one to do battle and to win over self doubt and fatigue. It requires one to make steady progress in a non-stop journey that may take up to 17hours to complete. It requires one to swim 3.8km in the ocean (a foreign environment), cycle 180km and then run 42.2km. During the event one experiences euphoric moments – boundless energy, enthusiasm and positivity as well as moments of deep despair, exhaustion and sometimes desperation. It brings out a raw fear as one tests oneself. It also brings out the best and the worst of all who seek the challenge and aspire to hear the words – ‘you are an Ironman!’ It makes us realize, what we as mere mortals, can achieve with focus, commitment and dedication

To compete in an Ironman requires one to be fit. Fit is not necessarily defined...