I once said to my client in Madrid “Well, she’s no rocket scientist,” commenting on the performance of one of his team members.  Turns out I was wrong—she had a PhD in astrophysics.

Anyway.  Have you noticed that too many people view fixing business problems as rocket surgery?  These are the same people who confuse motion with movement.  These are the same people who come to work each day and work on what was happening yesterday.  Do you ever wonder who is working on what needs to be happening tomorrow?

If your own employees view going to work and company functions with less enthusiasm than they would have going to an all day Celine Dion concert in the dead of winter, is it any wonder that your customers are running away in droves?

Businesses begin to die the day they open their front door—ask GM.  What then is the secret sauce to remaining viable?

As different as businesses are from one another, the common factor among all businesses is one thing—customers.  Hospitals, banks, manufacturers, software companies all have the same mission statement, one they do not publish—We do stuff for money.  Guess who has the money—customers.  Businesses only remain in business by being able to one thing; getting those with the money to give their money to them.

Without OPM—Other People’s Money—there is no business.  We do stuff for money.  If that is true, should not every activity, every plan, every process, and every investment somehow contribute, somehow add value to the transaction of transferring OPM from them to you?  Are activities that do not add value to that transaction wasteful, redundant, or unnecessary?

Every business decision, every strategy, every acquisition, every hire should be evaluated in terms of whether or not they increase the firm’s ability to increase the amount OPM captured.

If this idea sounds too simple, that is because it is.  There is nothing complex about focusing on the customer.  But you would never know that from scanning the internet job boards.  Companies are looking to hire for a cornucopia of customer related positions; CRM, CEM, customer for life, customer first.

What do these companies need?  Business intelligence, a data warehouse, a chief marketing officer?  Hardly.  Marketing keeps trying to figure out ‘how do we get customers to pay attention to us?’  What they should be asking is “what do we have to do to pay attention to them?’

Most company executives would not know a customer if they sat next to one on the bus.  They may know aboutthe customer; income, age, social stratification, number of children, but they do not know why they are a customer or why they were a customer.

Customers leave all of the time.  They leave to find a company that either treats them better, or one with which they do not have to interact.  Welcome to the land of customer initiated virtual RFPs.  Instead of companies deciding to whom they sell the stuff or their services, customers decide from whom they are going to buy.

Patient experience management is dead and companies killed it.  Customers know when someone is trying to manage them and they do not like it.  Now customers are managing the sellers and they do not need multimillion dollar systems to do it.

If you are interested, this link goes to a presentation I have given on Patient Experience Management:Dead or Dying?  Feel free to use it or to leave a copy on the desk of your CEO.