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D. Murali

MUCH of the energy that organisations spend is for keeping things going the way they are. But that is no different from yoked bullocks that go round and round in the oilman's works; they never get to see the meadows. "To invent new futures you need a new way to be innovative," write Roy Langmaid and Mac Andrews in Breakthrough Zone, from Wiley (www.wiley.com) .

"We must put the customer at the centre of everything we do," writes Charles Allen in his foreword. "Many of us do not place customers high enough on our daily agenda. We have a great many layers and filters that keep us safe from face-to-face encounters with our customers." Do we walk a mile in customer's shoes? If only we did, we'd know where it pinched.

The word `innovation' often sounds hollow. "There is a missing dimension to most innovation programmes," point out the authors. "Rather than generating a stack of flip charts and then trying to decide which might succeed, wouldn't it be smart to have customers to guide you in this creativity." Breakthroughs require us to get under the surface that surveys only scratch, and "make contact with people's deeper desires and wishes." Powerful brands have one thing in common: they are based on "enduring customer needs and desires." The rest is "on a high road to obsolescence." Which one is yours?

When you reduce customers to statistics and data, as computers can help you do, you make them "two-dimensional," and so is your understanding. "It might seem cost-effective," as your accountant would endorse, but the authors are categorical: "CRM does customers no service whatsoever." Don't expect any breakthrough innovation to come from CRM either, "except by accident." What then is the alternative to customer relationship management? "There is only one reliable path to customers' hearts and minds - communication based in trust."

Step one is "STOP: State The Objective Problem/Shelve The Opportunity Panic." Excitement of opportunity in the marketplace can be too tempting to resist, but being swept away thus "leads to premature implementation of poorly crafted solutions." A common pitfall is "to express problems in terms of solutions," as for example, `The problem is that if we just changed the way we trained and recruited customer service personnel then ... '

Look, instead, for the `objective problem,' such as, `with no change we will be insolvent in six months.' "This is the spin-free, un-marketed and simple fact that outlines the problem," Roy and Mac say. Another practical example of `unsophisticated and hard fact' is: `My wife doesn't love me any more' — simple but hard fact-based summation of a clear problem. In companies, an analogous line would read: "Our sales are declining by 35 per cent per year ... we don't know what to do to put us ahead of the competition."

It may sound easy to figure out what your company's own problems are, but there are several reasons why it doesn't happen. First difficulty is that, in business, people have forgotten to say, `I don't know.' Problems are shunned as "dispiriting, depressing and causing anxiety." Solutions pop out prematurely, that is, faster than we understand the problems. Dangerously, the word `problem' gets read as `opportunity.' And tragically: "Until we know that we don't know we can't find out — all our energy goes into sustaining a pretence that we do."

Do you know what happens if you don't diagnose the disease as a simple fact? "Treatment will be symptom suppression." Likewise, if you suppress symptoms of ill health that pop up in your company, you only weaken its health and allow "the disease to spread further."

Step two: "People, power and purpose". But, STOP! Do you want to break through to Breakthrough Zone?

BookMark@thehindu.co.in

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