Enough said

Today I received an email inviting me to download a white paper entitled "Building Customer Centricity through Expertise-Based Interactions".

They could have called it "Doing a great job for your customers by knowing what you're talking about".

But they didn't.

Apparently the paper "discusses the emergence of customer centricity as a result of growing customer sophistication and empowerment across geographies and market segments" and "the need for businesses large and small to embrace customer centricity and to take steps to internalise it as the driving force behind business processes and policies ... by revising business processes to ensure outcomes are customer-oriented and that every activity within a process is aimed at maximizing customer satisfaction" and "by focusing on expertise-based interactions as a way to broaden customer collaboration and participation into the very business processes designed to serve their needs and, by extension, maximizing customer satisfaction and facilitating cross-selling and up-selling."

In other words:

Customers everywhere are getting smarter. You have to be single-minded in getting your whole organisation to give customers a great experience. You have to know what you're talking about. And you have to be ready to change the way you work if it's better for the customer, because that will make them do more and buy more.

Enough said.

Clarity or consensus? You decide

So now we have given our verdict - or at least a few of us have - on one of the most rancorous political debates since, well, the last one. Dozens of explanations, hundreds of arguments and thousands of soundbites occupied a majority of the political elite and a minority of the rest of us in an increasingly frantic anticlimax.

The argument seemed to boil down to this: would you rather be led or represented by someone that more people strongly support than any other candidate, or by someone that most people are prepared to accept?

MPs would have to work harder for our votes, we were told. They'd have to get us on board, appeal to a broad constituency. 'We have to take people with us', you could imagine them saying, when planning how to attract the holy grail of 50.1% of people who at least would accept the idea of their joining the ranks of our 650 elected representatives.

'We have to take people with us': also heard in board rooms and senior management meetings, especially in the not-for-profit sector. We can change the way we work for the better, but only if we can get people onside.

It's a position that is hard to dispute. But how do we get people to share a vision for change? Should leaders appeal to the majority and get everyone to agree on the way forward? Or should they describe a clear vision, energise people with their conviction and recruit advocates who will help them to make change happen?

When I have asked people facing change to choose between two approaches, they have invariably chosen clarity over consensus. 'Tell us what has to happen, explain why it will be better, and make clear what you expect of us'.

Is the direction that more people believe in better than the choice that most will accept? In the case of our democracy, ironically that question was answered by a minority of electors. As for the challenges facing business and fundraising leaders the answer has to be a resounding 'yes'.