Technology companies are notorious for being self-centered rather than customer-centered. In most cases, if every problem was a nail, then every solution would be the technology they developed. This particular company took its top regional salesperson — we’ll call him Bob — and promoted him to VP, National Sales. Bob had a small habit that started to drive his salesforce crazy.

He always capitalized the “C” in customer.

So you might get the following email from Bob:

Please let me have your quarterly forecasts by no later than EOB today. I also would like to see any issues that your Customers had that required escalation. Thanks.

At first, people thought it was a test to see if they were reading his emails. So they would answer with an email that might look like this:

Forecasts are attached. No Customer issues to report.

Nothing happened until the first regional sales meeting. As the room filled, Bob was at the podium welcoming people, saying hello to the folks he knew until the meeting started. The lights dimmed and the first slide went up:

The Customer is always capitalized.

Bob opened with the fact that he knew his emails were making people wonder if his word processing software had a glitch. He told them that always writing “Customer” with an upper case “C” was a habit he developed the year before when he realized that he was doing more lecturing than listening, when he would find himself thinking about his vacation instead of thinking about the problem the customer was explaining. He said he was always ready to pounce in with the solution that his company had developed that would solve the problem, even if it did not exactly solve all the problems.

In one very memorable sales call, the prospect, who had been carefully qualified, abruptly ended the meeting, and before he left, went over to tell Bob that he was disappointed:

We really wanted to work with you folks, but I feel like you barely heard a word I said.

It turned out to be the best sale Bob never made.

In an effort to become more customer-focused, he made a small change and began to capitalize “Customer” to remind himself to really listen, and help Customers really solve their problems or even further define what the problem might be. Even if it did not result in an immediate sale.

You can guess the rest. The whole salesforce started capitalizing “Customer.” Every time they did, they had the fleeting thought that it meant something different needed to happen when they faced their Customers. They became partners, consultants, listeners, advisors, collaborators. Problem-solvers. And their close rates started to increase, and the deals, although fewer, became longer and larger.

Unfortunately, this tale does not have a happy ending. Bob did such a great job that he was scooped up by another company. His replacement, in his first email to “the troops” included the following:

From now on no more capital ‘c’ on customers. We know how to sell. Our numbers show that. We have the best products in the world. If we want to capitalize anything it will be our revenue numbers.

So they went back to business as usual. Selling their products. And they started to consistently lose sales to — can you guess? — Bob’s team who was still capitalizing “Customer” to help them stay Customer-focused.

Moral of this story: When you want to make big changes in your company and move from self-centered to Customer-centered, it helps to make a lot of little changes first.

Crowdsourcing has become one of the buzz words in the collaboration and innovation lexicon. It seems useful when focusing a lot of minds on solving a problem or finding a particular piece of information. Yet when looking for opinions, reactions, and input to a product, it raises an important question: When is a crowd not a crowd?

According to recent cross-cultural studies by Dr. David Rand, a lecturer in psychology at Harvard University, and Dr. Benedikt Herrmann of Nottingham University in the U.K., a crowd is a crowd only when the people’s backgrounds and the crowd’s composition are relatively homogeneous.

To study the homogeneity of crowds, Dr. Rand used what has become known as the trolleyology experiment, a classic thought experiment in which subjects are faced with a life-and-death drama. The dilemma is simple — a trolley car with no brakes will ram into and kill a group of people crossing the tracks unless the person in the experiment chooses to throw a single individual under the trolley car to slow it down enough for the others to escape unharmed. Kill one to save many, or do nothing and everyone dies. A classically simple dilemma with an incredibly hard solution.

Using crowdsourcing as the basis for the experiment, the answers from one crowd to another should have been the same. Yet the answers depended on which crowd was chosen to participate. The answers from one crowd were very different than the answers from another. In the work done by Dr. Herrmann, the results from a crowd in the United States were very different than the answers from crowds in Asia, Eastern Europe, or a Middle Eastern crowd.

Why is this important? Crowdsourcing is becoming SOP (standard operating procedure) for many companies that want customer input to innovate or co-create new products. Crowdsourcing in this instance is often viewed as a focus-group on steroids. The difference is that focus groups are carefully selected and rigorously questioned. It is as much art as science. Crowds are, well, crowds, especially when the invitation goes out on an open social network.

The experiments conducted by Dr. Rand and others conclusively show that different cultures more than any other variable provide different crowds. Human behavior is not universal. The key is to know the source before you look for the crowd.

Source: “The Roar of the Crowd,” The Economist, 05/26/12

We hear a lot about the voice of the customer. Not that the customer has been silent all these years and suddenly decided to speak up. Let’s time-travel for some perspective.

Go back to 1900, the turn of the 20th century. Mass production was at hand. The Industrial Economy was in full swing and manufacturing was the thing. When you owned the means of production you had no real need to listen to the customer. You cranked out relatively cheap products and people bought them. Mass production was married to mass consumption. Think Sears, Roebuck & Co. and the company catalog. Customers might have complained if they had more than one product to compare, or a better experience to remember. They did not, and their voice, as far as the manufacturers and retailers were concerned was a soft, almost silent, whisper.

Jump ahead 50 years. We were exploring space, and back here on Earth, we were exploring what it meant to be multinational, conducting business on a flatter planet, in a business climate that was heating up with fewer restrictions, regulations, and taxes. The name of the game went from “Made in America” to “Send to America.” There may have been some noise in the background, a low but insistent buzzing. Some of the customers were getting annoyed yet their voice was a restricted to the “Complaints Department.” Really. There was a “Complaints Department,” with a real person who listened to customers complain all day.

I bought my first personal computer in 1990 (still have it in storage — a Macintosh IIcx, 16 MHz 68030 processor, 1 MB RAM, 1.4 MB SuperDrive, and 40 MB running Microsoft Word 4.0 for the Macintosh). That was when the customer found a new voice, and it started with an unassuming “You’ve Got Mail!”

It was the start of what I call The Idea Economy, and the idea was disintermediation. Start by taking the monkey out of the middle (reference to a pre-digital game called “Monkey-in-the-Middle”), and the manufacturer and customer are suddenly directly connected. Web addresses, starting with “dub-dub-dub” appeared everywhere. The “@” became the cool new business address. Google was about to become a verb, and Amazon, eBay, Apple, Zappo’s, and others were all about The Customer Experience. You didn’t even need to buy anything as long as the experience was “insanely great.”

No need to look at your smartphone, it’s 2012. Manufacturers — and anyone else who serves the customer — time to listen up! The customers have found their voice. There’s only one way to stand out, survive, and thrive in the Idea Economy. The voice of the customer, suddenly amplified by technology, has gone from a whisper to the complaint department to the roar of the crowd.

Do you hear what I’m saying? That’s the idea…

Source: “Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that Changed Everything” by Stephen Levy, Amazon.com
Source: “Why Customer Experience Is The Only Thing That Matters,” Fast Company, 08/13/12

Most of us are not yet fully aware of the implications, but learning as we knew it and experienced it has changed. What does it mean for collaboration?

According to the American Society of Training (ASTD), “The ‘half-life of knowledge’ is the time span from when knowledge is gained to when it becomes obsolete. Half of what is known today was not known 10 years ago. The amount of knowledge in the world has doubled in the past 10 years and is doubling every 18 months…” In many fields the half-life of knowledge is now measured in months and years.

Organizations have been forced to learn new ways of learning. According to George Siemens, the leading theorist in the areas of learning and education, here are some of these new approaches to learning:

• Informal learning is a significant aspect of our learning experience. Formal education no longer comprises the majority of our learning. Learning now occurs in a variety of ways — through communities of practice, personal networks, and through completion of work-related tasks.
• Learning is a continual process, lasting for a lifetime. Learning and work related activities are no longer separate. In many situations, they are the same.
• The organization and the individual are both learning organisms. Increased attention to knowledge management highlights the need for a theory that attempts to explain the link between individual and organizational learning.

Most significantly, George adds the following idea:

Know-how and know-what is being supplemented with know-where (the understanding of where to find knowledge needed).

To sum it up, there was a time when we had time. Time to learn and learn more, take the time to get one degree after another and become, in time, an expert. That time is passing more rapidly than most people understand. The cycle of learning-unlearning-relearning has increased at an unprecedented rate and is continuing to increase every day. The upshot is that no one has the capacity to become an expert anymore.

What is the impact on organizations, and what does it mean to collaborate and innovate in this new environment of increasingly rapid relearning?

It means that the “Relentless Learner” has become the most important quality an individual can have. So important that “Relentless Learning” needs to become one of the new metrics against which an individual, a team and even a company is measured. So the team is the new expert, and since all the members are relentlessly learning all the time, the team’s expertise stays more current as a team than as any one member.

I never thought I would say this, but it turns out to be really important and true: Together Everyone Achieves More. And if the team is the new expert, then collaborating, and knowing how to successfully collaborate (more on that later), is the new key to success.