Evolution and transformation, twin siblings

In the business world, evolution and transformation have become frustrated siblings, each slow to understand and a bit reluctant to admit that the other is equally important to the future health of their shared bloodline. Like siblings, evolution and transformation know deep down that the other is important to the family but they try mightily to pretend that they don’t outwardly hold that view of the other.

While evolution can happen without transformation, in business it won’t produce the result investors had anticipated

It’s easily argued that evolution in business can be performed without transformation. An obvious example is Kodak. If you’re of a certain age like me, your favorite childhood photographic film maker evolved in a direction to which the industry was not headed. Because it didn’t embrace digital cameras it evolved but, unfortunately for its investors, it didn’t transform. With varying degrees of urgency, companies in most business sectors today appreciate the need to digitally transform their business practices to ensure they remain responsive, relevant, and predictive in a world of rapidly changing consumer tastes and preferences, accelerated technological capabilities, and heightened concerns about security and privacy. Yet, there are great forces exerting pressure to take shortcuts. The business leader’s and investor’s urge for speed to achieve transformation can overwhelm the reality that there needs to be a corresponding pace of change that pays some respect to the uniqueness (maturity, process complexity, skills) of each enterprise embarking on transformation. Transformation requires a multitude of forces operating in concert and, without fail, those forces are ultimately controlled by humans. It’s the pace of change demonstrated by those humans, their personal evolution and a transformation of their mindset that is key to a company’s overall ability to evolve and transform.

Evolution is gradual change (while only a blink of the eye in Earth’s history, think how long it took in human terms to evolve from telegraph to telephone, or from dial-up to 4G) and while attempts can be made to break it down into components, each with specific steps that need to be executed, evolution will veer in the wrong direction if forced upon organisms that are ill-equipped for adaptation. If acceleration of business change is the goal, strong and visionary leadership is critical. And, interestingly, while it might seem counter-intuitive in today’s hyper-technological age with machine learning and AI taking center stage, strong and visionary leadership matters now more than ever. Strike that… authentic strong and visionary leadership matters now more than ever.

MIT Sloan published a recent article in which it was reported that the ability to lead through change hinges completely on the leader’s credibility.

“Winning over skeptical employees and convincing them of the need to change just isn’t possible through mass e-mails, PowerPoint presentations, or impassioned CEO mandates. Rather, companies need to develop strong change leaders employees know and respect—in other words, people with informal influence.”

Leadership matters

Rock star CEOs and VPs cannot, on their own, drive complete change in the way it might be imagined, insisted upon, and wished for by those leaders and the boards of companies. The commitment to change and the ability of leaders throughout the organization to demonstrate that commitment and illuminate with clarity the path towards transformation is the real key to success. Would Apple have successfully pivoted from focusing only on Mac computers and towards the world of mobile if it had been only Steve Jobs who championed and believed in fully in the iPhone? Change needs to be publicly demonstrated by leaders all through an organization in ways that go beyond simply repeating the messages of the organizational leader (the CEO and/or EVP). Change that sticks at all levels is change that is felt to be authentic. Change won’t happen unless each leader in the chain believes in a better future for the organization’s mission. Ask yourself this question… Why else lead if it’s not towards something different, towards something that will be an improvement on the present? The answer is, you shouldn’t, because anything less than belief in a better future is not leadership. It’s supervising.

Industry conferences, customer success, and transformation

If customers are the fuel that drives companies to transform and a company’s leadership is the pilot/driver who maintains and accelerates momentum, what role do the various Customer Success industry conferences play? How does their purpose fit into the overall transformation narrative? Those kinds of events have steadily grown in number, in frequency, in size of audiences, and in the amount of buzz they generate. Do they matter though? Besides raising awareness of, and in giving sense of pride to, the roles of the people who work within Customer Success organizations, if those events matter shouldn’t they demonstrably impact not just the attendees but the customers of those attendees too? Conferences should offer sufficient thought leadership so that real change has a chance to occur not just in the way a Customer Success organization delivers service but, more importantly, in the ability for that organization to transform, to reorient itself around the customer and to evolve in that right direction. And this might mean developing a model that challenges conventional wisdom around people, process, and technology. This should not be shied away from. Real change means real conversation and challenging the norms. It means real leadership that understands that a customer’s ability to succeed, to transform, must be the main and enduring point. Proof of their ability to achieve their desired business outcomes should be the only signal we look for, when it will be okay for the Customer Success organization to say, “Our customers have transformed because we’ve been able to transform”.

And if Customer Success industry events matter, is their impact measurable beyond pure hunch and anecdotal data? Are we ever going to reach an inflection point where those questions are answered in such a way that signals Customer Success is learning some valuable lessons that indicate it is ready to be the transformational instrument of change that most companies need?

I feel I might have found that inflection point this past week at the CS100 Summit 2018 conference in Sundance, Utah. The event was hosted by ClientSuccess and the way the agenda played out it struck me that the conference lived up to its theme, Elevate. It took a while for that theme to become apparent to me (perhaps I’m a little dim) but by day two I felt it was the first conference I’ve attended where it seemed the consensus of the group was that Customer Success needs to move beyond tedious and frustrating conversations about the defensive postures inherent in asking for permission to lead customers or on those that argue over whether we deserve a seat at the leadership table. The pieces of the Elevate story organically fell into place from all the presentations I observed and from all the conversations I had and it pleased me to understand that the consensus seemed to be that by confidently offering up business outcomes based on customer respect, data leadership and stewardship, and customer proof points, Customer Success organizations have the chance and opportunity to chase with confidence that high, vacant ground of customer transformation.

In our customer success practice of Oracle SaaS applications, we view success through the lens of what it means to customers to derive value from their Oracle investments and how we at Oracle can make it easier and faster for them to do that. That means we see a longer-term destination where the CSM role will likely be drastically different than what it is today. This should not be a revolutionary or scary statement. It should be seen as an acknowledgment that we recognize in order to achieve a customer’s desired business outcomes it will require us to leverage technology to the hilt and that the customer’s needs trump any desire we might have for role constancy. It means we envision a future where a customer’s needs will be so paramount in our eyes that the customers won’t necessarily be conscious that an organization called Customer Success even exists (I suspect it will in some form or another). They won’t be conscious of it because they will receive the information they need, the guidance they require, and the recommendations they might only be marginally aware they need, all just before they think about it. Why is this important? Because, and I hate to break it to people, customers don’t actually want to talk to you. They would rather that the software worked without problems, was easy to figure out, and that if they needed answers they could find them quickly and on their own. To strike that balance of close oversight and invisibility, Customer Success needs to be data-driven, process-driven, significantly automated, and (this is key) human-governed.

That model is why leadership is critical. Customers first, employees second (because they need to contribute and take the lead into the future), and shareholders third (because while they are passive and seemingly anonymous, we really do need and appreciate their trust and financial commitment). It’s been building for awhile, the need to move beyond the conversational constraints of boxed-in Customer Success, as being just a model that is best-delivered by humans and, instead, shift the conversation towards how success for customers is best defined from their eyes. It’s a subtle shift in thinking with major implications. And it’s about time.

Congratulations, ClientSuccess, Dave Blake, and Burke Alder on a job well done. In my eyes, you’ve raised the bar for Customer Success industry events by challenging the attendees to think more broadly about the next stage of evolution and customer transformation.