The Knowledge Within

After having worked for over 2 decades and interacted with a number of CEO's and CXO I have found that organisations spend a lot more to listen to their customers than to listen to their employees and partners.

There is more to business than the consumer, note, I am not saying the consumer is not important. Today many companies prefer relying more on a research report from an independent source than trust the information from within their system. Research reports done on faceless customers with all their merits and demerits have a factor of accuracy and cannot be taken to be the gospel truth.

With commoditization of products, low differentiation and short product cycles what matters more is service levels and experience of the consumer/customer. Isn't this delivered by employees, salesmen and the trade partners.

There are very few organisations who take the effort to listen to employees and trade partners. Those who do, have prospered. When the employees and the trade partners believe they are being heard and recognised they are no longer executors of ideas but co-creators.

The insights if mined from within an organisation will always have a buy in from the executors as its originated from them. This leads to a higher commitment to execution, better results and longer relations & associations.

Any strategy is as good as its execution. Although a lot of strategic work happens at the head office, very few managers actually visit the market. The current strategies or new product launch are executed in market by the sales and or service teams and trade. These teams are the customers for the head office, they have knowledge on buyer behaviour, competition trends, market size and know how they can make a success of a new product or idea. They also understand how trade reacts to consumer behaviour and technology trends.

But don't we all listen to our employees didn't we make those few calls or had a meeting and a conference. Yes but we only heard what we wanted to, we listen to some and not to others due to our own human biases.

Isn't it impossible to listen to all employees/ sales teams, it would take ages.With increasing team size its difficult to reach out to entire teams and collect information. It may take months in some companies and often thats too late.

The need of the hour is real time information, trends and diagnosis as business issues are real time.

The web has become a powerful tool to connect employees. Thousands can be connected through collaborative tools and aligned to deliver on a project as a team. There are tools to get real time information from trade or employees in sales or elsewhere, diagnose execution issues and get teams to collaborate to a solution.

Today its easier to understand in a weeks time how a new product launch is progressing or a product gap analysis or projecting business for the next quarter with specific inputs. Strategies can be course corrected within the same month.

We have been working with some large corporates connecting and collaborating very large teams in real time and diagnosing issues on operational strategy and execution for sales and marketing.

We are creating a new way to do business.