When the company becomes more important than the customer
I don’t find “we’re customer-centric” very convincing. I want to know what happens when serving a customer gets in the way of hitting a target. That’s where I would look for the truth about a business.
Imagine you run a support team. You want customers to spend less time on the phone, so you start measuring call length. That sounds reasonable. Then you reward shorter calls. A representative who fixes a difficult problem in twelve minutes looks worse than one who ends an unresolved call in four.
The second customer calls back tomorrow. Your team handles another short call. On the report, people work faster. In the customer’s life, you’ve made the problem more annoying. Nobody had to announce that customers no longer matter. You changed what counted as success, and the people doing the work responded.
That’s the failure I’m interested in: a company starts protecting its internal version of success at the expense of the reason people choose it.
I don’t think this explains every struggling business. But Nike’s channel decisions, Starbucks’ operating trade-offs and IBM’s internal divisions give us concrete reasons to take the pattern seriously.
The reason people pay you
When I ask why a company exists, I’m not asking for the founder’s biography or the sentence above the fold. I’m asking what becomes possible for someone because the business exists.
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