When the company becomes more important than the customer<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Read Time: 8\u00a0Minutes<\/em><\/p>\n Hello<\/p>\n I don\u2019t find \u201cwe\u2019re customer-centric\u201d very convincing. I want to know what happens when serving a customer gets in the way of hitting a target. That\u2019s where I would look for the truth about a business.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The second customer calls back tomorrow. Your team handles another short call. On the report, people work faster. In the customer\u2019s life, you\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n That\u2019s the failure I\u2019m interested in: a company starts protecting its internal version of success at the expense of the reason people choose it.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t think this explains every struggling business. But Nike\u2019s channel decisions, Starbucks\u2019 operating trade-offs and IBM\u2019s internal divisions give us concrete reasons to take the pattern seriously.<\/p>\n The reason people pay you<\/strong> Can they do something they couldn\u2019t do before? Does a difficult job become easier? Can they stop worrying about a problem? Do they feel more capable, more welcome or better equipped for whatever they\u2019re trying to do?<\/p>\n Those are different benefits. We need to find out which ones matter to the customers we\u2019re serving, rather than choose the most flattering explanation.<\/p>\n Picture a founder who sees an unnecessary frustration. They believe people would choose something different if someone built it properly. They build a product, set standards, and decide what they won\u2019t compromise. Customers respond, and the founder learns which parts of the idea actually work.<\/p>\n That understanding has to travel as the business grows. New people need to know more than what to produce. They need to understand why particular decisions matter. A procedure might say to spend time helping someone choose. The underlying reason might be that a confident purchase produces fewer mistakes and a better relationship.<\/p>\n If I preserve the procedure but lose the reason, I might eventually classify that time as waste. I can then improve an internal efficiency measure by removing something that helped earn the sale.<\/p>\n That\u2019s what I mean by forgetting. The company might remember every detail of its history while losing track of what its decisions do for customers.<\/p>\n Nike put the channel ahead of the shopper<\/strong> On its March 21, 2024 earnings call, CFO Matt Friend acknowledged that, over the preceding year or so, Nike had focused more on achieving its marketplace-mix targets than on \u201cserving consumer demand where the consumer is shopping.\u201d<\/p>\n Nike had become too focused on where it wanted the transaction to happen. Its compensation documents make that priority tangible. For fiscal 2023, Nike\u2019s annual executive cash incentive gave equal weight to adjusted revenue, adjusted digital revenue and adjusted earnings before interest and taxes. Digital revenue was included in the business\u2019s revenue and also served as a separately rewarded objective.<\/p>\n I can understand the attraction of direct selling. A company may gain control over its presentation, improve its relationship with buyers and keep more of the selling price. Those benefits are worth weighing against the costs.<\/p>\n But customers don\u2019t have to organize their shopping around your preferred channel. Consider someone who wants to try several brands, compare fit and get help from a store employee. For that person, the retailer does useful work. Moving the transaction onto your website doesn\u2019t automatically preserve that help.<\/p>\n I read Nike\u2019s admission as a warning about confusing a means with an end. The channel should help the company serve demand profitably. Once the channel becomes the destination, customer behaviour can start looking like an obstacle to the plan.<\/p>\n Nike reported revenue of $46.3 billion in fiscal 2025, down from $51.4 billion in fiscal 2024. That decline doesn\u2019t tell us how much damage came from channel decisions rather than products, competition or other factors.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t need to assign every lost dollar to one bonus measure to recognize the problem. The incentive design documents a priority. The CFO\u2019s admission documents a conflict between that priority and serving shoppers.<\/p>\n What interests me is the decision rule underneath: would we rather make it easier for someone to buy, or have the purchase happen in the place that makes our internal report look right?<\/p>\n Imagine a business earns $40 online out of every $100 in sales. It wants online to represent half its revenue. It could reach that percentage by growing online sales. It could also reach it by keeping online sales at $40 while the rest fall to $40. The target improves while total sales shrink.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not saying Nike deliberately made that calculation. I\u2019m showing why a mix target cannot tell me, on its own, whether a business has become more useful or more successful. A percentage describes a relationship between numbers. It doesn\u2019t tell me whether either number deserves celebration.<\/p>\n Starbucks improved the parts and questioned the result<\/strong> These weren\u2019t obviously ridiculous decisions. Each addressed a real operating problem. That\u2019s why I find the memo useful. I can picture the separate business cases. Faster service. Easier distribution. A cheaper store to build. Each proposal might look sensible on its own.<\/p>\n But the customer experiences the result of all those decisions together. They don\u2019t encounter separate departments. They walk into a caf\u00e9. Schultz also wrote, \u201cWe have all been part of these decisions. I take full responsibility myself.\u201d<\/p>\n That sentence stops me from turning this into a story about an innocent visionary and managers who ruined everything. The people who built a business can help make the choices that weaken it.<\/p>\n Nor would I claim that lost aroma explains Starbucks\u2019 downturn. Prices, household finances and expansion complicate that account. The evidence doesn\u2019t isolate how much particular experience changes affected visits. The useful lesson is more specific: an operating improvement can remove a benefit unless somebody evaluates both.<\/p>\n The subsequent machine choice illustrates a better response. Starbucks introduced the lower-profile Mastrena in 2008, keeping automation while aiming to improve contact between baristas and customers. The company said it had worked on the machine for more than five years.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t read that as a demand to go backward. I read it as a reason to ask a better design question: can we retain the useful efficiency without sacrificing the experience?<\/p>\n People can care and still make the problem worse<\/strong> Steven Kerr described the mismatch in his 1975 paper, On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B. He examined reward systems that encouraged behaviour at odds with the outcomes people said they wanted.<\/p>\n I would apply that test beyond bonuses. Look at who gets promoted, whose work earns praise and who gets questioned when a number falls. Imagine a sales team paid for signed contracts, with little consequence when customers discover the product doesn\u2019t fit. The salesperson can hit the target while creating a problem that another team inherits.<\/p>\n Or imagine a product leader who earns recognition for launching features. Making an existing task easier might matter more to customers, but it produces a less impressive announcement.<\/p>\n These are examples of how I would inspect a reward system, not arguments that sales commissions or product targets are inherently wrong. The trouble deepens when a target acquires a sponsor, a budget and a public commitment. Questioning it can mean questioning a senior person\u2019s judgment. Now the organization has two problems: the original mistake and the cost of admitting it.<\/p>\n Argyris\u2019s work describes how people can protect themselves from embarrassment or threat in ways that also prevent them from examining their own contribution to a problem. I would worry less about whether the company has politics and more about what those politics prevent people from changing.<\/p>\n Can an employee bring evidence that the plan harms customers? Can that evidence reach someone with authority? And can that person change the plan without first making the employee defend their loyalty?<\/p>\n Argyris explained why working harder isn\u2019t enough<\/strong> He called these single-loop and double-loop learning. Single-loop learning corrects problems within the existing objectives and rules. Double-loop learning also makes those objectives and rules open to examination.<\/p>\n Go back to the support team.<\/p>\n Single-loop learning asks how to shorten the calls. We might improve training, simplify the script or give representatives faster access to information. Some of those changes could help everyone.<\/p>\n Double-loop learning asks whether call length deserves to govern performance in the first place. Are shorter calls evidence of better service, or have we started ending conversations before resolving problems?<\/p>\n We need both kinds of learning. I wouldn\u2019t want a company that debates its purpose every time someone processes an order. But I wouldn\u2019t want one that treats the target as untouchable, either.<\/p>\n Argyris described an unnamed company\u2019s troubled Product X. People close to production and marketing recognized serious problems long before management abandoned it. Warnings weakened as they travelled upward, senior enthusiasm persisted, and people below eventually communicated less.<\/p>\n The detail that stays with me is that the information already existed inside the business. Hiring another researcher wouldn\u2019t necessarily have solved it. Neither would another presentation reminding everyone to listen to customers. The organization needed a way for uncomfortable knowledge to change an authorized decision.<\/p>\n That is more demanding than inviting feedback.<\/p>\n Suppose I tell my team to challenge assumptions, then respond to the first challenge by explaining why the person doesn\u2019t understand the strategy. What have I taught them?<\/p>\n I\u2019ve made my response more informative than my invitation.<\/p>\n Argyris also distinguished what people say guides them from the rules their conduct appears to follow. I don\u2019t need to call someone dishonest to examine that gap. I need to compare their stated principles with repeated choices.<\/p>\n \u201cWe put customers first\u201d may be sincere. But if I repeatedly protect a delivery date over resolving a known customer problem, my decisions deserve scrutiny.<\/p>\n The customer shouldn\u2019t have to manage your departments<\/strong> One buyer put it plainly. Gillette\u2019s chief information officer told Fortune: \u201cI often don\u2019t know if I need hardware or software or services, and I don\u2019t care.\u201d He expected IBM to find the appropriate expertise.<\/p>\n I hear a customer asking the supplier to take responsibility for the problem, rather than sell whatever sits inside a particular department.<\/p>\n Lou Gerstner joined IBM as an outsider in 1993. In IBM\u2019s later account, he recognized that customers wanted integrated help while the company\u2019s separate businesses pursued their own paths.<\/p>\n This gives me a useful test: when two departments make individually defensible choices, who checks whether the combined result works for the buyer?<\/p>\n Brian Chesky raised a similar issue in his 2024 Decoder interview about Airbnb. He described groups with different incentives and incompatible approaches, where a sensible local decision could make the overall company work worse. That\u2019s his diagnosis; it doesn\u2019t independently prove what caused Airbnb\u2019s subsequent performance.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t take these examples as an instruction to centralize everything. I take them as a reason to give someone responsibility for the complete customer experience.<\/p>\n Customer focus still requires commercial judgment<\/strong> IBM didn\u2019t abandon financial discipline during its correction. Its 1995 proxy says that executives\u2019 actual 1994 incentive awards depended primarily on pretax earnings and cash flow. Customer satisfaction and other individual contributions carried less weight.<\/p>\n That matters because the choice isn\u2019t customers or numbers. I want the numbers to tell me whether the way I serve customers still works. I also don\u2019t confuse customer focus with agreeing to every request. Customers can want different things. A request from one large account might make the product worse for everyone else. A popular feature might cost more to maintain than the business can support.<\/p>\n My responsibility is to understand those trade-offs and choose deliberately. I\u2019d make another distinction: saving work and moving work aren\u2019t the same.<\/p>\n Suppose I replace a service employee with a form. The company spends less, but now the customer must find documents, enter information we already hold and work out which category their problem belongs in. I may have improved the process. Or I may have handed the work to someone whose time doesn\u2019t appear in my accounts.<\/p>\n I would check before celebrating the savings.<\/p>\n The same goes for a cost that looks unnecessary. Training, maintenance or a useful conversation can be hard to connect to a single sale. That doesn\u2019t make the spending automatically valuable. But difficulty measuring its contribution isn\u2019t evidence that its contribution is zero.<\/p>\n I would also resist protecting an old practice simply because the founder liked it. What matters is whether it still helps deliver something people value. A new method can preserve that benefit better than the original one.<\/p>\n This is where I draw a line between conviction and stubbornness. I can care deeply about making something possible while revising my assumptions about how to do it. And I can remove unnecessary work without assuming every activity whose value is hard to measure must be unnecessary.<\/p>\n What I would change<\/strong> I would make clear that I\u2019m inspecting the target, not asking them to confess misconduct. The support example shows why: a well-intended measure can reward a result nobody originally wanted.<\/p>\n Then I\u2019d trace one customer\u2019s experience across the whole company. Not an average customer in a slide. A specific purchase, implementation or unresolved complaint.<\/p>\n Where did we make them repeat information? Which handoff delayed the result? Did we solve their problem, or did each department complete its assigned step?<\/p>\n Next, I\u2019d follow the warning. Who first noticed the issue? What happened when they raised it? Did anyone have permission to change the requirement, or could everyone only apologize and work around it?<\/p>\n I\u2019d also inspect the measurement itself. Fewer support contacts could mean a better product. They could mean people can\u2019t reach support. More usage could mean greater value, or more effort to complete the same job.<\/p>\n I would pair the internal number with evidence of what changed for the customer. For support, that might include whether the issue stayed resolved, repeat contacts and total time spent getting help. None of those measures is perfect, so I\u2019d keep reading the underlying cases.<\/p>\n Then I would change something consequential. Adjust the incentive. Give someone authority over the broken handoff. Remove an approval that adds no useful protection, or restore a capability we cut without understanding.<\/p>\n I would state what I expect the change to do, set a review date and check whether customers actually experience the improvement. If the evidence contradicts me, I\u2019d revise the decision rather than search for a more flattering number.<\/p>\n Your decisions answer before your messaging does<\/strong> Communication can explain a useful change. It cannot substitute for making one.<\/p>\n When I say a company has forgotten why it exists, I don\u2019t mean it needs a better origin story. I mean its internal rules may no longer protect the benefit that earns the customer\u2019s choice.<\/p>\n I want to know which rule we\u2019d change when those two things conflict.<\/p>\n Take the target your team most wants to hit this quarter. Could they hit it while making life worse for the people buying from you?<\/p>\n If they showed you that happening, would you change the target?<\/p>\n Or would you congratulate them?<\/p>\n PSA for KIT<\/a> users. You can generate your buyer-centric homepage in 17 minutes.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Once you complete the Advisor step, the system will generate the Advisor and Insider reports.\u00a0<\/p>\n Then you can run through the steps in Pablo.\u00a0<\/p>\n How it unlocks<\/p>\n Each prompt unlocks as you copy the previous one. The system only works if you do the work.<\/p>\n See examples below for inspiration.<\/p>\n Ten B2B homepages, rebuilt from the buyer’s frame.<\/strong><\/p>\n The left column shows each site exactly as it stands today. The right column is the same company, rewritten from the buyer’s side.<\/p>\n Eight of the ten headlines on the left are about the company or its product. A buyer has to work out where they fit before reading on.<\/p>\n “The intelligent platform.” All ten on the right speak to the buyer first.<\/p>\n Your GPUs aren’t slow. Same companies, same products, and only the framing changed.<\/p>\n They sell construction software, tax work, insurance, a CMS and a founder network. Three of them are public companies. The category made no difference, and the pattern held every time.<\/p>\n People don’t buy when they understand you. They buy when they feel understood.<\/strong><\/p>\n Find your own homepage in the left column. Then read the one on the right and decide which page you would rather buy from.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/paulsyng.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/8c642a29-1018-a540-9af8-0a833f1225dc.jpeg\")
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When I ask why a company exists, I\u2019m not asking for the founder\u2019s biography or the sentence above the fold. I\u2019m asking what becomes possible for someone because the business exists.<\/p>\n
Nike gives me a particularly clear example because I don\u2019t have to guess what management was trying to do.<\/p>\n
Starbucks offers a different version of the same tension. In February 2007, Howard Schultz wrote an internal memo about the weakening of the Starbucks experience. He described automated espresso machines that improved speed but blocked customers\u2019 view of drink preparation. He discussed packaging that supported fresh coffee at scale but reduced the aroma and preparation rituals in stores. Standardized design improved store economics while, in his view, making the stores less welcoming.<\/p>\n
I think we lose something when we explain this behaviour by saying employees stopped caring. Sometimes a person understands the customer problem perfectly. They also understand what will happen to their performance review if they spend time fixing it.<\/p>\n
Chris Argyris gives me a useful distinction between improving how we pursue a goal and questioning the goal itself.<\/p>\n
IBM helps me think about another form of inward focus: making customers navigate the way the company organizes itself. In the 1990s, IBM worked to keep the company together, improve coordination and put more emphasis on companywide results. Customer accounts from that period describe the value of bringing different kinds of expertise together.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t want this argument to become an excuse for bad economics. A company needs enough money to pay people, maintain its product and invest in what comes next. Serving customers at a cost the business can\u2019t sustain doesn\u2019t solve that problem.<\/p>\n
I wouldn\u2019t begin with a customer-centricity workshop. I\u2019d put a few actual decisions on the table. I\u2019d choose a target that affects pay or promotion and ask the people working under it how they could meet it while making the customer experience worse.<\/p>\n
This is why I treat positioning as a business question. A promise of simplicity has operating consequences. If I keep adding steps that make my company easier to manage and my customer\u2019s job harder to complete, a clearer homepage won\u2019t remove those steps.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/paulsyng.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/49d69145-9552-3d3c-6d6e-0bcb91b36070-scaled.png\")
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2. Deepen it with the 4-Level Canvas.
3. Map what customers are buying versus what you’re selling.
4. Turn that into a landing page in the customer’s voice.
5. Build a clean HTML prototype from the page.
6. Write a LinkedIn post to drive traffic to it.
7. Rewrite your LinkedIn profile to pull in the right people.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/paulsyng.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/76d551f1-5c36-c352-431f-9159ffa07c88.jpg\")
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“The definitive AI-native platform.”
“Together, we can build it all.”<\/p>\n
Your tax review is complete.
Your project doesn’t fail all at once.<\/p>\n