Douglas Engelbart's Norweigian Cousin Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson

This blog is really for Engelbart afficionados. Click on the title for more about Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson from Oslo University.

I was recently reminded of the impact of Doug Engelbart's ARC Lab (Augmentation Research Center at SRI in the 60's and 70's) when John Markoff of the New York Times wrote about a high school student who had hung out at Doug's lab. Geoff Goodfellow came up with the idea of wireless email years and years before Blackberry and others. Doug's lab was the 2nd note on the ARPANET and as a result, no doubt, Geoff Goodfellow's inspiration is embedded in the core of the Internet in a protocol number '99' set aside for wireless email. http://www.wirelessmuse.com/winternet/2006/04/new_york_times_.html

But of course it was not in a vacuum, the intellectual ferment of the ARC lab, I'm sure had something to do with it.

Doug recently took me out for a birthday breakfast, thank you Doug! And we talked about his famous Norweigian Nobel-prize winning, writer of the lyrics of the Norweigian national anthem, ancestral cousin Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. I'd always felt that there was somewhere that Doug's "one-of-a-kind" way of thinking had emerged, and reading about Bjørnson made me realize that some of it was in his genes.



BJØRNSTJERNE BJØRNSON (1832 - 1910) www.gonorway.no/go/bjoernson.html and Douglas Carl
Engelbart (1925 -
www.adam.cheyer.com/misc.html
Douglas Engelbart's ancestor was first cousin to Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, a Norweigian who was the third person awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1903. I've tried to insert their mid-life photos side by side (the links are there if this doesn't work in your browser) - there is some resemblance!

It's interesting to see strands of Doug's thought "preceded" by the works of his distinguished ancestor.... the idealistic spirit, international efforts. The idea of "crop rotation" where Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson alternated between heroic sagas and peasant stories, is also reminiscent of Doug's "two-faceted" way of working, which is alternate between wanting to collaborate and really wanting to work on his own, in his own way; and to wanting to involve people and augment humanity, while working with computers to do this.

Click on the title to link to the description of , by Professor Edvard Beyer, who is professor of Nordic literature at the University of Oslo. I've reproduced below an extract that 1 particularly liked because it reminds me a lot of how Engelbart's mind works, in describing the sagas and stories of the Nobel-prize winning Bjørnson.

" a restrained power, an unquenchable urge for adventure, talents in search of a goal, stubborn pride and a shy taciturnity, which keeps others at arm´s length."

As a sculpture is hidden in a rough piece of stone

For some months now, I see myself as a work-in-progress - its a great way to get out of the perfectionism trap that I allowed to encircle me from my very young days

I'm sculpting my life each day, each hour a chance to chip away, to uncover something I care about

So today is something special, because someone has seen enough of the rough hewn stone that is my life to date, and can glimpse some of what I hope to be, to do, to contribute.

It means a lot to me to be seen as I would hope to be - even if I am far from complete - the sculpture is emerging.

Thank you to a wonderful human being Paul Greenberg http://www.the56group.typepad.com for being the best cheer leader who has just told the world what he sees when he looks at me! And listen out for Paul's Route 56 Podcasts - thinking fun inspiring, that's Paul.


PS - Just started reading Math and Mona Lisa by Bulent Atalay about Leonardo Da Vinci. The book reminded me of Michelangelo being the one who said that the sculpture is already there in the stone. Atalay said, for the scientist, the scientific law is already there in the data, waiting to be discovered.

Atalay is a Renaissance person, who sees in both art and science, that the human imagination is vital to seeing-it- when-others-don't and working to uncover it so others can see it too.

We have so much to learn from Healthcare

In February I attended a Healthcare IT conference in San Diego.

25,000 delegates, 900 exhibitors.

The buzz was that one exhibitor spent $1M on its booth at the show.

Clearly healthcare IT is a very rich field.

Yet amongst all the many tracks, workshops, exhibitors and speakers I found one person who stood out head and shoulders above the rest as the future of Healthcare IT

Dr. Joel Berman - a physician in Concord New Hampshire.

He talked about how the doctors in his practice came to accelerate improvements in care for their patients with diabetes.

His story is a story about what it takes to lead the human changes in order to take advantage of technology.

How the doctors had to deal with an existential crisis of what it meant to be doctors. How using the computer help them focus on what it was that they as human beings brought to the doctor/patient relationship.

We have so much to learn from the thoughtful doctors who are faced with the huge challenge of embracing electronic medical records EMR or electronic health records EHR - this dictate has come from the top down in order to control healthcare costs, all medical institutions know they will be required to have EMR/EHR to support their practice.

I hope you'll click on the title link and read the interview with this thoughtful humane and dedicated doctor.


And if you read Chinese, the article in Chinese is at http://www.greaterchinacrm.org:8080/gb/content_details.jsp?contentid=2036&subjectid=107

Today's Topic is Trust

Anne Obarski writes in The Side Road, that earning customer trust is the only way to win and keep customers. She's right. But that doesn't stop people taking a disastrous short cut: Winning customers only to lose their trust later and lose their business right after that.

The unfortunate thing is that organizations are not consciously trying to lose their customers trust. The sad thing is that its done without knowing. They do it when they are paying attention to other things, like trying to make a profit this year or next.

I recently wrote a couple of articles about Healthcare Customer Relationship Management and Customer Service in Healthcare. I learned that keeping trust with patients and customers is what its all about in Healthcare. I'll take the medicine, change my diet, do the exercise, because I trust that you tell me that this is what I need to do to improve my health. If I don't trust, then I won't do, and the treatment won't work.

The Values-Driven Consumer - this is one of the 7 trends identified in MegaTrends 2010 by Patricia Aberdene. I appreciate learning about it from Mark Silver's newsletter, www.heartofbusiness.com Here's my insight, businesses and customers are looking for trusted relationships, in reaction to unprofitable, dissatisfying relationships that emerge when customers and businesses are driven purely by financial considerations.

I love Trader Joes. Its a grocery store, there are two branches within 2 miles of my house and I go to each one at least once a week, sometimes more. I trust their food selection - mostly its yummy, it offers healthy choices, and its not a huge zoo. They have filtered down their selection to the things that are really likely to appeal to me. How did they build my trust? Well, I first heard that they are "cut price gourmet". At first I still went regularly to a supermarket. But as Trader Joe's selection expanded to include more day to day stuff, like fresh fruit and veggies and cereal and bread, it became unnecessary to go to a supermarket anymore. And they offer little sampling cups of coffee in the store, which is a nice touch that I really appreciate. And once in a while, I'll buy a fragrant bunch of oriental lilies for the dining table as a visual and perfuming treat.

I am driven by financial considerations, but I also like convenience, a discriminating selection that meets my tastes and needs, nearby parking and friendly people with viviid personalities at the checkout who always ask me "Did you find everything you need?". I really feel like I am doing business with People, not an abstract entity. People that I could trust if I was caught in an earthquake with. (This is quite a consideration in California, where the Big One is now past due)

There's a flip side of the coin. What do customers do that show businesses that they can trust them? Well, the obvious one is "Have a Good Credit Record", paying your bills. If we as customers want businesses to respect us as individuals, then we should respect businesses and their right to run their businesses to meet their goals. We need to appreciate those who go out of their way to help us, not just take it for granted. We are not monarchs or aristocrats, no one on earth was put here to serve us, and when something special is done for us, it is appropriate and necessary for us to respond in acknowledgement.

Trust is a Two-Way Track.

Trusted businesses will get more business.

Trusted customers will get more satisfaction from their business relationships.

Getting Better at Getting Better

There's a great description of what Doug Engelbart has been been trying to do all his life. Along with being a muse and mentor to many, he's devoted his life to how do we get better at getting better. Adele Goldberg, co-inventor of one of the first object oriented languages, Smalltalk has worked with Doug when she was active in the ACM - Association for Computing Machinery, and helped publish his papers back in 1993. Later in 2002, she wrote this about what he has been saying for 53 years. I really like it, its framed on the wall behind my computer monitor, and today is your lucky day, because I'm sharing it with you. I think its great.


We need to improve how we work together
And we all know that this is true:

The best way to improve is to find others who are improving,
and copy them!

The next best way to improve is to find others who also want to improve,
and work together.

Improvement is:
Process
and Tools
and Learning-oriented
and can be done outside protected business interests.

There are GREAT examples of improvement
Where communities formed from a grass roots need to get help,
and an individual desire to give help....Open Source


The results are tools
and better human communications
That benefit everyone

We NEED to get more results like these into our organizations
and our government

We can speed up our efforts by taking a meta approach.
We need to learn how in setting up the meta world
We can ENCOURAGE!
OBSERVE!
and LEARN from the individual customizations of the ideas.

We need to help people/organizations form communities
Whose purpose is:

- To get help and give help
- To Invent and Use Tools
- Better Communications



YEP, well said Adele!

CRM and Communities will increasingly overlap in the future:

It's a new paradigm that can take us away from the grinding cost-cutting that's prevalent.

Focusing us on finding new ways to improve the value that businesses and customers, governments and citizens can create together for each other.

Caring is Profitable - the Johnson and Johnson Credo

I was reminded today of an article that I wrote "pre-blog" which means a lot to me. So I'm sharing parts of it with you. Click on the title above to see the full article.




Here's a quiz:

1. Name the major pharmaceutical companies with almost always positive earnings results over the past five years

2. Name the major pharmaceutical companies that have beaten the US stock market (Dow Jones, NASDAQ, S&P 500) over the last five years

3. Name the major pharmaceutical companies that have increased the amount of their dividend payments to their shareholders over the last year, a time of tremendous chaos for the pharmaceutical industry

4. Name the one company that appears on all three lists.

Have you guessed?

Johnson and Johnson has a Credo, a set of guiding principles that has steered them since 1943. The Credo puts customers first and shareholders last and the business has thrived, here's how it starts:



"Our first responsibility is to the doctors
nurses and patients to mothers and fathers and all others
who use our products and services."


In developing their products for the Diabetes Market, Johnson and Johnson studied the effects of diabetes in a Native American community called Whirling Thunder. They did not focus on just the use of their products, they looked at the lives of those suffering from the disease, Johnson and Johnson looked at how to prevent the disease, sponsoring community programs to reduce the death rate from the disease.....

Johnson and Johnson is a leading provider of Diabetes products. Within a face to face setting inside a Diabetes community, the business learned how to recommend practices, services and products that helped them help themselves, building on their own strengths and culture. These learnings became available for incorporating in a diabetes website. They developed a program called One-Touch Gold which will be launched in fall 2005. Some other companies might call it a Loyalty program. Many loyalty programs are developed which start by asking "What is good for our company?" Guided by their Credo, Johnson and Johnson started first with the question "What is good for our customers?" They build Deep Customer Loyalty.....


The latest buzzword in CRM is Community. One problem is that few people know what that means, and how it helps business make money. The Credo has guided Johnson and Johnson to experiment with online healthcare community building. Research has shown that online support groups for people with a major disease like Breast Cancer can be very effective in providing useful information and friends and counsel for victims of the disease and their families.....

The Credo guides J&J's innovations in online community building for acquiring customers. By experimenting with the idea: "Ask not what the Community can do for J&J, but ask what J&J can do for the Community", they can test the business hypothesis - is this a good investment for the company. Using Customer Lifetime Value J&J will be able to determine how much they can and should invest in the community in order to increase customer lifetime value of their customers and prospects.

Our Credo


We believe our first responsibility is to the doctors, nurses and patients,
to mothers and fathers and all others who use our products and services.
In meeting their needs everything we do must be of high quality.
We must constantly strive to reduce our costs
in order to maintain reasonable prices.
Customers' orders must be serviced promptly and accurately.
Our suppliers and distributors must have an opportunity
to make a fair profit.

We are responsible to our employees,
the men and women who work with us throughout the world.
Everyone must be considered as an individual.
We must respect their dignity and recognize their merit.
They must have a sense of security in their jobs.
Compensation must be fair and adequate,
and working conditions clean, orderly and safe.
We must be mindful of ways to help our employees fulfill
their family responsibilities.
Employees must feel free to make suggestions and complaints.
There must be equal opportunity for employment, development
and advancement for those qualified.
We must provide competent management,
and their actions must be just and ethical.

We are responsible to the communities in which we live and work
and to the world community as well.
We must be good citizens - support good works and charities
and bear our fair share of taxes.
We must encourage civic improvements and better health and education.
We must maintain in good order
the property we are privileged to use,
protecting the environment and natural resources.

Our final responsibility is to our stockholders.
Business must make a sound profit.
We must experiment with new ideas.
Research must be carried on, innovative programs developed
and mistakes paid for.
New equipment must be purchased, new facilities provided
and new products launched.
Reserves must be created to provide for adverse times.
When we operate according to these principles,
the stockholders should realize a fair return.


"When we operate according to these principles,
the stockholders should realize a fair return."


In the Spring and Autumn Analects, Confucius laid out a set of simple principles which defined the relationship between people, their families, their government and their society.

Johnson & Johnson has succeeded over many years by following the simple set of principles laid out by their founder that defines the relationships between the business and customers, their communities and their shareholders. Guided by the Credo, Johnson and Johnson have a history of long term success in business profitability and built the most powerful brand in the Pharmaceutical industry.

Maybe we can learn something here about what makes CRM successful.

Going the Extra Mile for Service - in Singapore

I got a glimpse of how a country might set about improving service during a recent visit to Singapore with Paul Greenberg.

Gosh, he's a trooper. Just there for 6 days, we visited with many people all around Singapore, talking about Customers, Citizens and their relationships to the organizations of business and government. Read all about it in his blog of January 30th. He made an impression in Singapore, very generously sharing his expertise. And Singapore made an impression on him.

The word Trust came up a lot in those conversations. How to build relationships through service and developing trust. Yesterday, Social Customer Manifesto author, Chris Carfi pointed me at Christopher Allen's blog on the concept of Progressive Trust,
http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2004/08/progressive_tru.html

Neat stuff. Now let's link Customer Experience Management with the concept of Progressive Trust and we'll really be talking!

Singapore National Service Excellence Initiative

Paul Greenberg is a trooper. For 6 days, we visited with people all over Singapore, talking about CRM and Service Excellence. He made an impression, generously sharing his expertise, and Singapore made an impression on him, see his January 30th blog at http://www.the56group.typepad.com/.

In fact, it was so hectic, I am only just back to my blog. I salute him for having written about it so quickly. I was celebrating Chinese New Year!

Singapore is taking very seriously how to smooth the transition to the Service Economy. The National initiative on Service Excellence is a great start. Read more about it at http://www.the56group.typepad.com/ Paul's January 30th 2006 entry. Yes, it was quite a trip!

Prediction for 2006 - Contact Centers will Come of Age

When you start talking about Customers - which part of your company has the most contact with customers? Its time they come into their own: Contact Centers


If you've been around children, you'll know the story about the ugly duckling who came of age and found he was a swan. That's a lot like call centers. In the next year, you're going to see a shift in call centers as businesses recognize that the longtime ugly ducks are emerging as beautiful swans.

As the April 2005 edition of The McKinseyQuarterly put it, call centers are strategic assets, "among the most underused of all corporate assets."

...... click on this blog post title for the rest of the story

Customer Service and Customer Health: Is the Customer Always Right?

Happy New Year!

Lately I have been thinking about this question posed to me by a senior Customer Relationship executive at a major Asian bank.

"What do you do when a customer's complaint is unreasonable, I mean really unreasonable? You can't always say, the customer is always right."

Funnily enough, I found the way to resolve this dilemma is to inquire

What is the bank in business for?

Beyond just making money of course.

Because that doesn't get you that far, you make money by taking it from customers.

And they give it to you because they value something you are offering them in exchange. What is it that banks offer that is most valuable to their customers?

In the realm of services that banks provide, the most valuable to customers are those that support their financial well-being.

If we say that banks are in business to support the financial well-being of their customers : individual households or businesses, then service excellence can be measured in terms of how well banking services support customer's financial health.

So when complaints come, they can be resolved by the principle of financial health:

Does the service improve financial health or not?

When new services are considered they can be guided by this principle as well, so that customers don't feel that banks are only working to the bank's own interest.

The principle of financial health of customers provides a common goal for both customers and their banks.

And offers banks a great way to position their services to their customers through the various stages of development of their businesses and households.

Thought for 2006: The year for Servicing Customer Well-being

are you a fox or a hedgehog? A hare brain or tortoise mind?

It turns out that "people who make prediction their business—people who appear as experts on television, get quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses, and participate in punditry roundtables—are no better than the rest of us."

"Think for yourself" is the lesson of the review by Louis Menand in the New Yorker magazine, of Philip Tetlock’s new book, “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?” (Princeton; $35.

Psychologists have tested and found that people who have one big idea are most likely to embrace information that supports it and severely question information that does not. When it works it pays off big. E.g, Winston Churchill was right about Hitler. But his idea about Indian independence was wrong. He's remembered for being right about Hitler. Tetlock calls this type of expert the "Hedgehog".

The other type of expert is more likely to be right, because they look for evidence and correct as they go, they are not "stuck" on one idea. It looks to me like more evidence for using the Scientific Method: Make a hypothesis, test it, and make a new model that takes the latest information into account. The beauty of this is the speed of learning: The fox dashes ahead to take into account the very latest information, is more likely to believe that their point of view needs to be modified.

But its not enough to be a fox.

In September, I attended a talk by the actor and comedian, John Cleese. He spoke about Hare Brains and Tortoise Minds. It was a profound talk to a group of people who have been battered into thinking that cost savings are the only path to profit - Contact Center Directors. It advocated thinking of new ways to connect with customers, and shifting beyond cost savings to revenue generation.

Hare brains are very logical and rational - making constant refinements, they are very effective when things are pretty well understood. Ideal for cost savings.

Tortoise minds look deeper into their unconscious, rely more on intuition. They are more likely to achieve breakthrough thinking. In the area of working with people, in the arts, in business, in customer relationships, the easy things have been done, the Hare Brains have taken care of the obvious cost savings. Its the turn of the tortoise minds to develop the breakthroughs in service excellence which then can be refined to be delivered cost effectively by the hare brains.

The next step, to achieve breakthroughs in delivering customer value and delighting customers requires tortoise mind, and opening up to what might work.

(Of course this is a very superficial summary of what was a hilarious and wonderful talk - if anyone wants to see my notes, let me know and I'll send you a copy.)

So is the path to customer connection that of the FOX? with a Tortoise Mind?

The Fox is critical to link to Tortoise Mind - Learning is essential to guide intuition and insight in customer relations and service excellence.

Trolling the CRM blog world... .

Found something I like:

"Don't blame CRM for your Customer Service Failures" by Rashid Khan of Ultimus.

The title caught my eye, and I very much agree with his first thesis:

"For years enterprises have tried to combat customer service issues with technology. For example, often organizations do not have a central location to keep all of a customer's data. The customer's e-mail requests are stored in one location while records of phone conversations are located someplace else. When this happens the call center manager approaches the IT manager and says, "We need a database". The IT manager then researches the latest in knowledge-bases and buys the technology that will best fit the current architecture.

After spending quite a bit of time and money getting this knowledge-base up and running, the system still doesn't seem to run smoothly. Data is not inputted regularly so the information in the knowledge-base is often stale, incomplete or inaccurate. The Call Center manager then goes back to the IT manager and complains that the customer relationship management (CRM) solution is not working properly. To which the IT manager protests that the technology is working fine, but it is the fault of the agents for not using it properly. The ensuing result of the project is another piece of technology not being used to the best of its ability and the gap between IT and the business user is driven further apart."

But I must take issue with his simple solution: "process planning and automation".

Customer Service is a human interchange, an interchange between people. YES, process planning and automation can help the interchange be more "productive", but it requires the human touch to make it more meaningful and memorable.

CRM, in fact technology of any kind, should augment our ability to fulfil the human desire to connect with each other and create value together through the connection.

For a customer, the ideal company to do business with is one that is designed exactly to fulfil the customer's needs.

With technology, we are getting closer to this ideal, but first we have to understand very well the range of experiences, services and products the business can deliver, and how to organize all of these so that each individual customer gets just the experience that is relevant, timely, memorable and personally valuable.

Process planning and automation is just part of the solution.

I do like Rashid Khan's blog of Nov 22, and just wanted to add the essential "human touch" After all, what is the good of "cheaper better faster" if there is no human meaning and human value involved?

Winners of the Best CRM Blogs: Paul Greenberg and Chris Carfi

Back blogging again! I'm inspired to write by Paul Greenberg's winning of the SearchCRM Best CRM Blog award. He won it with Chris Carfi author of The Social Customer Manifesto. Congratulations Paul and Chris!

Just returned from Singapore last week. The trip had two focusing themes:

BizARTS and Service Excellence. Both relevant to CRM.

BizARTS is the name of the new venture being launched by Min Lee, Singapore's prodigy violinist, just returned from studying in the US and amazingly, very interested in contributing to the community she grew up in. She believes Arts IS Life. I'm involved because I see business has so much to learn from the arts in the specific area of delivering Customer Experences!

Service Excellence is the Singapore National Initiative launched in October to increase the level of service in Singapore. Clearly its part of a long term push within the country to transform into a Service Economy. I'm thrilled that they are taking the long view and seeing that a gracious society is essential to having an attractive economically vibrant service economy, knowledge economy.

The Experience Economy is coming!

Connecting the Arts and Business

The Arts are supported by the wealthy, many of the top business people in any society

Today Arts activities and events are valuable networking opportunities for doing Business

The UK has set up a whole organization called Arts and Business (see link) just to get more happening, for example: to create partnerships so that business is supporting the arts and gets something directly out of that support, e.g. publicity, goodwill, community building, employees volunteering and feeling good about it

What other Arts Business win/win connections might there be?

On the site, I found this article:
http://www.aandb.org.uk/render.aspx?siteID=1&navIDs=1,5,448,470

CREATIVITY CRISIS LEAVES UK BUSINESS AT A DISADVANTAGE

Some extracts -

* UK businesses are facing aa shortage of creativity skills at senior levels

* 60% of FTSE 500 companies now require their CEOs to have creative skills

* 48% require creative skills of their Sales Directors

* Businesses in the FTSE 500 see creativity skills as one of the main engines to business success, and seek creative people to join their Boards of Directors

* Reasons for 86% of board candidates failing to meet this criteria are

· A lack of creative mentors and suitable training (36%)

· A dull and unexciting physical work environment (27%)

· Work ethos, where the atmosphere and working practices are not conducive to the development of creativity skills (23%)

· Lack of training in general education (14%)

According to Arts & Business CEO Colin Tweedy:

"The arts are a good place to start and have a unique ability to inspire individuals to think and act differently and to increase levels of creativity and innovation. It can start by inviting a poet to speak about creative writing to developing a more complex arts access and development programme.....If businesses are to overcome the creativity skills deficit, then all that is required now is actual engagement with a primary source of creativity - the arts."


And how does this Connect to Customers?

Creating Customer Experience requires much more than mundane transaction completion - the aesthetics taught by being involved with ART, provide valuable insight into what it takes to develop with Customers authentic emotional impact and emotional connection - some call it Brand Loyalty - so that Customers feel good about doing Business with your company.

Just look at the success of the Apple iPOD and the new Nano - aesthetic creativity inside!

We have moved well beyond supplying the basics, customers want more and will pay for more:

style! design! coolness!

Its the Customers Stupid

Tom Peter's blog - well I just found it, what can I say?

I like it a lot when he says in his August 25 2005 blog "Black Dogs, Loved Ones, etc" :


It's the People, stupid! It's the Customers, stupid!

My great friend Warren Bennis said, "The best thing a leader can do for a Great Group is to allow its members to discover their greatness."

My late colleague Boyd Clarke added, "I have always believed that the purpose of the corporation is to be a blessing to its employees."

End of quote from Peter's blog.


I'm downloading Tom Peter's ePaper on PSF - the Professional Service Firm

114 pages, free at www.ChangeThis.com listed under September 7

Tons of very useful papers about the new Customer Economy


I found out about Tom Peter's blog from http://zane.typepad.com/ : Zane's blog

And got to Zane's blog from

www.heartofbusiness.com

where Mark Silver is doing well by doing good.

He's combining the Karma bank and the Money bank and creating $ocial Capital:

"When you want to make a difference and you need to make a profit"


And how did I find Mark Silver's site? Because I was looking for a new domain name....

Social Customer Manifesto

My post today acknowledges and recognizes an important contribution by Christopher Carfi

The Social Customer Manifesto

* I want to have a say.

* I don't want to do business with idiots.

* I want to know when something is wrong, and what you're going to do to fix it.

* I want to help shape things that I'll find useful.

* I want to connect with others who are working on similar problems.

* I don't want to be called by another salesperson. Ever. (Unless they have something useful. Then I want it yesterday.)

* I want to buy things on my schedule, not yours. I don't care if it's the end of your quarter.

* I want to know your selling process.

* I want to tell you when you're screwing up. Conversely, I'm happy to tell you the things that you are doing well. I may even tell you what your competitors are doing.

* I want to do business with companies that act in a transparent and ethical manner.

* I want to know what's next. We're in partnership…where should we go?



Sounds like a Customer Manifesto to me!


Now if this is the Customer Manifesto - what is the business manifesto?

And in the light of the National Katrina Disaster on many fronts (hurricane, flood, loss of NOLA, government's contract with citizens) - what is the government manifesto?

Blogs Customers et al

Just today, I met David through the Blogging Loom who writes:

"I believe in constant pursuit. When it's done without fearlessness and with a desire to embrace the unknown, the walls that have been created between the world and ourselves naturally dissolve."

I'm honored to meet you!

"Blogging Loom" comes from Edna St Vincent Millay's poem fragment:

Upon this gifted age, in this dark hour,
Rains from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts... they lie unquestioned, uncombined
Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill
Is daily spun, but there exists no loom
To weave it into fabric...


The Blogging Loom is slowly evolving into existence.

And that the nature of business is slowly but surely changing.

Businesses don't like it when their employees Blog about their company.

Why?

Because that's the truest "Buyers Guide" that there is.

And the Blogging Loom makes it possible for all to see how the Sausages are made inside the Sausage Factory.

Better the devil you know than the devil you don't

Customer Relationships will never be the same after the blogging loom hits mainstream

Pharmaceutical Mission Impossible

Deliver customer satisfaction and make a profit ? Who?s really able to do it? Have you guessed? Johnson and Johnson is delivering customer satisfaction and making a consistent profit. It is not Mission Impossible....

The Johnson and Johnson Credo is legendary in the pharmaceutical industry.

It is a model for good CRM practice.

I love it!

I wrote this article for Greater China CRM and suddenly realized that the J&J Credo was a somewhat like the Spring and Autumn Analects - the records by the students of Confucius on his thoughts about the relationship between people, families, community and emperor. Defining the values of key relationship has provides strong guidelines for one of the longest ongoing cultures in the world: China.

Perhaps it also accounts for Johnson and Johnson's steady success over the years.

Customer Lifetime Value article at CRMGuru

A long time ago, in 1998, Linda Sharpe and I gave a talk in Silicon Valley about Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) that drew a record crowd to the Marketing Special Interest Group of the Software Development Forum www.sdforum.org

Since then, my understanding continues to evolve.

Customer Lifetime Value is a great way to understand how valuable your customers are as Assets.... read my latest article just up at www.crmguru.com to find out more

The 5 Kernels of Corn - Truly Deeply Madly Valuing People

This was triggered by an article and response in the Singapore Straits Times.


Poet and Economic Development Board director Koh Buck Song wrote an article in the Straits Times June 22, 2005 about innovation in social development. “The key is to see it through”.



Joyce Tan Swee Yee won the award for Outstanding Social Worker Merit Award for 2004. Mr. Koh touched on issues she has worked all her life on. So she wrote a reply which was published in the Straits Times Jun 27 in which she said


“Unless we truly, deeply, madly value the individual citizen, there can be no true, long-lasting social development.”


Yesterday, my friend Hung Nguyen told me a story about a wealthy Asian patriarch, and I have very slightly adapted it below:

The illustrious and prosperous gentleman of the East had 5 sons, each with a family of his own. To whom would he would leave the bulk of his wealth.

In those days, it was the practice to give control of the wealth to the woman of the family. So he needed to decide which of his daughters-in-law would be the best.


He decided to test them over five years in this way, giving each daughter-in-law 5 kernels of corn and telling them he was going away and would return in five years.

The first thought he was a crazy old man, probably going senile and threw them away.

The second thought the 5 kernels must be very special, probably magical and so thought to capture those magical powers by eating the corn.

The third thought that these were given to her for safe keeping and she put them in a very special box that would protect them and put the box in a vault.

The fourth wanted to be innovative and ground the kernels into flour, and started looking for great recipes that would maximize the impact of that tiny amount of corn flour.

The fifth decided that the best thing to do would be to plant the corn.

So she prepared a planting bed and watched over the corn.

They grew tall and beautiful, and she harvested the corn, keeping some to plant for the next season, doing this for each of the five years.


The old man returned, and asked what had happened to the corn he had given his daughters in law


The first said “What corn?”

The second said “They weren’t magic, I ate them and nothing happened.”

The third said “Here they are, EXACTLY the way you gave them to me.”

The fourth said “I found this world-class recipe for those kernels and here is the exquisite morsel I made from the corn”

The fifth said “Come with me to the back of the house”, in front of them, spreading as far as they could see were rows and rows of maize plants, green and lush, waving gently in the slight breeze.


The old man knew he had found the right person to inherit his wealth.


In his article, Koh Buck Song gives his view of the major obstacles to following through on social development innovation. I read it as meaning that it is the lack of follow through that results in the inability to harvest sustainably from efforts at social development.

For me, focusing on the follow through is like trying to work out how the first four daughters-in-law can follow through to maximize the impact of their five kernel’s of corn. Five is Five and stays five. (even when innovatively cooked into a worldclass recipe for eating)

It was the fifth daughter who saw the potential of the kernels of corn and nurtured them, who saw the kernels grow and multiply. Five becomes 100’s becomes 1000’s and keeps on going…

All the training and innovation will come to naught as with the first 4 daughters-in-law.

The individual citizen is like the corn kernel – all the potential is there – in each person.

Accepting all the possibilities and nurturing them to fruition, harvest and re-seeding is a joyful process.

The key is to Truly, Madly, Deeply Value the individual citizen.


What if we change citizen to customer? How would you read the story?