Blog: Jill Dyche

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Slouching Toward What's Best for the Firm

In which Jill laments companies with a culture of internal focus, but heralds a bright shining light in the form of a few visionary individuals.

We’ve all heard of companies who are more internally focused than externally focused. It’s been one of the barriers to successful customer-focused initiatives, the fact that people can’t get out of their own way and support change for the customer’s sake. As Don Peppers and Martha Rogers say in their latest book, Return on Customer, without customers we don’t have a business. More companies’ behaviors should reflect this philosophy.

The phenomenon of internal focus is usually painted with the broad brush of politics. I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately and I’ve decided that there’s a “gestalt” behind such cultures. What I mean is, when it comes to internally-focused organizations, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Simply put, an internally-focused company is comprised of internally focused people. You might even know some of them. I do. They concentrate on managing perception rather than on their job responsibilities. They spend more time on relationship building than they do on delivery. They’re all about domain ownership (aka: what’s mine, what’s not).

Just when I start sounding jaded about this stuff—I know when this happens because I start talking about Maslow’s hierarchy of need until someone smacks me upside the head with sociology textbook—something interesting happens. I have a conversation with a well-meaning executive that knocks me sideways and gives me new hope for corporate America.

For instance, last Monday I was meeting with a Vice President of Strategy for an entertainment company in L.A. His company’s IT department had asked me to come in and introduce the topic of data-as-an asset. They wanted me to cover why data quality and integration can be mapped back to customer-focused strategy. I did 90-minute presentation to the V.P. and his team. Mindful of their attention span and busy schedules—these were, after all, business people—I didn’t focus on customer data management processes and technologies, but on the opportunity cost of not doing customer data management.

The post-meeting Q and A was over lunch across the street from the studio. The strategy exec was engaged and frank. He said:

"I’ll be the first to admit I don’t get this stuff. I don’t really want to get it. But if it’s the right thing to do for the firm, I’ll put up my budget. I mean, I believe you…I just can’t wrap my brain around what this will take. But get me a list of benefits. Tell me what we can’t do as a company until we get this right. Give me a roadmap. And if you can do those things, I’ll fund it."

I mean, I liked the guy before he said this stuff, but now I’d move his fridge for him. For an executive whose time is normally consumed meeting with large consulting firms who don’t name names (McKinsey), he was willing sit down with a data integration and BI services firm (Baseline) and discuss the business risks of not having good data (counterproductive interactions with suppliers, contradictory communications to retailing partners, sub-optimal marketing campaigns, just to name a few).

At the end of lunch, he’d committed to bankrolling an initial data quality effort and—God bless him—justifying the expense to his colleagues in upper management.

Who knows? He could end up falling on his sword. But I doubt he will. Because someone who commits to improving corporate data in a sustained an ongoing way has probably already built some political muscle and doesn’t feel the need to constantly flex it via perception management and spin. Instead, he can think about what’s best for his firm.

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