There is a great scene in the movie The Matrix (http://youtu.be/zE7PKRjrid4) in which Morpheus presents Neo with the choice to take a red pill or a blue pill:

“If you take the blue pill, you will wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland, and I will show you how deep the rabbithole goes!”

When someone asks me for advice on agile, teams, organizations, management, etc. unfortunately I only offer the red pill. If you want to have a blue pill and hear a biased view keeping you in the dream world then I am not the right person to hire or to ask for advice.

However if you want an honest opinion and advice. And if you are not afraid to hear about the strengths and weaknesses of the organization and individuals , I can offer you the red pill and I will do all I can to get to the bottom of things and to guide people, teams and organizations to better and more enjoyable ways of working.

It doesn’t always make me popular, but then again, I am not here to be liked by everyone, I am here to change things. That’s what motivates and drives me.

“Delight the customer”

With radical management Steve Denning introduced a new phrase: “customer delight”. And more and more companies are picking it up. But unfortunately not to the extend that is needed to actually achieve delighted customers.

Now what is the idea behind “customer delight” ? In my opinion it actually has several aspects.

Customers are spoiled
We live in an era were customers have got used to high quality products and services. Satisfying customers is not enough anymore to distinguish a company from it’s competitors and to add the customers of those competitors to it’s own customer base. Customers expect to be satisfied so you need to delight them to get their attention.

Traditional marketing is dead
Traditional marketing which consists of advertisements as we know it is no longer accepted by customers. Customers are constantly “harassed” by commercials, smart sales people and marketing statements that do nothing more then stating the obvious. Customers won’t get fooled anymore by these empty forms of marketing, they need real stories to be convinced. And what better stories there are then the stories of delighted customers?

This change started in the consumer market but is now finding it’s way in the business market. This is a logical evolution since the people that were delighted by the consumer products and services probably also work for a living. And if you get a certain amount of quality and service of consumer products then why should you accept less from the business market?

Why should we want to delight customers?
During a seminar about radical management Steve Denning started with an explanation how traditionally managed companies will run out of business in a very short time. I strongly believe in this as well. If companies keep to their proven approaches from 50 years old while the entire world has changed and expectations about products and services have grown exponentially they are fighting a lost battle.

The first signs of this are slowly beginning to show. Companies that are operating from their ivory tower are loosing ground and will be in trouble if they don’t chance their approach, while the companies that focus on delighting their customers are largely succesfull and profitable.

Research has indicated that only one out of five employees is fully engaged in their work. To me this is quite shocking, this means that 80% of people with a job go to their work each day, do their trick and go home again. No passion, no intense drive, commitment only limited to what is in their job description. Thousands to millions of people spend their working time in life like this.

Now why is this a problem? It is up to the people how they fill in their position at work right? True, that is one way to look at it. However it are the people that are managing companies that should be worried about this. We live in an ultra competitive era were business come and go constantly. An era in which customers have become more and more critical, harder to lure them to your companies products and services and definitely more difficult to retain.

To succeed you need to stand out and prevent from blending in the background to eventually fade away. Now fill it in for yourself, will a company consisting of people that come to work, do their job and then switch of and go home be the company that rises above all others, or will it just blend in the background and fade away? I think we all know the answer.