Banks, eh? Easy to knock them, but what can we learn from their travails? Well, they illustrate perfectly how a. incentives drive behaviour, and b. delighting shareholders is unlikely to be a winning strategy in the long term. John Kay’s book Obliquity explores the principle that complex goals are best achieved indirectly, with examples of companies which achieved sustainable profitability by focusing not on their profit goals but on what their customers needed from them. Read More

Every business needs an effective customer dashboard, which should measure how the business is delivering on its promise to customers (or consumers), and not how well the marketing department is spending its marketing budget (see Dashboard schmashboard). Every function is responsible for managing and spending its budget wisely. Marketing communications budgets may be subject to board scrutiny from time to time, just like other large budgets, but that’s nothing to do with the customer experience. Read More

Customer dashboards are popular now – everyone’s talking about them, and feeling great about using them to “bring the customer into the board room”. Your average customer dashboard is usually a table of measures, sometimes as many as twenty or thirty, that come directly or indirectly from your customers or consumers. These can be simple things like market share or retention measured by the business or third parties, along with data from custom research like customer satisfaction or net promoter scores, Read More

Fooled by randomness, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

It’s a cliché to say a book changes how you think about things, or how you see the world, but this one does. Taleb, a Lebanese trader working in the New York financial market, is original, iconoclastic and entertaining. It made me question what I read and hear in the media, and how people report events and achievements. The central idea is that we look for causality and frequently infer it where it does not exist. Read More

How brands grow: what marketers don’t know, by Byron Sharp

Based on analysis of twenty years of rigorous purchasing data from many categories and markets, this book debunks some of the myths about how marketing builds business success. An Aussie academic who worked with the great Andrew Ehrenberg of London South Bank University, Sharp shows how a lot of marketers focus on the wrong things, and tells you what you should focus on. Read More

Beyond the Familiar, by Patrick Barwise and Seán Meehan

These two take an enterprise-wide approach to creating organic growth, with a simple, clear and actionable model. They agree with Sharp that the only differentiation really worth pursuing is to be the business that delivers on the category basics better than competitors. Their previous book, Simply Better, laid out that argument in full. This time they’re showing how to put it into practice. They place a very high value on customer feedback, Read More

The best advice I got?
When I was a graduate trainee, a sales manager who spent every lunchtime in the pub told me: “Everyone has something to teach you.”

The worst advice I got?
When I arrived in a new company as CEO, a very experienced account man told me not to bother getting to know a major client as he had it under control. Of course, we lost the business. Read More

“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”

Sign hanging in Einstein’s office at Princeton. Read More