Such so called ‘Moments of Belief’ – strong and unusual moves against the status quo - are pivotal for companies. The public smashing by Haier’s CEO of sub-standard products; Jack Welch’s denial of access to secure facilities by a security officer; the cancelling by Target’s CEO of the classic store visit in favour of an unannounced incognito arrival, all count.
Such moments shape an organisation’s belief system and can perhaps be compared to decisive social, political or religious events in history.
Rather than a single act of an individual, a “Moment of Belief ” is better interpreted as a timely and thoughtful intervention in a fertile context that gains traction for myriad reasons.
Numerous historical examples show similar origins. Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her seat in a segregated bus; Henri Dunant’s witnessing the horrors of war; King Henry VIII of England’s refused to recognise papal authority and self-declaration as Supreme Head of his country’s church; and the Bolshevik overthrow of Russia’s provisional government creating the future Soviet Union; all count.
Invariably, the status quo was unsatisfactory for many and there was a legitimacy of alternatives. Conditioning made each protagonist act in the “Moment”. The ‘Moments” were easily identifiable and unambiguous and, each had highly significant consequences.
But monocausal attribution of “Moments of Belief” should be treated cautiously when it comes to comparisons. Business writers should ensure they examine antecedents, and the sequence of enabling factors to illustrate what causes lasting change in belief systems.
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True belief in a customer-led approach
By Charlie Dawson, Seán Meehan & Karine Avagyan
Research conducted showed 63% of senior executives reckoned understanding customers and acting on that understanding was critical to success. Yet only 24% adopted a customer-led approach to running their businesses.
Data from 454 executives suggested they were either customer-led or efficiency-led, but that only the customer-led approach contributed to competitive success.
When asked to name the top three contributors to performance from 12 categoires, respondents selected customer understanding and response, people, operational excellence, and innovation most. And the most common combination of “top three” factors were customer understanding and response, operational excellence and people.
Yet the evidence suggests customers lose out to other, more influential, stakeholders, and to different priorities. While acknowledging the importance of customers, most respondents put customer understanding as just one of many important corporate factors, including product excellence, R&D leadership, scaling, cost cutting and operational improvement.
Analysis suggests two basic mutually exclusive approaches are followed; efficiency or customers.
Important differences emerge between customer-led companies and the rest. The former are characterized by gathering momentum, which over recent years has strengthened employees’ focus on customers; a shared understanding of key customers; an effort to satisfy clearly identified customer segments; an ability to bring customer propositions to market; and a high level of employee engagement.
Customer-led companies remain “focused on the numbers”, contributing to, not detracting, from their performance. Efficiency-led companies focus on the numbers and on lean. But they tend to be less adaptive and less responsive than customer-led ones.
Executives supporting the efficiency-led route may claim customers are one of their top three priorities, but do not experience the superior business performance to prove it. So while managers may claim, and possibly individually believe, customers are among the most important factors for competitive performance, nearly twice as many follow a more finance- and operations-led approach, despite resulting in less satisfactory competitive performance than those prioritising a customer-led credo.
Download full report "The Belief Trade-off: Customers or Efficiency First?
