The major obstacle when putting forward initiatives to improve the Customer Experience around your products and services is very often missing confidence by employees that these initiatives are supported by top management. Employees and managers see themselves stuck in a situation when they try to set-up such initiatives from the bottom-up. So what you can you do about it? From my point of view: not a lot.

The main determinant for successful projects is always top management support. I don’t know how many papers, surveys and interviews I have seen where the final conclusion is that the most important key success factor is top management support. This factor becomes even more important when talking about designing and delivering customer experiences.

Two basic patterns of strategic direction can be present within an organization. It is either inside-out oriented, focusing on their organizational performance (i.e. cost structure, production network) or it is outside-in oriented, focusing on markets and customers and deducing organizational requirements from this. In the field of strategic management this has been discussed in detail with the two concepts of “the resource based view” of an organization and market orientation. The decision what concept is dominant within an organization is naturally given by the direction that is defined within an organizations strategy which is ultimately defined by the CEO.

Convincing the CEO to focus on Customer Experiences or even just on customer focus when he is busy with controlling and production strategies is a difficult thing. The discussion whether leaders are born or made is an old one. What I am asking myself is this: Are customer oriented CEOs born or made? And if you are not customer oriented (enough), can you still change yourself as a CEO? (Or can you become more customer oriented through you employees?).

It is possible to become more customer oriented as a CEO. If people are able to climb Mount Everest or cross the Sahara it is possible for a manager to become costumer focused. What does it need for that? Determination to become a CEO that feels the pulse of the customer.

A few examples?

We have the usual suspects here, Steve Jobs of Apple or Tim Brown of IDEO. Another interesting person is Ron Dennis, the leader of the McLaren Formula 1 team. Here is an article about the McLaren technology center and as they say in the article: “a man’s obsession”. (found via metacool)

Bruce Nussbaum at the Businessweek talks about the challenge that “CEOs must be designers, not just hire them”. Here is one great excerpt from his article:

In the US, CEOs and top managers hate the word “design.” Just believe me. No matter what they tell you, they believe that “design” only has something to do with curtains, wallpaper and maybe their suits. These guys, and they’re still mostly guys, prefer the term “innovation” because it has a masculine, military, engineering, tone to it. Think Six Sigma and you want to salute, right? I’ve tried and tried to explain that design goes way beyond aesthetics. It can have process, metrics all the good hard stuff managers love. But no, I can’t budge this bunch. So I have given up. Innovation, design, technology—I just call it all a banana.

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