If you want to gain height, you have to throw off ballast.

Companies that sell what they can make go out of business; companies that make what they can sell survive. Firmen, die verkaufen, was sie machen können, gehen ein; Firmen, die machen, was sie verkaufen können, überleben.

Not new wisdom, you may think. Companies have always been dependent on customers – as far as business administration is aware, little has changed in this respect. But for a long time now, aspiration and reality have no longer coincided: “The only employees with a real customer focus are department store detectives.“ How can we explain this discrepancy? 

All companies become customer-hostile over time. Or, if that sounds too harsh: customer-ignorant. Through rampant bureaucracy. Through disproportionately increasing transaction costs. Through efficiency dogma. Through long-lasting exploitation of a successful product or a successful technology.

This process is barely noticeable at first: At the beginning, everything is focused on the customer, whose problems are the condition for the company’s existence. Then the company becomes successful and grows. After a while, it starts to develop solutions that look for customer problems. So in the beginning, companies are there to solve customers’ problems; later, customers are there to solve companies’ problems. This means that the company is now the constant, the customer is the variable. Then the customers’ problems are forgotten. The company starts focusing inwards, building departments and silos, developing functional identities. The company loses its external awareness and no longer looks out of the window. And precisely to the extent that customer focus is required, it is also structurally unlikely. 

The trend toward structural customer remoteness in companies on the one hand and individualized and informed customers on the other has consequences. We have a situation where lip service is no longer enough: “Customer proximity” is not close enough; “customer focus” is also somewhat powerless. 

We need to become more consistent. If we want the customer to think of us first, we have to think of the customer first. Customer centricity is no longer a tool, but an organizational model. Meaning: The entire company must be thought of and designed from the customer’s point of view. Then the customer is the starting point of the value chain. It is not the company’s plans or goals that determine its actions, but the customer’s needs. A company that knows no taboos is fit for the future. Neither product nor process, neither personnel nor capital, neither organizational form nor legal form. Satisfying customer needs is all that matters. 

If we really think from the customer’s point of view, then we are usually dealing with a pull market, not a push market. Then change requests also come primarily from the customer, not from the hierarchy. The customer runs the company, not the management. Then this becomes the main task of leadership: to ensure that employees can do all that is good for the customer. 

To define it even more sharply: Many speak of “values” that are supposed to guide business actions and promise moral supremacy. But the weakness of values is not revealed by criticizing them, but by taking them seriously. This immediately shows their unrealistic one-sidedness. Isn’t openness just as justified as secrecy? Isn’t change just as justified as stability? Isn’t assertiveness just as important as empathy? Also trust – without mistrust, it would be meaningless. And so warlike potential threatens when values are made explicit and declared to have no alternative: Values are fought in the name of values. Quite the opposite of the economic principle of bartering goods and services: It serves peace. Therefore, the only value that a company has to orientate itself by is the customer. Nothing else. It must be about enhancing the quality of life of people outside of the company. As a consequence of this and as a subordinate priority, entrepreneurs and employees can finance their livelihood.

In order to earn something, you have to serve others. This requires a willingness to prioritize the needs of others. This connection is often forgotten. Therefore, work is held in low esteem as “work for others” and money is seen not as a consequence but as a prerequisite for prosperity. In truth, it’s the other way around: The satisfaction of the customer’s needs is the prerequisite of this activity, profit the consequence. And profit, in turn, is not an end in itself, but again only the prerequisite for continuing. 

It could be argued that a company does not primarily want to make customers happy, but to make money. That may be the intention, but reason sets limits to this. We can see this from the fact that an infinite number of people start out with the intention of making money – and fail. Why do they fail? Because the customer’s desire is more important than the company’s intention. It is the customer who decides whether to accept an offer. An unsold product isn’t a product at all, it doesn’t actually exist. Therefore, the customer is the priority. Customers are the bottleneck, without whom the company has no chance. In other words: The customer can exist without the company, but no company can exist without customers. We are what our customers allow us to be.

That is the ranking order: The company is primarily a means, the customer is primarily an end. Corporate autism, on the other hand, is the confusion of priorities. And a lack of customer orientation is nothing other than a lack of sensual experience. This is the loss of work as “work for others.” The energy is bound inside, it does not point outside, to a contribution to the quality of life of others. Then work is experienced as “meaningless”. That is why we can no longer ask: “What can we do? What do we have?” The question of the future is: “What do they need?” 

In the name of customer focus, management usually complains about the dullness and slowness of employees. This is only correct when we focus on the non-essentials, but wrong in relation to the essentials. Of course, we can blame the problem on the individual employee in the familiar way and blame mental employee backlog. We can launch smile offensives. But we can also ask: Why are our employees not more customer-oriented? Are the structures in the company built in such a way that the customer really does not play a role, but has to be “artificially” reintroduced, as it were? What conditions destroy the awareness of working for the customer? What makes us forget that the customer pays our salary? What form of organization prevents customer focus? And above all: What do we as management contribute to this?

This question is aimed first of all at the institutional framework, the structure, and the organization of the company: 

• Which institutions are customer-ignorant/hostile? 
• How can we tell that we are subordinating the customer? 
• What is particularly annoying from the customer’s point of view? 

We should stop bemoaning deficient behaviors on the part of our employees, and instead set out to address our structural customer disdain. To give an example: management by objectives. Prescribing targets is structural customer hostility.

So if we want to change something, we should first look at the institutional framework. Only when we have tidied this up, when we have removed systemic blockades, only then – only afterwards! – can we also look at the individual. Because of course there are poor appointments, of course there is incompetence, of course there is failure. There are people who are basically customer hostility personified. But more than that, there are structural missteps. And smart people do not stand a chance in stupid organizations.

The way things are, reintroducing the customer is mostly about decluttering the organization: about “not doing” or “no longer doing”. If you want to refocus the company on the customer, you have to get rid of a lot of the old junk and shed a lot of management nonsense. You cannot build tomorrow’s company with yesterday’s institutions.