During a webinar I was attending, the presenter made a comment that they once talked to some business leaders about the importance of customer focus and those leaders rolled their eyes. They then had to have a conversation about the importance of customers in business.

You can imagine me shuddering in disgust. What the hell is more important than customers? Nothing. Customers are why your business exists. Read that again. CUSTOMERS ARE WHY YOUR BUSINESS EXISTS!!!! Nothing is more important than them.

But here we sit with business leaders rolling their eyes when the subject of customers comes up. This webinar presenter said they had to make a graph that showed how customers related to the bottom line.

Really!? Do we really need to make a graph? Look. Customers have needs. Your business, I am guessing, has a product that will help the customer with that need. You provide them with a great product that helps them achieve their goals, and they pay you. Moreover, provide it in a way that makes them smile and never have to lift a finger and they will pay more. Do you need a graph to explain something as basic as that? Good grief, that’s something a six-year-old would understand.

C’mon biz leaders, we can do better. We can create comfortable, practical places filled with beautiful, functional products that get delivered by caring, capable people using easy, effective processes. It’s all about balancing all that measurable, graphable, objective stuff (the practical, functional, capable, and effective), with the hard-to-measure, non-graphable, subjective stuff (the comfortable, beautiful, caring, and easy). When we do that, we include humans in our calculations. We include customers …the only thing that will keep your business going.

So, what’s the bottom line here?

Please stop trying to take the human dimension out of business. You are only hurting yourself. And… please stop being foolish. Business is all about people, don’t pretend not to know that. If you are a business leader and you really don’t understand this, you need a new line of work.

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