Care about your customers more than about yourself
At a conference in Los Angeles, someone in the audience asked me, “What if every musician just set up their own store on their own website? Since that’d be the death of CD Baby, how do you plan to stop that?”
I said, “Honestly, I don’t care about CD Baby. I only care about the musicians. If some day, musicians don’t need CD Baby anymore, that’s great! I’ll just shut it down and get back to making music.”
He was shocked. He had never heard a business owner say he didn’t care about the survival of his company.
To me, it was just common sense. Of course you should care about your customers more than you care about yourself! Isn’t that rule #1 of providing a good service? It’s all about them, not you.
But even well-meaning companies accidentally get trapped in survival mode. A business is started to solve a problem. But if the problem was truly solved, that business would no longer be needed! So the business keeps the problem around so that they can keep solving it for a fee. Anyone who’s in business to sell you a cure is not motivated to focus on prevention.
It’s kind of like the grand fables where the hero needs to be prepared to die to save the day. Your company should be willing to die for your customers.
That’s the Tao of business: Care about your customers more than about yourself, and you’ll do well.
The problem is how to get mortals to be heroes.
One can use "hacks," (computer term) such as specifically having random lady parachute packers dropped from a plane to be sure they are packing carefully, or having officers go to the end of the meal tent line up to be sure they are feeding the men food that is plentiful, hot and timely, but how to hack a culture?
During Vietnams, the U.S. officer class was noted to be notoriously self-serving.
I believe to reform a culture requires constant re-affirming face to face (not on paper) to invoke peer behaviour, with peers in position to motivate each other, among top-down examples in integrity. If the top folks aren't in favour of switching to serving customers, then you can forget the idea for anyone else.
Robert Townsend took Avis from being in the red for at least a dozen years in a row to being in the black (profitable) in only one year. But I think today Avis is "just another company." Because I think heroic common sense mortals are rare.