Who Your Customers Want to Become

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 14 June 2012

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Michael Schrage, research fellow at MIT Sloan School's Center for Digital Business and author of the HBR Single "Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become?"

Transcript

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0:00.0	When leadership advice feels like buzzwords and platitudes, it's time to get real.
0:05.9	HPR's podcast Coaching Real Leaders brings you behind closed doors as Muriel Wilkins coaches anonymous
0:11.9	leaders through raw honest career questions
0:14.6	that we all face.
0:15.9	Listen and follow coaching real leaders for free
0:18.3	wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HBR IDEA Cast from Harvard Business Review.
0:33.0	I'm Sarah Green.
0:34.3	I'm talking today with MIT's Michael Shrake,
0:37.3	a frequent HBO blogger, and author of the new single,
0:40.4	Who do you want your customers to become? Michael, thanks so much for joining us.
0:44.0	It's my pleasure.
0:45.0	Michael, I'd like to just start with the problem.
0:48.0	Most of the executives I know would give their right arm to truly understand what their customers want.
0:52.0	So why is it so hard for
0:54.1	most companies to understand their customers? Well first off forgive me for doing
0:58.6	this but I'm going to attack the premise of your question. I think that there's no shortage of a company that wouldn't give
1:05.2	up any portion of their anatomy to better understand their customers unless they felt it would
1:11.0	lead to greater profitability or market share.
1:14.0	For too many organizations, customers are merely a means to an end.
1:18.5	The end is the growth and profitability of the business.
1:21.5	And sometimes the customers are simply an inconvenience in that regard,
1:26.0	friction that needs to be overcome.
	...

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