A wise old owl once told me to beware of Doctors that don’t water the plants in their surgeries. Not only were my doctor’s bonsai as barren as the plains of the Serengheti but he also smoked. Another story… back to youth.

We should also be wary of pundits that stand up at conferences presenting the needs of the customer through the paradigm of a “value chain“.

As Einstein said, “the way we see the problem is the problem”, and if we view our customers sitting at the end of an industrial value chain, no end of serving up web2.0 platitudes is going to save us.

The value chain is a throwback to an era where industrial production relied on warehousing and shunt-to-market models of supply. Any MBA graduate will tell you their experience of the beer-game (not in the pub, but the one about managing supply of inventory to a remote market). Remote, in the sense that the “end customer” is at the end of the stakeholder’s concerns.

Companies such as Toyota have long dismissed the concept of “value chain” from their corporate lexicon. Toyota not only invites in all “value network” stakeholders to work collectively to create customer value it doesn’t fall short like GM did and view their immediate chain link as their customers. In GM’s case, the customers were the dealers. You only have to compare the fortunes of GM and Toyota over the last decade to see which strategy is working.

For some this is semantic navel gazing, but for others herein lies our industry challenge - the language we use defines how we see our role and relationships with the industry. As long as we see them as “end customers” or “end users” we’ll prioritize technological developments over the some of the more basic needs - such as customer service.

In our industry we wield a web 2.0 hammer, no wonder everything looks like a nail.

Tags | mindset, presentations, value chain