Not Another Suit, Please.

Companies are forever assigning employees new tasks to address the latest fad or trend. The history of innovation implementation in corporations is replete with such examples; electricity, automobiles, computers, human resources (what a concept!)all started out as separate silos until business figured out how to use the thing and whether it might last until next year. This was not necessarily a bad policy as it forced one person or a small group to focus on the issue at hand, figure out how it might work best for the company in question and then how to make it profitable. That is more productive, cost-sensitive - and more sense than demanding that everyone adapt it immediately.

This can, of course, go to far. In the following essay from his Dim Bulb blog, Jonathan Salem Baskin trains his acerbic wit on a new trend in corporate organization: the Chief Customer Officer. Since customers have been around since the Assyrians started selling clay and have been generally considered essential to business existence ever since, this would not seem to be a particularly insightful approach to building business. But maybe we're missing something...

"I had to stifle a laugh as I read this article on Forbes.com entitled "The Rise Of The Chief Customer Officer."

The idea is inane, as is the premise that any business leader would fall for such malarky. If the content were any sillier it would appear in a HBR blog. Expect to see it in a consultant new businesses presentation near you.

There's always talk about adding or subtracting corporate officers. The IT guy used to be equated with the mechanic who fixed the coffeemaker in the employee cafeteria when there used to be an employee cafeteria, only then the importance of tech in every company activity elevated him or her to the C-suite. HR people have experienced a similar movement only in the opposite direction as employees have been replaced by outsourced partners, freelancing serfs, and the machines those IT folks get to buy. At a lower day-to-day managerial level there's always a debate over where or with whom projects should reside...is a social media campaign a technology project, marketing campaign, human resources program, PR event or, since it’s probably all of the above, who owns it? It would be kind of weird if job descriptions didn't change at least somewhat with the times.

But a Chief Customer Officer? Nobody should take such a suggestion seriously.

Consider the source. Forrester is a great company. It was a real help to me in researching my first book, Branding Only Works On Cattle, and I know firsthand that its people are smart and well-intentioned. But the whole technology analysis industry is pretty much a racket. Its narrative of corporate behavior is just that; a present-tense color commentary presented as forward-looking insight, all the while based on a presumption that technology (and the vendors who support it) is the right lens through which to understand organizational change. Of course, it's not.

It's funny how its insights on the future never really happen, per se, but rather get replaced by newer descriptions of current events. So they're kinda like the CIA, knowing everything but being responsible for predicting nothing. Lots of expert reports and then the Soviet Union collapses. Who Knew? More analyses and then, oops, crowds fill the streets in Cairo. Expensive events at which speakers talk in large platitudes about the future, only Y2K never happens and the people using Twitter are not your neighbors.

And it's no surprise that Forrester echoes the popular happyspeak of customer-centricity, which is one of those ideas that feels so perfectly good and right until you think about it for a minute, after which it dissolves into blather. The customer doesn't come first, know best, or anything like that, and organizations don't exist solely for the edification of customers or at their pleasure. Crowds, markets, and audiences are notoriously fickle, ill-educated, and quick to anger, and technology can't begin to change a few thousand years of history on this point. That's not to say that organizations shouldn't constantly strive to do better, and that some aren't particularly good at it for starters, but caring about customers is not a new idea.

Just look around you. Does your company (or client) need a Chief Customer Officer? Is that the biggest itch that needs scratching? I'd suggest hiring a few other more obviously useful additions to the C-suite first:

•Chief Punctuation Officer: This leader would have the responsibility of making sure all company correspondence was grammatically correct and easy to follow (and brief).
•Chief 5 Minutes Officer: How about creating a job for somebody to ensure that no internal meeting lasts more than 5 minutes, as well as make sure nobody wastes time telling everyone else "what they should worry about" without taking responsibility for doing something about it.
•Chief Retention Officer: If you must muck up the C-suite with something that sounds customer-y, how about an officer whose sole responsibility is to get your customers and employees to re-up with your business?
These job needs should be as apparent and obvious as any promise technology might make for a Chief Customer Officer, or whatever.

I've got a better idea. Don't add a job description at all. Just do better at all the management consultant blatherese that you've already paid for. If you walk the talk even only slightly more each new day from the last, you’ll be well along the path to happier customers. You don't need to add a suit in order to do it.