Quiet Leadership

I recently read David Rock's book on Quiet Leadership, knowing in advance that it is considered highly controversial in terms of its use (or misuse) of neuroscience in the context of organizational management.  I'll refrain from wading into that debate: my purpose was not to validate the scientific accuracy, but to consider how his theories apply to the customer-supplier relationship.

I expect I'll be doing a lot of that in 2013, as one of my current interests is considering the balance of power in that relationship.  One of the most significant changes in the marketplace is the increasing competition, such that a customer offered a "take it or leave it" proposition is far more likely to leave it, and that suppliers can no longer count on the ability to herd customers into their shop and squeeze them through their internal procedures - a shift that occurred a few decades ago, but to which most firms still do not seem to have adapted very well.

In that sense, the theory of leadership Rock presents is very salient.  The core of his thesis is that the traditional method of management, using threat to demand mindless obedience from the workers, is no longer applicable and never was particularly effective; and that to achieve optimum performance, management must leverage the intelligence of their teams and encourage them to think.

In the marketplace, suppliers never did have formal authority over their customers, but seemed to act as if they did.   By virtue of limited competition, the supplier of any good recognized that they could still use threat (withholding the benefit of the product) to encourage the behavior they desired to elicit from consumers (buying the product).

This power was significantly diminished at the onset of competition, though it remained skewed in favor of the supplier: the customer who refused to accept orders would undertake the additional inconvenience of having to seek out an alternative - to do the necessary research to find an alternative, and to undertake the effort to do business with a competitor.

For brick-and-mortar retail, the cost of switching might require a customer to drive a little further, or accept the waiting period if they ordered from a catalog or Internet vendor.   This is still true in many industries today: consider that online grocery never did catch on because of the additional cost, time, and risk to the consumer.   But for many industries, that is changing.

Dragging myself back to the book: the approaches described in terms of influencing the behavior of employees correlate.   Especially when introducing a new product, a new channel, or even a new supplier, it's necessary to consider the existing mental framework a customer has in terms of the behavioral pattern they have already adopted, or expect to adopt, in order to satisfy a need and appeal to their cognitive processes and a deeper level.

That is to say, rather than commanding customers to buy a product, suppliers must gain permission to enter into the process of determining how to satisfy a need, guiding the customer gently toward the recognition of value.   My sense is the author might pale at this, as marketing is more geared toward convincing the customer "buy this specific product" rather than "consider which product will best suit your needs" and accepting that the customer might choose a different vendor.

But then, marketing at its best is about matching products to needs rather than just pushing boxes, and when we come to the recognition that the product we sell does not fit the needs of the consumer, it is the product rather than the consumer that should change.   So in that sense, exploring the mental framework of the customer might lead us to discover opportunities for product improvements.

My mind is clouded with topics that are spinning off of the mark -it's unlikely I'll bring this meandering to a tidy end and am likely to become frayed further.