Keep your critic close to you;
give him shelter in your courtyard;
without soap and water
he will clean your character.
- Kabir
LESSON 12. The value of "listening to your customers" depends upon which customers you choose to listen to. A company can start out to be very customer oriented yet fail to detect market changes because it continues to listen to and respond to only one customer segment. DEC's philosophy from its very beginning was to be intensely customer focused, and it held this philosophy as a moral obligation. The sales function was there to help sophisticated customers figure out their problems and to involve customers in the solution. Anytime a customer had a problem, sales was ready to help, which led to a great many separate projects all over the organization. Customers were organized into a users' group (DECUS), and this group continued to love DEC products. DEC managers paid constant attention to them and therefore believed sincerely that the company was highly customer oriented.
But because of the engineering and innovation bias, only the most sophisticated and "interesting" customers drew attention in an elitist paternalistic way: "if you were smart, we would listen to you and take care of you; if you were 'dumb,' we would take care of you but not listen to you." When the market became primarily mainstream users, DEC would not listen even when the customers screamed about poor order processing, schedule delays, and product problems.
Furthermore, because resources were not infinite, many projects that "good" customers wanted and that DEC promised to work on could not get immediate support, which meant schedule delays and impatient customers. DEC salespeople could always say with conviction that a given project was still alive, but the schedule might slip, sometimes by a matter of years. Keeping the project alive and thereby ultimately solving the customer's problem was often seen as far more important than meeting an arbitrary schedule. The subtle lesson is that a successful company has to pay more attention to its critics and to the customers it loses. It is dangerous to listen only to the customers who love you.
- Edgar H. Schein, DEC Is Dead, Long Live DEC
