Alexander Chalkidis

Category: Business

  • Why on earth did you leave CRM implementation to the IT department?

    I was talking to the CEO of a market leading services company recently.  He was trying to entice me to get involved, I was trying to avoid telling him too bluntly that the cosy family-style management he had lived with all these years was about to crash completely.  We skirted about the issues.

    “With your sort of market position, it sounds like you could really do magic with a good CRM” I suggested.  “Oh yeah, we bought one of those last year…I think the IT guys are doing it.”

    Here’s what I propose:  go get some social scientists to do it instead.  Anthropologists would be great, sociologists if they are not too wishy washy.  Because focusing on the customer should no longer be the domain even of the traditional marketing department.

    Marketing has always been squashed between a sales department gung ho attitude and some magical creative juice produced on demand to impress.  Throw a CRM project their way and yes, they will do a better job than IT for sure.  But is that what we need these days?

    What sort of salary is your customer living on?  Where is she living?  How on earth do you expect to relate to someone so different unless you have developed the methodological toolset?  This does sound a lot like anthropology, because this is what you need to do.  I would willingly have one of my fingers chopped off for access to Facebook, VISA or Google customer data.  Not that I wouldn’t miss playing the guitar, but the social scientist in me would be in heaven.  It is not about finding shortcuts to selling to them.  It is about understanding how they think and how they feel.

    You can do a lot of this without losing any fingers.  Work a different position in your company.  Dress up and play a different role on any sidewalk.  Talk to strangers.  But companies need to be a bit more systematic about this effort.  And what the social sciences have learned over the past half century is an invaluable starting point.  Call him a CCO or whatever you want, but someone near the top of the organisation has to want to understand customers and to add value to their lives.  It isn’t just market research or R&D that has to come under this position, but it is a good place to start.   Any customer facing function needs to be rethought with this hat on.  And in a position to get things done about it. 

    Because the customer isn’t going to wait around for you to get it right much longer.

  • Tribal Shame, Doping Control and how to keep Greece’s deficit from mounting again

    I should be ashamed of myself.  After the Greek football team triumphed in Euro 2004 Iwas the only person in the country and probably the planet, publicly stating (and even writing) that we didn’t deserve it.   I claimed the Greek team was doped (any other way to explain how a team that never lasted past 65′ suddenly went into overtime running like Ben Johnson?) and that opponents took bribes.  It was an Olympic year, we had the budget!   To add insult to the injury I am fairly sure that even our first ever modern Olympic medal in marathon running, back in 1896 with Spyros Louis was in fact the result of Greeks giving him a couple of lifts at parts of the route not covered by judges.  OK, I am an obvious cynic.

     

    One of the reasons I got particularly annoyed at Greek doping scandals is because I experienced the disappointment in kids that looked up to them first hand

    It is not just because they are unusual that these views didn’t get much airing.   There is no public forum designed to feel ashamed of itself.  When Kostas Kenderis was almost caught just before the2004 Olympics ( a ridiculous story with him escaping doping control on a moped and then staging an accident so as to avoid a blood sample being taken) it hit me even more strongly.   The reason everyone gets away with such behaviour is because we are not acting in a natural, tribal  way.  Can you imagine the same athlete being of Japanese decent?  He would have been found dead in his apartment for the shame.  The shame he brought to his country, to his fellow athletes, to the Olympic ideal. 

    You only had to look at the hearings for the Toyota case recently in the US to see this in vibrant colors.  Toyota’s only sin was spreading too thin in terms of control of its enormous supply chain.  They didn’t do an Enron.  But the shame of it all…  So why don’t we just purposely design controls in business and in sport to encourage the tribal approach to guilt. 

    “Guilt” as a legal term is way to shallow.  Someone can be pronounced “not guilty” even though we 

    all know he is; and he can laugh straight into the cameras as he glides away from the court.  And people can feel deep guilt or remorse about things they never controlled or were in any way responsible for.   It is a social construct.  The whole concept of “corporate responsibility” was always inadequate in my mind.  It is like trying to sell a product that nobody really needs.  “You really need this product, buy it!” sell which gets a “and why the hell do I need this?” response type of situation. 

    Tribal guilt is not like that.  Get that athlete to go to court with his entire team.  Introduce penalties to his federation.  Make the negative publicity a communal hit, not something personal.  Shrugging it off as a whim of a particular person is too easy.   This is not some kind of twisted mean streak, it makes perfect sense.  The reason we need guilt is to reinforce our common values.  Tiger Woods apologised not because it is any of our business what he does in his bed or a hotel room, but to show us he is not evil; he feels remorse and agrees that the societal norm of not sleeping around too much in an obvious way is correct. 

    Get Kenderis, Enron board members and the Greek football team in the limelight with the system that turned a blind eye to their misbehaviours and we achieve a similar pressure point.  Which seems to me to be a pretty similar set of problems and solutions to Greece’s current financial mess.   Individual citizen’s as wrongdoers hide behind the “everyone else was doing it” facade.   Politician’s hide behind the “every other government did it” scenario. 

    It is common in such situations to assume that the system that creates the problem, can’t solve it.  Especially amongst Greeks it is taken for granted that it is too deeply ingrained in our characters, our national “style”.  Heck, even in the war of liberation against the Turks in 1821, it is well documented that Greek soldiers refused to fight if their pay was late.  (With the battle raging right next to them!) 

    This is not the case.  It only takes one prominent working  example of the shame system I propose for it to become established.  It could catch on like a Greek summer wild fire and spread as fast.  And maybe sports is the ideal place to start.  I put myself forward as an initial victim of this approach.  If footballers in the 2004 Euro team, Kostas Kenderis supporters or relatives of Spyro Louis want to,  I am willing to be put in front of a jury of fellow bloggers to test whether this slander I am spreading is justified or not! 

    Maybe they will start commenting things like “hey, alex, this post seems preposterous!” instead of just letting me get away with it so easily next time…