But many of us don't realise what this means in the long run. Customer Centricity places the customer at the steering wheel of the organisation. This means, if the customer changes their needs the producer or provider must change also or face extinction. Without the customer, there is no business!
You can leverage this alignment strategy actively.
1) Choose your providers or sources wisely - look for the qualities you care about, not just the price - if you can't afford it, go with less - because the low cost option is low cost for a reason (they are cutting back on our future to provide a product now which you can buy now but is robbing the world of unseen opportunities and creating unseen problems).
2) Demand change - talk to managers, voice you concerns - if enough people ask, the business may change their ways to keep your loyalty! If you all work together for the same cause individually this is more likely than not. One reason is that employers are annoyed by union like activity - unions are known to bully and cause strife, nearly as much as corporations are known to exploit employees. Individual, assertive activity will force an organisation to ask questions internally, because they will see a shift and respond.
3) Actively Promote good business - there are so many businesses out there that ARE trying to do it right. So help them.
- Get behind them and support them by advertising for them, take time to promote that which is wholesome.
- Give away samples, even if it costs you a little, imagine how much you're helping to create a future that is different. You want to make a mark on this world, do it with passion.
- Start your own business if you have the capital, remember your roots and what your values are - don't bend to economic pressures easily, as all successful businesses know, it takes a long time and many failures to become successful.
5) When you're dissatisfied with the actions of an organisation, speak out collectively or individually. use your social networks, and a number of online groups such as Demand Progress and Avaaz and Change.org to work together. Actively take a role.
Links: It only took one...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-nXT8lSnPQ
6) Start your own initiatives and recruit like minded people - not just anybody's but people who are really passionate about it, not just a pay packet.
Here is one small example of how an attitude and a product can be engineered from the get go to survive the future we are going to be looking at.
http://www.thankyouwater.org/?noredirect=true
You might say well, it isn't really like that yet, people still don't really see the value behind this and people are still going to behave in a minimalistic fashion - doing little as possible to gain the modest for themselves. This is probably mostly you commerce and accounting students going along with what text books have drowned you in for decades to get you to behave the way the capital holders need you to behave to stay on top.
Let's switch that perspective, say group A is all the capital holders (those who fund business) and B are everyone else (the labour force to simply put it). If all of group B (the majority) choose to value what you value and refuse to accept what is given, demanding better, as individuals, then these few in group A will have no power, because they can only seek those who compromise their own values to achieve group A's ends. They will be forced to shift or put B against B. Group B is realising that this has gone on for a long time. And it's time to pay attention to the growing chasm that we dreamed wasn't there.
We only need to look at how things have evolved in the last few decades to see where they are really going. Not just purely at what we believe is the behavioural science behind humans and their self interested choices.
The direction is pretty clear. We have a case for cooperation and collaboration. We have a case for the need for change. I'm not going to go ranting on about the data, because for one, this blog isn't about an argument for or against anything - it is a manual for change at a grass roots level.
I'm not trying to convince anyone, and you're here because you're already convinced and you're ready to try something new.
