Listening To Your Customers

In How the Mighty Fall, Jim Collins talks about how once great companies fail by failing to listen to their customers. In my own work, I am finding that listening to my customers is both rewarding and frustrating. What's great is that they clearly have a great need for the services I am responsible for delivering. The frustration is the impediments in delivering those services in the bureaucratic environment of the Federal government. Interestingly, I was talking to a former employee of GM, who worked for them in the IT area, and many of these same problems occur in the private sector in big businesses.

But listen to customers management must, or you can go the way of Domino's, once a fast rising company. This video is being cross posted from a political article on The Liberator Today, but the lessons are as applicable to management as to politics.