December 27, 2006: Identity Meets the Cluetrain Manifesto

What is Hecuba to you or you to Hecuba? This injunction (shameless appropriated from Shakespeare's Hamlet) applies not only to actors but to all of us in the “roles” we play (our “presentation of self,” as Goffman called it) in everyday life. However, there is also a grander scheme of things that I introduced some time ago. This involves what I feel is the most important lesson from Plato’s “Theaetetus” dialogue. This is that, while none of the four definitions of knowledge considered can survive Socrates' critical examination, Socrates does demonstrate how the concept of knowledge is tightly coupled to three other key concepts: memory, being, and description (λόγος).

I would now like to pick up where my last discussion left off and examine the concept of “Being.” I would argue that this concept needs to be sorted into the being of objects and the being of subjects, i.e., the agents who engage with objects; and this latter class of being has to do with identity. In other words any inquiry into the nature of identity involves pulling at a thread that is tightly woven to many other critical threads, including the thread of knowledge itself!

These couplings have been particularly well appreciated by George Herbert Mead, particularly in his exploration of the concept of symbolic interactionism. I like to say that the motto of symbolic interactionism is: “No perception without personal interaction.” For my money this is the underlying premise without which the assertion that “markets are conversations” cannot make any sense. Indeed, it is also the premise behind Habermas’ theory of communicative action, which argues that “communicative action” (as Habermas defines it) is the fundamental prerequisite for understanding. Since it seems valid to assume that markets can only operate effectively within a context of understanding between buyers and sellers, Habermas’ theory ultimately explains why markets are conversations; but I am afraid that this kind of foundational thinking has gotten lost amid the 95 theses of the Cluetrain manifesto!

December 10, 2006: Two Banks

In one of those rare ironies of coincidence, the Nobel Peace Prize was just presented to Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank in the wake of a report highly critical of the World Bank released by its own independent assessment arm. Here are some specific numbers from the account of this report in Friday's SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE:

Among 25 poor countries probed in detail by the bank's Independent Evaluation Group, only 11 saw reductions in poverty between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s, while the other 14 suffered the same or worse rates over that term. The group said the sample is representative of the global picture.

It is easy enough to be glib about the fact that Grameen is doing everything right and the World Bank is doing everything wrong, and that would obviously be a specious generalization. Nevertheless, it might be worth considering what differentiates these two lending organizations besides the magnitude of money involved. I would like to propose the hypothesis that, because of its magnitude, the World Bank operates on an institution-to-institution basis (a generalization of the B2B concept that has become part of our technical jargon). Grameen, on the other hand, was conceived by Yunus to operate on an individual-to-individual basis. It is only by thinking of a loan applicant as an individual person (subject) that one can consider the value of advancing a $2 loan (an example given on the radio the other day). This is not to say that the world would be a better place without institutions, since there are clearly situations in which we benefit from them. However, poverty and related disasters, such as flood and famine, are, as I have previously tried to articulate, problems of individual subjects; and institutions that can only deal with those people as objects inevitably make matters worse, just by virtue of that institution-to-institution thinking. Since I am still basically a Hegelian, I would certainly like to see a dialectical synthesis of these two perspectives; but I doubt that we can arrive at such a synthesis before beefing up the individual-to-individual side of the argument. Also, while there is no doubt that Yunus' efforts have advanced the cause of peace, the Nobel Committee could have made an even more powerful statement by also awarding him the Economics prize!

September 02, 2006: Thinking about Subject and Objects in a CRM Society

Two themes seem to be merging together into a common perspective. The more vivid is the impact that When the Levees Broke is having, the more I watch of it. The other is the impact that CRM technology seems to be having on our view of the world, which, in the past, I have considered primarily from the point of view of service. However, what I now have to say applies to all aspects of "customer relationships" purported to be covered by CRM technology. More recently I have also been exploring this theme in my comments on the Confused of Calcutta blog.

Let us begin with one fundamental premise: The name "Customer Relationship Management" is nothing more than (to try to use polite language) a linguistic deception. Anyone who thinks that this technology "manages customer relationships" probably has a thoroughly impoverished view of management, an absolutely distorted conception of the nature of relationships, and nothing less that total ignorance of who the customers are. It is that last point that inspired the title of this entry, because, at the end of the day, all CRM technology is based on the assumption that customers are viewed as objects, rather than subjects who, for one reason or another, have been motivated to engage with the vendor.

Then, while watching When the Levees Broke, it hit me: This is an assumption that has extended beyond the scope of CRM! Listening to a victim's account of the evacuation of the Superdome, the description came to a head when she finally blurted out that the evacuees were being treated like slaves. (Spike Lee may be the only film-maker not afraid to take such racially charged material and put it on the screen rather than bury it in a wastebasket.) To defuse the racial connotations, what she was saying was that the evacuees were being treated as objects. This may have been a matter of expediency or efficiency, but the people managing the evacuation made a calculated decision to deny subjectivity to each evacuee. Where this women invoked the image of the old slave markets, my wife invoked the image of Auschwitz, the other classic example of "mangement by objectification."

Were the victims of Katrina being treated as objects by people hooked on CRM technology? Probably not, but those folks did have the same worldview one finds among CRM promoters and users. Will vendors ever get back to those "good old days" when customer engagement was important? I shall not venture a guess, but I will confess to a strong streak of pessimism!

August 23, 2006: Service Science as an Academic Discipline (according to IBM)

A former colleague was kind enough to point me at the Web page for a Symposium on "Services Sciences, Management and Engineering" hosted by the IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory on September 8, 2005. He also pointed out that, if one followed the link to the Japanese content, one could find a PDF version of the presentation given by James Spohrer from IBM Almaden Services Research. My colleague had not know that I had "vented" about my experience at Almaden in March of 2004 in the June 25 entry for this blog. Obviously, I was very curious to see if the story had improved at all since my last encounter with the IBM point of view. Having now reviewed the material, my personal opinion is that there is a lot more content but not a lot of improvement. Obviously, I want to elaborate on this!

Apparently, the first step in declaring a "Service Science" is to come up with a definition for it. This is the first one that was presented to the Symposium audience:

The application of scientific, management, and engineering disciplines to tasks that one organization beneficially performs for and with another (‘services’)

I have to say that I think that describing "services" as "tasks that one organization beneficially performs for and with another" is not a bad idea. I just wish that Spohrer had taken it more seriously. The rest of the slides had a very prescriptive tone, but there seemed to be a tacit assumption that benefit would arises as a side-effect of all the recommendations being prescribed. I think this is not just silly but dangerous. My own experience has led me to the conviction that any enterprise that is serious about being a service provider must assign top priority to looking for new opportunities to provide benefits to the customer. Once you get beyond theory into the realities of practice, this priority trumps the "coproduction of value," a buzz phrase that sounded great the first time I saw it in the Harvard Business Review but has begun to grate on my nerves the more I hear it. Value is the side-effect of understanding where the benefits are, not the other way around.

So how do you understand where the benefits are? The first step is to cultivate the art of customer engagement. However, as I have already observed, our techno-centric fixations with such "solutions" as CRM have done little more than warp our ability to master this art. Thinking in terms of science, management, or engineering seems to have done little more than reduce the customer to an object with requirements to be satisfied. This is the heart of the warped thinking that results: The customer must be engaged as a subject; and, as one understands customer-as-subject, one will understand where the opportunities for benefit are. Understanding is the operative action here (and it should be treated as an action, rather than a result of analysis). This is why my entry about service on June 17 was such a desperate attempt to invoke the lessons that Habermas had to teach about a theoretical foundation for the actions that lead to achieving understanding. Furthermore, the progression from engagement to opportunities for benefit is essential a problem of interpretation. Customer engagement provides the opportunity to "interpret the customer;" but it is also necessary to "interpret the world" that constitutes the customer's context. Now, when Spohrer's presentation finally gets around to proposing a curriculum, the unhappy truth about what is on his slide is that, while all of the subject areas have to do with decision making, none of them have to do with interpreting that "world" in which the decisions have to be made! To use the language I have appropriated from Kenneth Burke, to think of decision making as a strictly scientific problem and to ignore the role that dramatistic thinking and acting plays is dangerous. It is like the blind man who thinks that feeling an elephant's leg is enough to understand the whole elephant.

At this point I should observe that one theme that plays a very heavy role in Spohrer's slides involves the word "innovation." Perhaps this obsession gets at why a research laboratory with its roots in physics and computer science (the way in which the slides introduce IBM Research) will never understand what makes service "work." Yes, innovation is a term in the equation, so to speak; but it is an auxiliary term. A service provider arrives at innovation by focusing on how to get customer engagement and benefit discovery right; and what could be more innovative than identifying an opportunity for benefit that the competition has either ignored or overlooked?

If we do want to talk about where innovation enters the picture, a good place to begin is probably a book by Alain Dumont entitled, Innover dans les service (published, alas, only in French). This is a book of case studies, so there is not much prescription here. On the other hand Dumont at least came up with an inspiring subtitle: De l'évident à l'impensable. In this language one might say that customer engagement begins by "interpreting the evident" and arrives at opportunities for benefit by following the interpretation through to the "unthinkable" (or at least the not-previously-thought). Now, since this book was published in 2001, there probably are no case studies that would still seem "unthinkable;" and, for any of these case studies, it will not be easy to reconstruct the mind-set of what was "evident" at the beginning of the story. Nevertheless, I think Dumont is on to something.

At the end of the day, any business that decides it want to make the shift from providing products to providing services is going to have to recognize that a cultural shift is prerequisite. The real problem with the IBM slides is that they offer an alternative to making that cultural shift, but it is a false alternative. You know how bad things are when you look at that list of 28 disciplines that get "mapped" on slide 8 (pictured above). Note that Education is at the very bottom of the list, yet that is probably the oldest (or second-oldest) service profession in history! I suppose I would even be so arrogant as to proclaim that anyone who does not acknowledge education as the most important service offering in history does not have the foggiest idea of what service really is!