One of my favourite serious writers is the English economist John Kay. He has a great blog post entitled The school bully is, alas, right on climate change which describes the difficulty planning for a globally warming future about which we know very little.
Isn’t this a bit like planning most big CRM implementations?
I have seen many CRM plans over the last 20 years as a CRM consultant and almost without exception, they are based upon inadequate information about almost everything, they are hugely over-optimistic, they hugely understimate the difficulty of changing mindsets and they assume that even their poorly understood business environment won’t change over the next 2-3 years. Can you remember what customer business was like three years ago? I can, and it wasn’t anything like it is today!
As John Kay writes in his article, this socialist style of planning simply doesn’t work. It is far better to have a stretch vision, to work out the first few steps that take you towards it, to remain flexible while you are implementing them, and to periodically reassess where you are and where you are heading, with whatever new information comes along. The same applies to your CRM project too.
What do you think? Is your CRM project stuck in a socialist planning nightmare? Or is it adapting to the changing business world out there?
Post a comment and get the conversation going.
Graham Hill
