1 post tagged “inside-the-bottle-syndrome”
I'm reading "Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?" and came across an interesting idea titled "The pressures of inside-the-bottle syndrome."
"... On a day-to-day basis, we are all wrapped up in the most pressing needs of our jobs or businesses. And the needs most pressing, unless we have direct contact with customers, are the ones right in front of us at that moment. Everyday pressures -- producing reports, helping the company realize an upwards-trending graph of net profits, make the perfect pot of coffee, cutting costs, and responding to changes made in other areas of the company -- affect the experience we are trying to communicate.
After hours, days, weeks, months, even years of so-called "real-life-perspective," it becomes easier and easier to slip into the abyss of the company bottle. You become trapped and have only a blurry vision of what's going on outside.
It's from deep inside this bottle that some of the most bloodletting business decisions are made -- giving airline passengers fewer peanuts to snack on or outsourcing telephone customer service to Asia. You can't trace the effects of actions like these back to profit-and-loss statements; they don't have immediate consequences to the bottom line, certainly nothing that can be measured on monthly or yearly basis. Inside the bottle, all systems are go."
I've worked in Engineering groups all my career and found I created the best product or added the best feature when I had contact with customers. Seeing and hearing how a customer used a product or what they wished the product would do was a great incentive to make it happen (or make it better).
It's been said that engineers design things around how they would use it instead of how the customer uses it. Sometimes that's true because the customer is outside the bottle, and inside the bottle is the "perfect pot of coffee."
I'm sure we all can come up with our own examples of where we see this being true but have you looked inside your company's bottle lately?
(For those following along at home, the quoted section from the book starts on page 30.)
