That was the response when John Stanhope stood up to deliver his first address as Chancellor of Deakin University in 2016 and declared he wanted to make the university customer-centric.
John Stanhope AM standing in front of Deakin University, Geelong, Australia.
The academics were genuinely confused. Customers? This is a university, not a retailer.
I have known John for many years and he is one of the most customer-centric leaders I have met. He knew something they didn’t.
As the former CFO of Telstra and Chairman of Australia Post, he’d spent decades proving that “customer” isn’t a dirty word — it’s the only word that matters. Students are customers. Employers who hire those students are customers. And if you don’t measure how well you’re serving them, you’re guessing.
So he asked the university three questions:
What? What are students and employers actually telling us?
So what? What do those signals mean for how we teach, support, and prepare graduates?
Now what? What are we going to change — starting this week?
Simple questions. Devastatingly hard to answer honestly.
At Telstra, the same three questions had delivered a $15 million bottom-line improvement in just 10 months when he turned a 2,500-person finance department into a value-added service function. So he knew the approach worked — even in places where people insisted “we don’t have customers.”
At Deakin, the results spoke for themselves. By 2025, the university had climbed from #3 to #1 in Melbourne for producing graduates rated “employee ready” by employers. Applying a survey of students as customers, that is the same for all Australian public universities, Deakin has been rated number one in Victoria for student satisfaction for over a decade. Not through a rebrand. Not through a new tagline. Through systematically closing the gaps between what their customers needed and what the institution was delivering.
John kept a reminder sign on his desk for years: “Be here now.”
A reminder to be fully present with whoever was in front of him. Not checking email. Not rehearsing his next point. Just there.
It’s one of the simplest leadership principles I’ve ever encountered, but it is so powerful in its effect, yet possibly the hardest to practise.
What would happen if you asked your team “Who is our customer?” tomorrow? I suspect the answers would surprise you.
John Stanhope wrote in the foreword to our book, The Human Culture Imperative, where he emphasizes the importance of collaboration, empowerment, and strategic alignment — the three internal enablers that determine whether a business can actually respond to its market.e
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