Tag Archives: Customer Centric Culture

In the history of business, companies rarely fail because they lacked data.

They fail because of  The Fog.

As a senior leader, you’re expected to see the future. Yet many executives spend their days driving strategy through a windshield covered in mist.

That fog usually comes from two places:

1. External Blindness – not clearly seeing what customers and competitors are doing.
2. Internal Friction – the execution gap inside the organisation.

When those two forces combine, even the biggest companies can miss the iceberg right in front of them.

The Ghosts of Innovation Past

We often talk about companies like Kodak, Nokia, and BlackBerry as if they were unlucky.

They weren’t.

They simply turned inward.

• Kodak actually invented digital photography. The problem wasn’t technology — it was failing to see that customers wanted memories, not film. They lacked Customer Foresight.
• Nokia and BlackBerry focused heavily on engineering excellence while missing a critical shift: the phone was becoming a computer in your pocket. They lacked Competitor Foresight.

More recently, many traditional car manufacturers ignored the shift to software-driven electric vehicles, allowing companies like Tesla and fast-moving Chinese manufacturers, like BYD, to surge ahead.

The pattern is always the same.

Companies protect the past instead of seeing the future.

Then they say: “We didn’t see it coming.”

Clearing the Fog: A Real Example

A powerful example of clearing both the internal and external fog comes from Bank al Etihad in Jordan.

In conversations with the leadership team — including Chairman Isam Salfiti and senior executives across customer experience and leadership development — one theme stood out:

They built growth by creating clarity.

Instead of guessing about the future, they used data, leadership alignment, and customer insight to guide their strategy.

Seeing the Digital Shift Early

While many competitors focused on expanding physical branches, Bank al Etihad recognised something important, customer foresight:

Customers were beginning to expect digital experiences similar to those provided by global fintech companies.

They shifted toward a digital-first acquisition strategy.

The result?

Their Net Promoter Score (NPS) reached 60, one of the strongest in their market.

They cleared the external fog.

Fixing the Internal Execution Gap

Leadership also knew that digital strategy alone wasn’t enough.

If the organisation wasn’t aligned internally, execution would fail.

So they focused on three key changes:

1. Institutionalised Alignment

Customer-centric values became part of the company’s formal competency model.

Promotions are now based two-thirds on how leaders live the company’s values.

2. Eliminated Silos

A cross-functional Culture Committee was established to ensure HR, marketing and business units were working together instead of operating in isolation.

3. Radical Transparency

Everything — from office spaces to digital interfaces — was redesigned to reinforce a customer-first culture.

The signal was clear: the old product-centric mindset was gone.

The Result: High-Definition Growth

By clearing both internal and external fog, the impact was dramatic:

• Employee NPS increased from the mid-40s to 74
• Customer Experience Index reached 80%

They didn’t just survive digital disruption.

They designed their organisation to win in it.

As Customer Experience Director Ledi Lapaj put it:

“We don’t want to walk in the dark.”

The MRI: Your Strategic Radar

To remove the fog, leaders need more than opinions.

They need a diagnostic.

The Market Responsiveness Index (MRI) from MarketCulture measures the three dimensions that determine whether organisations succeed or stall.

1. Customer Foresight – The Forward View

Are you anticipating customer needs before they are articulated?

If your team is only responding to complaints from last month, you’re driving strategy while looking in the rear-view mirror.

2. Competitor Foresight – The Side View

Disruption rarely comes from the competitors you already know.

It usually comes from unexpected startups or new technologies that change the rules of the game.

3. Strategic Alignment – The Engine Room

Even with a clear strategy, companies fail when the organisation isn’t aligned to execute it.

MarketCulture research shows that misalignment is one of the biggest hidden barriers to growth.

Don’t Manage in the Dark

The MRI has been used by more than 1,000 organisations to identify blind spots and measure the eight key drivers of market responsiveness.

In a single day, leadership teams can see where the fog exists — and where action is needed.

It moves organisations from:

Guessing → Knowing
Assumptions → Evidence
Fog → Clarity

Is Your Strategy Flying Blind?

Bank al Etihad proved that clarity followed by action creates competitive advantage.

But clarity doesn’t happen by accident.

It requires measurement.

f you want to see where the fog exists in your organisation, request a Market Responsiveness Index (MRI) briefing and identify the blind spots before they become icebergs.

Book HERE

In 15 minutes, you will gain a clear understanding of how the MRI works, what insights it provides, and how leaders are using it to bring clarity to their organisations. As a bonus you will receive a copy of our latest book “The Human Culture Imperative”

No obligation.

No cost.

Just clarity.

In A Few Good Men, Jack Nicholson delivers the iconic line: “You can’t handle the truth.” In the end, though, the truth always prevails.

Building a business that succeeds in its early years is challenging. Sustaining that success as the organization grows is even harder and it starts with leaders being willing to face the truth, however uncomfortable it may be.

In the early stages, companies tend to share a common trait: a deep focus on customers. Teams are close to the market, leaders listen carefully, and the organisation is highly responsive to customer needs. Every customer matters.

That focus is often the source of early growth.

But as organisations scale, something begins to change.

Structures emerge. Processes multiply. Leaders spend more time managing internal systems than understanding customers. Attention gradually shifts from the market to internal metrics forecasts, budgets, targets, and quarterly results.

None of this is inherently wrong. It is a natural consequence of growth.

The challenge is that organisations can slowly lose visibility of the very thing that drives long-term performance: their ability to respond to customers and the market.

When this happens, the symptoms appear gradually. Growth becomes less predictable. New initiatives underperform. Customer loyalty weakens. Leaders sense that something is not quite right, yet the existing data rarely explains why.

Paradoxically, organisations often have more data than ever before, yet less clarity.

At MarketCulture, the problem we solve for organisations is clarity for leaders.

Clarity about how well their organisation is responding to the market.
Clarity about how aligned their teams are around customers and strategy.
And clarity about the cultural dynamics that either enable or limit growth.

This clarity is delivered through the Market Responsiveness Index (MRI), an organisational assessment completed anonymously by employees that measures how customer-centric, market-responsive and aligned a company truly is across leadership, teams and departments.

But gaining this clarity requires something that is sometimes in short supply in organisations:

Leaders willing to handle the truth.

Many organisations say they want feedback. Fewer are truly ready to hear it.

The MRI works because it surfaces what employees actually experience inside the organisation, not what leaders assume is happening.

One CEO we worked with in a mid-sized services company believed his organisation was highly customer focused and aligned. Revenue had grown consistently for several years, and customer complaints were relatively low.

However, when the MRI results and employee feedback came back, the picture was different.

Employees reported that decision-making had become slow, departments were working in silos, and frontline teams felt the organisation was becoming more internally focused. The biggest gap was not strategy, it was responsiveness.

To his credit, the CEO did something many leaders struggle to do.

He accepted the results.

Rather than challenging the data, he used it as a starting point for change. Over the following year, leadership simplified decision processes, increased cross-department collaboration, and re-focused teams around customer outcomes.

The result was not just cultural improvement.

Customer retention improved, product adoption increased, and the organisation regained momentum in the market.

What made the difference was not the data itself.

It was the leader’s willingness to see the organisation as it really was.

For leaders, this is often the hardest step.

Organisations rarely fail because leaders lack intelligence or effort. More often they struggle because they lack clear visibility of what is actually happening inside the business.

Every meaningful improvement begins with the same step:

seeing reality clearly.

The Market Responsiveness Index (MRI) gives leaders that visibility. It provides a clear, evidence-based view of how responsive the organisation truly is to customers and the market and where the greatest growth opportunities exist.

But insight alone is not the goal.

The goal is better decisions, stronger alignment, and sustainable growth.

The first step is simply understanding where your organisation really stands.

The MRI has been implemented by over 1,000 companies worldwide. Case studies and videos are available on our website.

If you would like to see how the MRI works and what it could reveal about your organisation, you can book a short introductory conversation with Sean Crichton-Browne.

Book HERE

In 15 minutes, you will gain a clear understanding of how the MRI works, what insights it provides, and how leaders are using it to bring clarity to their organisations. As a bonus you will receive a copy of our latest book “The Human Culture Imperative”

No obligation.

No cost.

Just clarity.

Creating a new business that endures over a long time is hard. We all know the statistics; 80 % of companies fail within the first 2-3 years.

What separates the businesses that sustain from those that wither away? Customer obsession. These companies have found a problem worth solving, a need that must be filled, and customers willing to pay. It all sounds simple.

What happens when these businesses grow up?

Over time their success breeds complacency. They no longer have to fight to win every customer; customers come to them; life is good. Leaders become managers and get paid to manage things already in place. The focus becomes the numbers, and the tail begins to wag the dog.

In markets where growth is turbocharged, mistakes are brushed under the rug. “So we stuffed up for that customer. There will be another one to replace them….”

It all goes well until the music stops; the tide goes out, and companies are exposed. Suddenly new products or services start failing not because they are bad products or services but because customers have lost trust. Managers have not been paying attention to the real source of revenue and profits – loyal customers.

Things have changed, growth has stalled, reputations decline, and customers are walking away.

Time for some customer-centricity.

The time has come to take a hard look at the business, how we are operating, what needs to change. We need to shift to a more customer-centric way of doing business!

Where do we start? How do we make it happen?

Like any and every major accomplishment in human history, everything great begins with one step forward.

In this case, that step is to take a realistic view of exactly how customer-centric you are as a business. For many that small step maybe a step too far: they don’t want to know.

Feedback hurts – it can feel like a knife twisting, gauging a hole in our being. It instills fear, even panic in us. And yet it is the truth, the way we perceive things is the way they are no matter what stories we want to tell ourselves.

So why do leaders say they want their businesses to be customer-centric but are not willing to take the first step?

Fear.

Fear of failure.

Fear of exposure.

Fear that it will distract.

Fear that it cannot be sustained.

Fear that they cannot do anything to change.

So what is the antidote to all this fear?

Just do it. Find out where you stand with a quick assessment of just how customer-centric your organization is and then take some simple steps to begin your improvement journey.

A funny thing happens when you face your fears – you grow.

If you think it is time to face your fears and improve your business find out more about our unique customer-centric culture assessment here