In March, 1976, one of the most famous covers of the New Yorker Magazine appeared. It was Saul Steinberg’s, “View Of The World From 9th Avenue.” It represented “New Yorkers’,” more accurately, a “Manhattanites'” view of the world.
The cover was a smash hit, posters were published, I think every office in Manhattan had a framed version. When I moved to Manhattan some time later, I had it on my apartment wall. Parodies of the poster started being published. I remember visiting Silicon Valley, and saw the Silicon Valley version, featuring Page Mill Road and Stanford University.
As a proud Manhattanite, the cover reflected our view that the world rotated around Manhattan. Everything important in the world, somehow originated in Manhattan, then radiated to the rest of the world. We felt we were at the center of everything that that mattered in the world. If it didn’t start in Manhattan, it didn’t matter.
Sometimes, when I look at our views of our customers, markets, competitions, I get images of Steinberg’s New Yorker cover flashing in my mind—only a corporate version of it. This corporate version always puts us, our products and solutions at the center of everything. The rest of our corporate world is subservient to our own views. Customers, competitors, the market pale in comparison to our view of who we are and what we do.
Our corporate decks are modern versions of Stenberg’s cover. They feature us, our products, and the logos of customers smart enough to acknowledge our greatness. Our content and marketing continues that self centeredness, talking about how great our products are, how much we’ve helped customers. We train our people to focus on what’s important to us, our products/solutions and how to sell. We fail to train them in our markets, industry knowledge, and how to have business conversations with our customers. Our sales scripts focus on us–we conduct “discovery with an agenda,” looking for the cues that enable us to pitch our products. We focus on our results and now whether our customers are achieving theirs.
And our customers, naturally, have a different view of themselves. In this view, they are the center of attention. Their goals, strategies, challenges dominate their thinking–not our solutions. Their fears, aspirations, and dreams are their center of focus. And, often, what stands in the way of their ability to change and grow.
Steinberg was parodying our tendency to “self importance.” But we know reality is far different than he presented, and than we think. In reality, even if we work for a corporate giant, our markets, customers, competitors dwarf us. To be successful, we need to shift our view of the world. Our view of the world changes, profoundly, when we remove ourselves from the center of focus. When we start putting our customers, our markets, even our competitors at the center of what we look at, we think about them and engage them differently—more realistically and with greater impact.
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