A neighbor is working on a post-graduate degree.

His days in class are in chunks: Several times a year, he spends four days at eight hours a day sitting in a classroom. Listening to lectures.

There are eight experienced folks in the class. From around the globe.

The professor who is nearing retirement reads his lectures.

He puts a slide up on the screen, reads it, and then moves to next slide. That’s on the good days.

On the bad days, he reads his notes verbatim, head down. All day. Every day.

The class wants to grapple with the ideas of the lecture. To “cross discuss” with each other. To engage the professor. To apply the content. The professor shuts down the conversation with nervous anxiety and moves to the next slide.

Each person in the class has a laptop.

On day four, my neighbor, numb from the previous three days, sets up a chat room on Tiny Chat (www.tinychat.com).

During the break, he says, “Hey, let’s discuss the lecture while the professor is reading his notes.” He coaches his fellow classmates about how to join the chat online, and they all jump on. My neighbor’s first instruction in the chat room: “Okay, let’s work hard at not mocking the professor.”

Soon, the room is abuzz, online. It’s not easy to say nice things about the oblivious professor when you can discuss his teaching methods silently in real time, but the class soon begins to engage him and the lecture …

… without him.

If the professor had simply moved the eight chairs into a circle and hosted a conversation about his topics, there would be no need for Tiny Chat. At least not that day.

Some of the folks you really need to be listening to aren’t talking to you.

I once used a local dry cleaners for my shirts and did so for about 5 years. One day, while the owner waited on me, a young, pretty woman walked in. I was handing him my credit card to pay for my shirts when he turned and helped her. He made me wait. After 5 years of loyalty, I walked out and never returned. The dry cleaners was about a half mile out of my way, and that day he gave me a reason to leave. I never told him about how I felt. I never said good-bye. Poof! I was gone.

A friend recently was driving back from vacation on the East Coast and decided to drop in on a college that was on their son’s “maybe” list. The school made their list only because the daughter of a family friend attended the college and raved about it. A personal referral ranks high on my list as a high value prospect.

So the family popped by the campus and got the standard tour with a current student dressed in blue jeans with her hair pulled back. The family then headed back on the road. The school never contacted them. Never followed up with a phone call to the prospective student, asking, “How was your visit? What did you like? What questions do you still have?”

You wonder if the private liberal arts school had such an overabundance of smart male applicants that their lack of follow-up was a tactic to keep enrollment low.

Consequently, the school will never know why my friend’s son will not attend in Fall 2009. I’m not saying that he would have attended had the admissions folks cared what he and his parents thought. But my guess is that at the next marketing meeting, the enrollment team evaluated their plan and creative based on what they prefer or what some of the current students and faculty declare as acceptable. Most likely it reflected the cheery perspective of folks in love with their decision to attend or work at the school.

The next time you pat yourself on the back and say, “Look, these existing clients (current students, current members, etc) really like this or that,” remember this: The most important folks may not be in the room. Who will speak for them?

If your market has ever ignored a product, a concept, or a message you thought was genius, then you know the pain of figuring out what your consumer really wants. B&S recently interviewed John Winsor, author of Beyond the Brand, who says the place to begin is a deep conversation with your customer.

B&S: You suggest that organizations must innovate to thrive. That’s hard for institutions with a long history.

John Winsor: Innovation is about having deep conversations with your consumers to find out if the product you’re delivering is what they really want.

Take Harvard, for example. Recently, they re-evaluated their financial aid program, because they realized that its college costs were driving away low-income and middle-class students. Though largely viewed as an elitist institution, they have increased the number of low-income students by 33 percent. This move is causing other universities to rethink their financial aid models. There’s cultural pressure to change. And it’s scaring a lot of people.

I’m always surprised that more universities don’t take the perspective of “Let’s do something unique!” Not enough universities go out and really listen to their consumers—students and parents—to reinvent what the university should be … or could be.

What kind of leadership do you need to innovate?

There’s a new president, Richard Celeste, at Colorado College. The trustees elected him not for his university experience, but for his life experience and leadership skills. He was the two-term governor of Ohio and the ambassador to India. He brings to the university an eclectic, interesting point of view as well as great leadership skills.

From big consumer companies to universities to non-profits, the prototypical manager/CEO—a guy with an MBA—usually gets hired. But these people have a trained way of thinking about organizational growth and management, which gets in the way of any kind of creative thinking or creative solutions.

One marketing strategy for innovation has been to identify and recruit “Influencers” to carry the ideas into the market. How do you view the power of Influencers?

In the February 2008 edition of Fast Company, Duncan Watson authored an article entitled “Is the Tipping Point Toast?”

In it, Watson refutes the idea that Influencers are largely responsible for the success of a product or trend. Of course, we all want to pin down Influencers, because it seems easier to reach only a small group of people—and not the entire market. But, it doesn’t wholly work, because you have to know how an Influencer actually influences.

So if not solely Influencers, what else drives good ideas into the market?

I think culture does. Watson uses an analogy of a forest fire to explain his point: There are thousands a year, but only a few become threats; in those rare occasions, the environment is ripe.

Or think of it like this: You can send somebody with a tanker full of gas into a forest and blow it up—that person driving that truck has a lot of power to influence. Or you can send somebody into that same forest with a single match, and if the conditions are right, it, too, will start a huge fire.

Influence can come from anywhere, but the cultural conditions determine what will spread. You have to understand your culture.

That sounds abstract and hard to control.

For a lot of organizations it is really hard. It feels like you’re throwing everything to the wind and saying, “Well, influence is really random.” But if you continue having real conversations with your consumers, you can predict intuitively where things are going. To understand the bigger cultural issues, you need to ask: What’s really happening out there? How are things really changing? Then you have to connect the dots to get the full picture. To do that, you’ve got to get out of your office and interact with your customers.

How do social media enable deep conversations?

Social media gets you inside the conversation; you’re not observing from the outside.

You can sit outside the door of a restaurant and analyze the quality of the food, service, and ambiance, or you can sit down and experience it. I think blogging is the same thing. You’ve got to jump in the stream. You’ve got to be a participant. You’ve got to be a part of the conversation—and people will find a way to connect to you and have a conversation. From there you’ll be able to identify key voices and cultural trends.

It’s nice to know that success isn’t necessarily connected to your innate abilities or high school SAT score.

According to K. Anders Ericsson, professor of psychology at Florida State University, successful people “spontaneously do things differently from those individuals who stagnate” (Fast Company, November 2006, p. 116).

Smart people stagnate, not-as-smart people stagnate.

Ericsson uses the phrase “dilberate practice” to describe how successful individuals improve and innovate on their performance. A deliberate practice may be as simple as the ability to observe yourself doing an activity and intentionally improving on it the next time you do it. It’s that extra step or activity that gives folks the edge to go deeper into their craft or get better feedback from their clients. It’s not a grandiose activity. Call it the “small discipline.”

The same practice appears to create successful organizations.

Adam Bosworth, vice president of Google, recently conducted a presentation for SalesForce.com convention and used the phrase “intelligent reaction” to discuss how successful software should be built. In short, here’s the formula (or deliberate practice) of successful software development:

• Try things out;
• Watch;
• Learn from the customer in real time; and then
• Iterate.

This practice, which has produced successful companies like SalesForce.com and Google, also seems basic to successful marketing. You try this campaign, and then adjust to what works. The alternative, I guess, is to attempt to get it all right the first time, what Bosworth calls the “grand plan,” which is a myth. You never get it 100 percent right the first time. And by the time you are able to implement the full plan, the market has changed.

The point isn’t that you shouldn’t plan, of course. The point is the deliberate practice to get in front of customers quickly, listen to what they are saying about your product or service or marketing, and then adjust.

Last thing: There are two culprits when organizations can’t do this well. One is simple inertia. The other is ego.