This is the 9th interview of this year and I think you are in for a treat. Today’s interview is with Professor Patrick Barwise of London Business School about his new book, Beyond the Familiar.

Now, this is quite a long interview….a shade over an hour. I did contemplate cutting it into sections but there is such a lot of great stuff in there that I couldn’t bring myself to do that.

So, forgive me for the length of the interview but trust me it is worth a listen.

For those of you that don’t have the time to listen to the interview and for those of you who do, here are some highlights from the interview:

• Customer focus is ultimately a leadership issue and if you work for a company where the CEO doesn’t get it then you probably should start looking for another job 😉
• When it comes to creating a customer centric business, quite often going slower means you will get there faster: Less haste more speed
• Customer centricity requires open communication and that means four things:
  • Good communication down from the top and checking that people have heard;
  • Breaking down the silos that exist in organisations;
  • Develop a culture of open communication without conflict; and
  • Open communication has to be underpinned by vertical communications from the bottom to the top.
• Number 4 is one of the main reasons that the marketing principle, that is easy in theory, tends to be hard in practice. Firms that fail tend to do number 4 poorly.
• What P&G do to better understand their consumers
• Adds to Syed Hasan’s 3 principles to drive employee engagement by adding that by giving people a sense that they are doing or adding to something that is worthwhile will drive employee engagement.
• Relationships are not different just when you cross the threshold of an office
• How P&G and Tesco Managers and Board members get direct and real customer insights…..clue: it’s all about empathy and ‘walking a mile in someone else’s shoes’ creating real insight, leadership by example and employee engagement
• The Professor’s thoughts on NPS and being a fan of the metric
• What market researchers should realise about NPS and how it could help them do their job better
• How do you fight short-termism when trying to change your company focus to one of customer-centricity; and
• Other reflections on technology and where the market is going.

About Patrick Barwise (taken from his Amazon bio)

Patrick Barwise is emeritus professor of management and marketing at London Business School and chairman of Which?, the UK’s leading consumer organization. He joined LBS in 1976 after an early career at IBM and has published widely on management, marketing and media.

His latest book Beyond the Familiar: Long-Term Growth through Customer Focus and Innovation (www.beyond-the-familiar.com), co-authored with Seán Meehan (IMD, Lausanne), was published by Jossey-Bass in March 2011. Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP, has written that “Shareholders could sleep better at nights if every CEO had absorbed [Barwise and Meehan’s] fundamental lessons”.

Barwise and Meehan’s previous book, Simply Better: Winning and Keeping Customers by Delivering What Matters Most (Harvard Business School Press), won the American Marketing Association’s 2005 Berry-AMA Book Prize and has been translated into seven other languages.

Patrick Barwise is also an experienced expert witness, having worked on international commercial, tax, and competition cases and has been involved in two successful business start-ups: the online field research company Research Now (sold to e-Rewards in 2009) and the online brand community specialist Verve.

See www.beyond-the-familiar.com for more information.

Let me know your thoughts about the conversation that Patrick and I had in the comments below.