Michael Schrage - Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become?

This book starts with a detailed description of The Ask and explains why The Ask is one of the most powerful questions you can ask about your business, just as important as Theodore Levitts famous Marketing Myopia question, What business are we in?

One way to appreciate the power of The Ask for your business is to first apply it to yourself. The next section encourages internalizing The Ask by looking at some of the innovations youve adopted recently and thinking about what theyve asked you to become. How have they changed who you are? Do you likeor resentwhat theyve asked you to become?

The core of the book explores six key insights that follow from the question, Who do you want your customers to become? and the practical implications for serious innovators, marketers, and strategists:

1. Innovation is an investment in human capitalin the capabilities and competencies of your customers. Your future depends on their future.
2. Innovation is about designing customers, not just new products, new services, and new user experiences.
3. Customer vision is as important as corporate vision. Your corporate vision and mission statement should respect and reflect your vision of your customers future.
4. Align customer vision (what you want your customers to become) with user experience (what your innovations ask them to do).
5. If you cant be your own best beta, find and design the customers who can.
6. Anticipateand managethe dark side of The Ask.

Examples, key questions, and practical exercises build upon and extend these insights to real-world practice and implementation.

More than a novel intellectual exercise or analytical framework, The Ask offers a fundamentally different question of how organizations canand shouldcreate value.

The AskWho do you want your customers to become?is as important to determining enterprise success as, What business are we in? How do we delight our customers? and What is our brand? The Ask goes beyond entrepreneurial truism and clich. Solutions that merely please, serve, meet the needs/specs, or delight customers dont go far enough. They represent yesterdays marketing and design paradigms. Theyre too rooted in the now. They misunderstand innovations real impacttransforming customers.

Look at the auto industry. Henry Fords mass-produced Model T was a fantastic innovation. But its biggest impact, by far, was turning ordinary people into drivers. Does anyone doubt that Toyotas Prius, Hondas Civic (natural gas) and other automotive greenovations are less tales of technological ingenuity than global initiatives asking drivers to become more environmentally responsible? What is the Priuss innovation ask? That auto owners become as ecologically correct and ingenious as the vehicles they drive. Toyotas Prius literally and figuratively becomes as much a vehicle for eco-transformation as transportation.