CEO IN THE BOILER SUIT

From David Walker
"The CEO in the boiler suit"

This was an expression which came up during discussion in our April 2008 Forum for DINZ and the Advisors and Associates.



It intrigued me then . The hairs go up on the back of your neck when someone hits the button. This was it. The label for that difficult, intransigent but worthy SME business leader. You can smell the oil on his boiler suit. You can see the anxiety in his eyes.

In management consultancy, it has been fashionable for a few years to think about Personas- rather than thinking about MARKETS to think about individuals...to think of specific highly realised customers. On the whole this is a good move. To think of tangible specifics rather than the world of norms extracted from gormless surveys.

It could be that designers while designing artefacts could, so to speak ,design the idealised customer. Product.Person Process. They seem to like that idea in the East. I have seen elaborate story boards for stereotype customers, with bios and bad habits, teenage malcontents with funny tastes in clothes music and food. But this was in Shanghai.

All this story-telling and myth-making falls in the category of Emotional Intelligence. The effort is directed towards trying to understand the inner person before thinking about the delivered goods...which we all get to in due time down the NPD pipeline, where the soft stuff turns into hard stuff.

 

So I thought it would be fun to think of our clients to INNOVATIONZ in this way. As an idealised, even romanticised, Persona. To make them more human, more accessible, more likeable.To make them more real.