I'm sitting in the Sarasota FL Hyatt on Sarasota Bay hotel in my room...zonked. I'm tired, having been up since 4:00am and on the road early so I could miss the traffic on Route 28 in Manassas VA that would have, if I had hit it only a half hour later, aided me in my quest to most likely miss my first plane of 2006 - but I did avoid traffic and thus had loads of time to kill. While doing so I was thinking about the presentation I'm giving tomorrow morning at 8:30am to the University Continuing Education Association (UCEA) which is labeled by them "CRM and the 21st Century Non-Profit: You Gotta Have Heart, But You Need Cash and Volunteers Too" and has absolutely nothing to do with that subject whatsoever since these are marketing execs for continuing ed at universities from around the country. So I relabeled it, unbeknownst to all but the director and coordinator of the event : "CRM + Student for Life = Adult Continuing Education X Revenue." That will be a trip.
But while throwing something entirely unexpected (but, of course, far more germane to the crowd at hand) is gonna be a fun thing, that's not why I'm kind of sleepily (at 2:45pm, no less) writing this blog entry.
While thinking about the presentation on the leg of the flight from Charlotte, NC to here in Sarasota, I came up with a thought based on the 4 Principles of CRM that I'm going to be presenting and always do (see slide below). You know what I think we're doing with CRM for better or worse? We're taking that lovely, though often uneven, artistry each of us practices of living day to day, behaving ethically, acting persuasively, thinking rationally and reasonably, and enjoying life's experiences and trying to turn it into "CRM The Science of Business." The problem that we've had historically doing that is that in the interests of the bottom and top lines of corporate "necessaries", we've ripped life's elegance out of the whole thinking about it and replaced it with analytics and technology and systems. That's what makes it sad and not all that interesting to a lot of people. But what is very nice, very promising about all this, is that because of the transformation of society that is currently going on with all these new generations growing up in an unprecedently powerful and empowered way - AND with the recognition that time is all we have on this planet, the new "customer" which pretty much means you 'n me, will no longer stand for the diminution of elegance and or thus the degradation of the beauty of the experiences. They may not put it in those terms, but it is no coincidence that we social creatures are turning more and more to communities online or otherwise (I'll be writing about a PEW Internet study I just ran across on social networks and the internet in a day or two). What that means is that either business logic and the direction of CRM changes or you can kiss those customers' goodbye. The elegance of a single individual's life is on the way back into the equation and no analytics or metrics can replace the way that the individual desires that elegance, that sense of beauty in ALL facets of his/her life. - That can be personal, where the artistry continues to reside or in the business world, where the pseudo-science of CRM - which keeps falling back to its cold and left-brained 1990s style business logic, now has to be replaced by that same artistry. AND that, bunkies, means the mutual collaboration between humans to get a desired satisfying result for all the humans concerned - be they on the corporate side or on the customer's end. Isn't that what we want in all things, anyway? Happiness in its multiple forms?
I know I do.
Remember the CRM Principles Below
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