Bruce Temkin has done as much as anyone to define customer experience thinking. Having left Qualtrics at the start of the year, the industry veteran is embarking on a whole new adventure. And it might be his biggest challenge yet. CXM caught up with Bruce before he travelled to the UK for this year’s International Customer Experience Awards later this month, to discuss his ideas for sparking change within the global business elite.
CXM: You left Qualtrics at the start of the year and you’ve been working on something called Humanity@Scale for the last eight months. So, what is it and how is it going?
Bruce Temkin: With Humanity@Scale I want to change how leaders around the world think and act. The notion of Humanity@Scale hit me when I was at Qualtrics, but I didn’t know what it meant. So over the last [few] months, I’ve been figuring it out and preparing for a launch in January. I’ll be starting a podcast. I’ll have a website up; I’ll have a bunch of other things going on.
CXM: So what happens next?
Bruce Temkin: My goal is to get leaders to understand that they can improve humanity in the way that they act and the decisions they take. And it will help them achieve their goals.
It’s similar to CX and will apply to customer [and] employee experience. But the idea is if we can change the way leaders think about their role, so they understand how human beings are both an important part of their success, but also that the way that they operate impacts people in ways that they didn’t think about, then I believe that we can make the world a better place.By having a few people all over the world start changing in the same way, hopefully we can make a dent on improving humanity.
CXM: What are some of the challenges facing the programme?
Bruce Temkin: The challenge is a lot of senior business leaders who’ve reached the CEO level [have] grown up with loyalty to shareholder value, profit and loss. [What they] do for the wider good has maybe translated into CSR programmes… because clearly the number one priority has always been value for shareholders and everybody else in the team.
CXM: How do you get them to embrace an idea like Humanity@Scale?
Bruce Temkin: I think that it’ll be easier now than it was five or ten years ago for a couple of reasons. First of all, just about everyone in the world recognises that we need to do a better job of how we interact with each other.We can have debates about lots of things, and we might not see eye to eye on everything. But I guarantee you, I can get almost total agreement that we need to do a better job of how we interact with each other.
The other thing is all the work over the last couple of decades around customer and employee experience has raised awareness of the fact that there are opportunities to succeed by focusing on human beings that are not antithetical to their individual success.
If I were to create the London Business School today, a big chunk of it would focus on humanity in some way — how you impact [it], how you understand it, and your role as a leader in society.
A lot of older thoughts like shareholder value have been debunked. When I started my career after business school, I went to work for GE. I worked for Jack Welsh, who was the champion of shareholder value. Over 20 years later, he said we were mistaken. It’s not shareholder value.
I want to teach leaders to think about, not shareholder value, but stakeholder value. When you’re running an organisation, you’re creating value for a whole set of stakeholders.
Some of those stakeholders are your investors, but there are also stakeholders that are employees. There are stakeholders that are customers, there are stakeholders who are communities. They are all making commitments of their time, energy, and assets to the firm.
So, if you think about the value of a firm, it’s about optimising the return for all stakeholders. If we can get them to understand that the shareholders are not the only stakeholders, and in many cases aren’t even necessarily the most important set of stakeholders, then we can change.
I’m not here to think that I’m going to change how everyone thinks, but my goal is to start a trend towards thinking differently.
I want to spark that change.
CXM: You need other people to join you on that journey. Can you tell us some of the organisations or the individuals you’ve been talking with about sparking that change?
Bruce Temkin: I have not had discussions with organisations. I’m going to start my discussions with dozens and dozens and dozens of leaders.
I can tell you that 100% of the people I talk to are on board. I don’t yet have a vision for how I’m going to incorporate that, I’m still thinking through different options, whether there’s community certification [or] some other things.
I want to just introduce the notion of Humanity@Scale in a more robust way than I’ve done in the past. I’ll do that at the beginning of the year and then spend probably the first three months figuring out what people want to do and how people react to it.
Change works in waves. I’m not worried about the first wave of people buying-in, learning and sharing. I can get that just based on the response I’ve got with the people I’ve talked to and who know me.
CXM: The world is a crazy place right now — you’ve got wars cropping up everywhere! Economic turmoil here, there, everywhere. Why do you think companies are going to be receptive to this message now?
Bruce Temkin: I always start with trying to understand human behaviour and how people think and feel. I think that we have a world of turmoil, and in a world of turmoil, people look for comfort.
People look for stability. People look for goodness.
So the more chaotic the world is, I think the more receptive they will be for a message like this. Whereas if the world wasn’t chaotic, [and] wasn’t crazy, then they wouldn’t be looking.
One of my core beliefs is that in times of change, which we’re definitely in, small things that people do differently can have a big impact. It’s the chaos theory.
People are looking for a way to participate in the world that makes them feel better about what they do and the mark that they’re leaving [behind]. That feeling is much [greater] today than it has been in years past.
I don’t need everyone buying into the message to change the world. I just need a handful of people starting to spread the spark.