Spend a day in the life of your customers

The ability to attain insights and a sense of the market through customer contact, and then to translate those insights into strategic management, is the greatest skill a senior executive can have. Many top-level managers believe in customer contact, but too often this contact is left exclusively to those in the marketing and sales departments. This, however, is a risky approach for several reasons, including the fact that input from customers is valuable only if it is garnered from every level, down to the end user.