Bring on more board meetings !!

The tension in the board room was building up as the board meeting progressed. Why have different people on the board? Why have people on the board who perhaps come for meeting only five times in an year and don't know about the day-to-day operations? - All this became so clear as the radically different approaches started to emerge from different sides of the round table. Very very interesting, high-energy, high-pressure talks - all of them trying to bring in more constructive feedback to the growth of the company. 

Language plays a very important role in these meetings. Ask the board members to converse in a foreign language and the limited vocabulary makes the talk abridged and limited. In the mother tongue, things get dirty and for the best more than often. 

It is simply so important to have this strong third perspective. It is so important to have the right people on the board who are able to take things professionally and keep their heart out of such discussions. People who can single minded focus on making their companies go in the right strategic direction. 

I loved it to be part of this meeting because I knew I was with the right people !!

Opinion: Are we incentivising our societies to becoming negative?

The more I explore customer analytics, consumer experience management and understand how we want to gauge who are the customer groups that a company should focus on, the more I worry about the vicious circle that we have built up in this world today. 

Let me explain using an attribute that is commonly used to understand the consumers - consumer sentiment. Large analytics teams and complex analytical softwares pay a hell lot of attention to this one parameter. Their logic is that the more negative a consumer's sentiment is, which is measured in the world of algorithms through certain key words for instance 'unhappy', 'highly disappointed', 'depressed' among others, the more important it is for a company to pay attention to this consumer if they want to retain the consumer. 'Red flags' and red traffic lights flash across the screens of call centre agents and customer representatives who want to service these customers at their best depending on the capabilities of their product or service. 

On the other side of the table is the consumer, who by the way is not stupid. The consumer knows that the more strong and negative he or she is in his/her response to anything that he/she is unhappy with, the faster and better service he/she will get, with a good chance to even win some credit back. And thats exactly what many consumers do. 

The result - our societies are becoming more and more negative. Patience has gone for a toss !! and don't get me wrong - it is definitely and absolutely important to be constructively critical about things that aren't the best because that is the only way to ensure that the things will improve. However, here the scenario is not the same. Millions, if not billions, are empowered today with the knowledge that the more critical and negative they become - the more credit they can earn. 

Are we driving our own societies to negativity? Shouldn't customer analytics be more psychological based analysis that can exactly figure out what and how real a consumer sentiment is? I feel there is not just a small flaw in this whole analytics technique - it is a huge risk looming around the corner that will perhaps make people more negative than they ought to be.