Unlocking the Customer Value Chain: How Decoupling Drives Consumer Disruption

by Thales S. Teixeira

One important strand of psychological research has shown that when people in various capacities exhibit more aggressive behavior, they tend to perceive the world differently than they would in a less aggressive state. When we are driving in heavy traffic, become irritated, and behave aggressively, we lose focus on our “customer”: the safety of our passengers and ourselves.1 Similarly, aggressive behavior in the workplace reduces our focus on our actual customers and their needs. From the 2016 Volkswagen diesel engine emissions cheating scandals to the 2017 scandal centering around Wells Fargo’s practice of opening fake accounts for oblivious customers and Uber’s controversial efforts to combat archrival Lyft and camouflage its operations from the eyes of transportation regulators, a take-no-prisoners attitude on the part of executives has led to an erosion or outright violation of customer-centricity, which in turn hurts businesses and society.

At the extreme, scholars such as Eugene Soltes, who has studied white-collar crimes, have revealed links between highly aggressive behavior and corporate malfeasance.2

But the harm done by adhering to a war metaphor is even worse. When executives and managers treat competitors aggressively, their aggressive thinking becomes reinforcing, profoundly influencing workplace cultures. The language colleagues use ...

Us-versus-them thinking and a generalized fear of loss prevail. Over time, companies hire more-aggressive people and fire less-aggressive ones, coarsening the culture even more. Gender diversity suffers, as women on average tend to behave less aggressively than men. If you want to understand why so many workplaces have failed to retain female leaders and foster a cordial workspace, you can’t ignore the profoundly aggressive mindset (a warlike mentality being ...