Curiouser And Curiouser
Bill Guerin of Cambiar raises some interesting points here about why researchers don’t apply their principles to their own work. If they know so much about customer retention, for instance, why aren’t they good at retaining customers?
My thought on this is basically that most of Bill’s questions involve not just knowing about business, but being curious about it. And many researchers - perhaps even most - didn’t get into the industry primarily because they were curious about business. They got into it because they were curious about people, and discovered when they’d reached a certain level that you needed to be curious about business too.
So they muddle through, train themselves to ask the right questions, learn to talk the ever-more-hyperbolic language of business passion. Some don’t need to fake it (I’d guess they’re the most likely to move client-side), others fake it incredibly well, a lot go through the motions but their hearts aren’t in it. They don’t know how to apply research to their own businesses because, frankly, they’re not actually that curious about them.
Isn’t this a terrible state of affairs? Well, yes. And there are all sorts of things we should do and are doing about it. But it could be worse. I still think curiosity about people is the absolute number one quality a researcher ought to have. It’s the thing we “own” as an industry. If you are lucky enough to find someone who is blazingly curious about people and clever at working out what they do and why it matters, you should employ them even if deep down doesn’t give a stuff about business - they will probably do their best work in tandem with more business-minded individuals, but they’re still a fantastic asset.
