Blind Spot

Illuminating the Hidden Value of Business

By Steve Diller, Nathan Shedroff & Sean Sauber

Published: November 2016

Paperback: 248 pages

ISBN: 978-1933820-69-9

Digital ISBN: 978-1933820-56-9

Distracted by traditional metrics and mounting access to data, leaders are blinded to what it actually takes to create greater value for their businesses: meaningful, long-term relationships with their customers.

In Blind Spot, you’ll learn how exceptional organizations—from Disney to Instagram—innovate and sustain valuable, productive customer relationships. Blind Spot’s lessons deliver a groundbreaking perspective shift and win-win approach for your customers, your business—and even your shareholders.

Hear authors Nathan Shedroff and Steve Diller on The Rosenfeld Review Podcast

The Rosenfeld Review Podcast (Rosenfeld Media) · The Blind Spot of Innovation: a Chat with Nathan Shedroff and Steve Diller

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About Steve Diller

Steve Diller leads Scansion, a firm that identifies, shapes and builds experiences and relationships that transform markets and businesses. As an “experience strategist,” Steve brings a unique perspective, rooted in the “time-based arts,” such as film and music, as well as anthropology and cognitive psychology, that makes it possible to optimize any offering in an era of rapid technological and social change. His and Scansion’s clients have ranged from the Fortune 100 to start-ups, including: Yahoo!, Autodesk, Chrysler, Logitech, Intel, Gannett, The Washington Post Co., P&G, The Economist Group, Carhartt, DirecTV, GM, Electrolux, Microsoft, and AAA.

Prior to forming Scansion, Steve was Senior Vice-President of Brand Strategy at Added Value, and before that was a Partner and Director of Innovation at Cheskin. Before Cheskin, he owned a film production company and produced and directed several feature films. Steve is also a founding member of the faculty at California College of the Arts’ MBA in Design Strategy program, teaching Market Insights and Social Ventures.

Steve received a Master’s Degree in Public Policy Studies from the University of Chicago, a Bachelor’s Degree in History from Carleton College, and a Bachelor’s Degree in Film from Columbia College. Steve is co-author of Rosenfeld Media title Blind Spot: Illuminating the Hidden Value of Business.

Nathan Shedroff is the executive director of Seed Vault Ltd, a Singapore-based platform building an independent, trusted bot economy on the blockchain. He manages a cadre of experienced bot enthusiasts and technologists developing new ways to ensure user privacy, shepherd the shift to this new paradigm, create ways for people to profit from their creative work, and save the business sector from its most critical threat ever. He is a design pioneer turned entrepreneur and an international educator, speaker, and consultant.

Nathan was the founder and chair of the ground-breaking Design MBA programs at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco, CA. These programs prepared the next-generation of innovation leaders for a world that is profitable, sustainable, ethical, and truly meaningful by uniting the perspectives of systems thinking, design thinking, sustainability, and generative leadership with strategic tools that lead people through ambiguity.

He speaks and teaches internationally, and his many books include Blind Spot: Illuminating the Hidden Value of Business, Experience Design 1.1, Making Meaning, Design Is the Problem, Design Strategy in Action, and Make It So.

He holds an MBA in Sustainable Management from Presidio Graduate School and a BS in Industrial Design from Art Center College of Design. He worked with Richard Saul Wurman at TheUnderstandingBusiness and, later, co-founded vivid studios, a decades-old pioneering company in interactive media and one of the first Web services firms on the planet. vivid’s hallmark was helping to establish and validate the field of information architecture, by training an entire generation of designers in the newly emerging Web industry.

Sean Sauber has spent the last 25 years working, growing, and thriving across multiple careers and disciplines. Through all of this there has been a common thread – understanding relationships between individuals, groups dynamics, and leveraging these insights to drive innovation.

Sean’s careers have run the gambit from being an Orthopedic Physician’s Assistant in trauma, sports and joint reconstruction, to consulting work with “The Big Five,” multiple functions at Procter & Gamble, business development at a software dot com, to college professor.

In this variety of roles he has managed everything from teams in the stress filled trauma room, multiple business development relationships in the dot com days, to new hires and veterans in the corporate world, leadership teams in academics, and research projects with a diversity from children’s oral care needs to caregivers of Alzheimer’s patients to new drug delivery systems.

He was a founding member of the Clay Street project at P&G. Described by AG Lafley in his book Game-Changer as “a place where innovation teams are built from scratch, connecting behaviors are the norm and the culture is courageous.” Sean led session development, design research, and business model development. His experiences and further training led to creation and execution of workshops focused on the development of creative cultures in organizations – Human Potential Workshops.

Having facilitated over 50 of the Human Potential workshops held for P&Gers from all over the world, he has experienced the trials and triumphs of building organizations to be more transparent and successfully self-directed by collaborative, yet independent, individuals.

After leaving P&G in 2007 he continued to help others leverage their true potential. Since then he has advanced his approach as a design researcher, college professor, a strategy team facilitator, innovation process facilitator and organization leadership coach.

In 2009 he started Extending Minds, his consulting firm that specializes in the creation of design sessions and team cultures that spur breakthrough innovation. He has had the pleasure of working with a variety of organizations including GE Healthcare, Target, Pfizer, Mayo Clinic and the University of Cincinnati Office of the President.

More about Blind Spot

Testimonials Table of Contents Foreword Excerpts Book Blog Illustrations

Testimonials

Building relationships is fundamental in the networked age. Blind Spot lays out a powerful design thinking approach for an organization to build long-lasting, meaningful relationships with customers.

Reid Hoffman, chairman at Linkedin and partner at Greylock

When successful traditional companies like Target train their employees to refer to customers as ‘Guests,’ or when at tech companies like Automattic there aren’t any technical support people but there are ‘Happiness Engineers’ instead, you can see a company’s culture consciously caring about the relationships they choose to have with their customers. This new book on the science and art of crafting thoughtful relationships with customers, Blind Spot, provides helpful examples and frameworks to guide more leaders’ understanding for how to deeply engage and commit to their customers, instead of simply transacting with them while wondering why they’re not coming back at all.

John Maeda, partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

The greatest challenge to corporate leaders today is finding new ways to build deep, long-lasting engagements with people in an era of transience and transaction. The waveline is the first new tool I’ve seen in years that has the power to build relationships with consumers that they will value highly. The dynamic, illustrative, multi-dimensionality of the waveline makes it the 21st century replacement for the consumer journey. Indeed, the waveline is the new consumer journey

Bruce Nussbaum, former innovation and design editor of Business Week, former professor of Design and Innovation at Parsons The New School of Design, and current Mentor-in-Residence at NEW INC, the New Museum’s digital art incubator in New York

In a time of increasing complexity and change, Blind Spot takes the mystery out of how companies can and should create lasting value for the people that matter most—their customers.

Lisa Kay Solomon, coauthor of Moments of Impact and Design a Better Business

Since Hamilton Carhartt created our first overalls after doing ‘fieldwork’ with railway workers in 1889, everything we’ve done has rested on building great customer relationships. The ideas in Blind Spot have helped us do even better, in a much more complicated world

Mark Valade, CEO, Carhartt

From newspaper readers to cash-hungry ATM users, companies are looking to create meaningful and lasting relationships with their customers. The waveline is a truly game-changing tool for assessment and optimization of your organization’s consumer engagement.

Thomas Pierce, chief marketing officer, Cardtronics

Chapter 1: A World of Hidden Value

Chapter 2: Defining a Business Relationship

Chapter 3: Visualizing Relationships

Chapter 4: Finding Opportunities in Relationships

Chapter 5: Becoming by Doing

Chapter 6: Distancing & Team Structure

Chapter 7: Discovering

Chapter 8: Deciding

Chapter 9: Declaring

Chapter 10: Designing

Chapter 11: Delivering

Chapter 12: A World of Premium Value

Foreword

I normally hate books like this. I don’t want to have a customer experience, much less a brand experience. I can’t bring myself to support any effort to give corporations a human face to match their ill-begotten rights of citizenship and personhood. Companies are enough like people already, and people are becoming far too much like brands themselves.

But Nathan Shedroff (whom I’ve discussed these issues with) and his co-authors, Steve Diller and Sean Sauber, are more forgiving people than I am, and they see a way for companies to humanize their operations without resorting to yet more manipulation. In fact, the guiding principle here is not that corporations should ape human behaviors in order to manipulate consumers into behaving more predictably. That’s the conventional wisdom in the customer experience universe, and it’s what has led to increasing alienation of human beings from the companies that mean to reduce their customers’ autonomy and individuality in the name of short-term profit.

Rather, the authors suggest that companies accept their essentially non-human status and embrace the humanity of the people buying from and working for them. The corporation is not the ends but the means.

That may be the greatest blind spot of all in today’s business landscape and, ironically, the one that our digital technologies have made most apparent to everyone else. In such an environment, transparency seems to alert everyone else to our own shortcomings, while hiding them from us.

Thinking long and hard about one’s customers’ experiences—from first point of contact through sale and word-of-mouth to social responsibility, labor relations, and environmental impact—may be the best way for a company to justify actually benefiting people in the long run. Yes, it’s good for business.

—Douglas Rushkoff
Author, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus