Sustainable Business Learning Community Conversations, January 2014 - February 2014

January 2, 2014 Topic: Community Impact and the Customer

Bob's Thoughts on the Community and the Customer:

Regarding the Customer versus Community, here are my thoughts. (I’m not sure if this is “right” or even what it means. It’s just the thoughts that appeared during our discussion.)

1. Communities are naturally created when people share common interests.
2. An organization usually belong to a number of communities and, if they want to stay in business, one of their communities better be comprised of people who are interested in their products or services.
3. Communities are comprised of three or more layers:

• Spectators – people who are interested observing/browsing (low or no “trust” required)
• Customers – people who are willing to make a purchase/financial investment. They must have some level of trust in the business as a member of this community but they are receiving a perceived quid pro quo for their investment, so the trust might focus around the businesses ability to deliver the promised product/service
• Contributors – people who are interested in building/expanding the boundaries of this interest-community. Contributors usually have a high level of trust in the “interest community” as they are willing to provide feedback, insights or develop new products/services without any assurance of a return.

A person can belong to more than one layer but before someone will “invest” as a Customer or Contributor, they need to have built a level of trust. Trust is built by a process of caring, sharing .

The key points, for me, are that communities are based around common interests and that businesses need to be Contributors to their respective Interest Communities. That these businesses need to be leader in these communities and nurture trust. If they do this, they will naturally move other participants from Spectators to Customer and (hopefully) to Contributors. The latter being the invaluable person who shares ideas on how to improve your business to better serve the customer’s and communities interests.

David B: suspect - prospect - customer - influences

Tom's Thoughts:

• There are so many people in the community that enrich our business and who are not just "vessels of money".
• We want to invest time and energy into these relationships, too.
• We must understand the broader community and the diversity of people that are necessary to keep your business vital.

Other thoughts from the group:

• Be a helpful part of the community; contribute to the benefit of the community without expectation of reward.

• Building networks within a community is critical and can be so beneficial.

• Community can lead you to think about redefining what you do; seek out community to help define yourself.

• Accept dependence upon one another; this is enriching rather than depleting. The further up the ladder you go, the more you are encouraged to be independent. But it's much more rewarding to nurture interconnectedness and interdependence.

Questions: Does community work the same way in larger businesses or certain other kinds of businesses? Can they have similar goals and interests? How authentic a desire is it to want to create and nurture relationships that are outside of the financial/economic one? Can you realistically expect to develop relationships with people who are not paying customers on the same level as those who are?

Response: Think of a business is a living organism. If all you do is define the business by an income statement and balance sheet, money coming in and out, it would be a very narrow view. Because our relationships here at the GG are so much more than that, we are able to build real community. Ideas are energy, love is energy, help is energy, openness to be helped is energy. Just because a business is doing well financially, energy can still be lost and the business can become unhealthy. It's healthier to see a business in a multi-dimensional way, beyond only financials. At same time, financials are important; at the GG, if we don't have enough people paying lease payments, we can't function, either. But if that's all we do, then that doesn't produce enough energy to keep things going.

• Earl used to travel all the time so his business community was completely disconnected from his personal relationships; it was hard for him to bring the two together. Now he's trying to connect the two more. You should always be doing good things - you never know what good might come out of a contact, a relationship that you form.

• You will get so much more in return than you put in if you put energy into nurturing the relationship/spiritual side.

• Who you interact with helps define who you are, whether or not you do business with them. It grows YOU.

• The new mayor of Detroit has said that he wants to give each resident a sense that he/she is an integral part of this community. Once people are exposed to the idea of cohesive community, they will really want to belong to it and nurture it.

• Make community an active element of design from the beginning of your business formation; boot just an awareness of community, but part of the integral design of the life cycle of your business.

• Many companies pay other companies to learn how others perceive them out in the community because they don't have any idea; they are so disconnected from their own community that they are completely unaware.

• Working in Detroit from a newcomer's point of view: The level of impact of one's work in Detroit is so very clear. It's easy to see the effect of your work and the growing optimism. Also, there are so many free sources of information; people here are so willing to share.

• If you enjoy a community, think about sharing the community with your friends and acquaintances. Let a healthy community spread out!

• A new era in Detroit: It feels like we're at the beginning of a new era, a new way of thinking - we just can't go back to how things were 50 or 100 years ago - we live in different times. So we are developing a new way of thinking. We are creating new kinds of social infrastructures. Detroit is rebuilding community and we are at the beginning of this process. The city has an opportunity to develop a "civic spirit" with businesses that aren't formed on secrecy but on sharing and openness and trust.

• Community as cult? Sadly, the only image that many people have of community is a cult - they have no other image in their mind to bring up when they hear the word "community". How do we work to change that? Americans used to have "community habits" but many have these have been lost. We need to develop new community habits. This image of the self-reliant person has overwhelmed the real need for us to rely on and help one another.

• If you do the work that you want to do, that you're interested in, community will develop naturally around you.

• We don't have a very nuanced language around the idea of community. Our language just doesn't allow for variations in meaning.

• Words of wisdom: Work towards something that you would like to be part of, because if you don't want to be part of it, then who are you building it for?