Telepocalypse

Corporate focus

In the end it was quite a relief to sell the car. Our last day in Kansas City was the Tuesday, and we sold it to a dealer on the Monday for near our private sale asking price. Will we miss our green Ford Focus? Not really, just a hunk of plastic and metal. Some memories maybe -- driving my pregnant wife to hospital, taking a wrinkly tiny baby home; a casket of ice dripping off it after the big ice storm; trips down to the arboretum for walks.

Everything looks rosier in retrospect. When we got it, I was a bit disappointed. Don't get me wrong -- everything was put together just so, just the odd tiny design niggle. Like the armrest.

Being a whacky European, I had selected a manual gearbox for use in suburban flatland, Kansas. This clearly wasn't in the minds of the designers of the US version of the Focus, since they had decided that a whopping great armrest was a compulsory feature for the American market. Even if that armrest interfered with minor use cases like changing gear.

So here's the thought. We're living in a world of increasing interconnectedness: long value and supply chains, web services and cheap connectivity. But the corporate body hasn't evolved along with it. I can't penetrate the force shields of the Ford Motor Company and dive down to the product manager who decided to mess up the clean Euro design of the Focus when translating into supersize Americana. [This is nothing about Europe vs. US, by the way. It just works out that way in this one case.]

My cell phone, my car, my home, all the stuff I buy -- I want to be able to make it better. I want to have a meaningful relationship with my personal suppliers. I want to see the translucent enterprise: not so transparent that they freak out, not so opaque as we have today.

I want to be able to go to the corporate web site, select any product or service, and be able to drill down. Interact with the product manager and marketing team. Tell them what's wrong, what my unmet needs are. Do it directly, not just post up an unseen complaint on a random website.

In return, they keep me informed when my concerns are addressed in the next product iteration, give me priority access to new product, give me the inside track on other customers.

Crazy? You bet. But is it any madder than online banking and dating were twenty years ago?