The Business-Oriented CIO: A Guide to Market-Driven Management

Chapter 1. In Search of Overhead Heroes

A customer is the most important visitor in our premises. He is not dependent on us, we are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work, he is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider to our business, he is part of it. We are not doing him a favour by serving him, he is doing us a favour by giving us an opportunity to do so.

—Mahatma Gandhi

Politics would be a helluva good business if it weren't for the goddamned people.

—Richard M. Nixon

"Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door," is the often-quoted advice from the American man of letters and philosophy, Ralph Waldo Emerson. The message is that ingenuity and hard work are all one needs to succeed. Unfortunately, Emerson never said it, or at least never wrote it. It is reported that the closest Emerson ever came to the statement was in his Journal, published in 1855, where he said, "I trust a good deal to common fame, as we all must. If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles, or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad, hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods."^[4]

It was only years later, after Emerson's death, that Sarah Yule reported that she heard Emerson say, "If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap, than his neighbor, though he builds his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door."

Regardless ...