The Customer, The Student, The Whatever

Carlos Ghosn is a Brazilian born, French-educated son of Lebanese parents who has lived in Japan for 18 years. We both arrived in Japan in the same year.

He's had a little more impact than me!!!

BUT.

Like me, he uses interpreters all the time.* Morimoto-san is his gesticulating, passionate, interpreter. She follows Carlos everywhere "except the rest room." She's well known for capturing his mood and conveying that in Japanese.

Amongst the executive staff at Nissan’s headquarter in Yokohama, the saying goes:

“When the CEO yells at you, you get yelled at twice.”

Carlos just stepped down as CEO of Nissan on April 1st. In his book - Shift - he described four reasons why Nissan was failing. These four reasons have an uncanny relevance to teachers trying to make a successful practise.

The first concerns profit. Yesterday I wrote of BodyChance's attitude to that:

"We care about profit because we care about people."

Or to put it another way: without people, there's no profit.

Which dovetails neatly into the next reason Carlos revealed for Nissan's failure:

"Second, there was a lot of talk about the customer at Nissan, but the customers had little presence in the company."

How would that apply to you?

Well, how much do you know about the people who come to you? (Or how much have you researched about the people you want to come to you?)

What magazines do they read? What shows do they like? Are the fanatical about anything? Play sports? Have children? A partner? Are they gay, straight or gender-challenged? Do they speak a foreign language, drive a car or have savings?

The point is NOT that you DON'T THINK about student customers - I am sure you do, just as there was "a lot of talk" at Nissan…

It's about what you think, and how you think…

How much do you know about their worries, unrelated to your teaching? How much do you know of their life situation, their needs and concerns? Do these issues occupy your thinking when students are not you with you?

At Nissan, it was all about what had been done before. Or copying what Toyota was doing - without really understanding WHY Toyota was doing that. In the AT world, I see this behaviour all the time: people copying one part of a marketing strategy, without understanding how it is just one small part of a complex, interwoven system with a lot of moving parts and DeepThinking behind it.

If you love Alexander's discovery, you can come to love all this too.

*I think I would have crawled under the rug and stopped breathing if Carlos had also managed to learn Japanese on top of everything else he did. I still feel a little shame that I have not accomplished that. Yet.