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Lecture 2 - Managing by Wandering Around

Narrator: Listen to part of a lecture in a Business Class.

Professor: OK, as we’ve talked about a key aspect of running a successful business is knowing, um, getting a good sense of what the customer actually wants, and how they perceive your product. So with that in mind, I want to describe a very simple method of researching customer preference and it’s becoming increasingly common. It’s called MBWA, which stands for Managing by Wandering Around.

Now, MBWA, that’s not the most technical sounding name you have ever heard, but it describes the process pretty accurately. Here’s how it works.

Basically, um, the idea is that business owners or business managers just go out and actually talk to their customers and, uh, learn more about how well the business is serving their needs, and try to see what the customer experiences, ‘cause that’s a great way to discover for yourself how your product is perceived, what its strengths and weaknesses are. You know, how you can improve it, that sort of thing.

You know Daltons? They make soup and canned vegetables and such. Well, the head of the company had Daltons’ top executives walk around supermarkets, um, asking shoppers what they thought of Daltons’ soups. And he used that data to make changes to the company’s products. I mean, when Daltons, of all companies, embraces something as radical as MBWA, it really shows you how popular the theory has become. Yes, Lisa?

Student A: But isn’t it dangerous to base decisions from information from a small sample of people? Isn’t large-scale market research safer, getting data on a lot of people?

Professor: That’s a good question. And, uh, well, I don’t want to pretend that MBWA is some sort of, uh, replacement for other methods of customer research.

Now market research data definitely can give you a good idea of the big picture, but MBWA is really useful, it kind of filling in the blanks, you know, getting a good on-the-ground sense of how your products are used and how people need to respond to them.

And, yes, the numbers of opinions you get is small, so you do need to be careful.

But, good business managers will tell you that the biggest fear they have and one of the most frequent problems they come across is, well, becoming out of touch with what their customers really want and need. You know, surveys and market research, stuff like that, they can only tell you so much about what the customers actually want in their day to day lives. Managing by wandering around, on the other hand, well, that gets you in there and gives you a good sense of what customers’ need. So, when used in combination, then, MBWA and market research, well, they are powerful tools.

Oh, here’s another example for you. Uh, senior executives for a clothing manufacture, it was, um, Elkin, Elkin jeans, you know? They went and worked in the store for a few days, selling Elkin’s clothes. Now that gave them a very different idea about their product. They saw how people responded to it. They could go up to customers in the store and asked them questions about it. Uh, yes, Mike?

Student B: Well, I would think that a lot of customers would be bothered by, you know, if I’m shopping, I don’t know if I want some business representative coming up to me and asking me questions. It’s like when I get phone calls at home from market researchers. I just hang up on them.

Professor: Well, it’s certainly true that, well, no one likes getting calls at home from market researchers or people like that. But I’ll tell you something. Most customers have the exact opposite reaction when it comes to MBWA. Now, don’t ask me why because I really have no idea. But the fact is, that customers tend to respond really well to MBWA, which is the key reason for its success.

In fact, the techniques of MBWA work so well. They’ve actually been extended to all kinds of different contexts like politics, for instance. Uh, a few years back, the mayor of Baltimore, uh, I think his name was Shaffer, or something like that.

Anyway, he decided that the best way to serve the people of the city, of his city, was to actually get out there in it and experience the things that they experienced.

So, he’d ride around the city and, well you know, in all parts of it, and he’d see all the pot holes. He’d see how the trash was sometimes, uh, not picked up off the side of the street. And then he’d go back to his office and he’d write these memos, now, they were memos to his staff about the problems he’d seen and how they needed to be fixed. You know, that sort of thing.

But, the thing is, he got all these information just by going around and seeing the different Baltimore neighborhoods and talking to the people in them. Now, he called this smart politics; we’d call it MBWA, or just playing good customer service.