Further thoughts from the Atlanta experience on 3,19,2010

1.      Nurturing is a natural, albeit, uncommon instinct and behavior in most humans.

a.      The lesson was learned from over 500 nurture presentations and nearly 100 company invitations to introduce the philosophy and actual methodology of becoming or being a truly nurturing company to their home-teams.

b.      I believe the amazing velocity of shifts from our, still fresh,  agricultural/industrial-age heritage into the digital-cyclone age of today has driven the mandates of the natural laws of nature that ultimately influence all life on earth, to the archives of the past.
Laws, by the way, NOT exempting business relationships into some easy to ignore and ancient -instructions to new farmers that were surely yet to come.

c.      In this multi-million air mile this journey exploring and evangelizing the very philosophy, merits and logic of nurturing customer relationships, the global organization VISTAGE archived the dates and details of every presentation I have made for member-groups in North America from the first in 1988 and make it available to resource speakers on-line.
With the dazzling array of metrics-search capabilities in the digital cloud now at my fingertips, I was able capture and to calculate from my own database, the number of natural-nurturers present at each presentation.  In 1997, I conducted an analysis.

Pareto was proven right again.

d.      21% avowed a personal commitment to actually and proactively nurturing all their constituencies. They openly acknowledged their personal ownership of the initiatives.
38% were aware of the concept but admitted reluctance to initiate the practice.
61% openly scoffed at the idea and expressed that sustained and explicit aggression against competition was the only answer.

By 2007, the numbers had shifted dramatically by now:
35% now say they are actively nurturing.

32% saw no change in attitude or efforts.

17% astonishingly declared a new awareness and initial attempts to implement
16% still scoffed or ignored completely. I’d call that a significant and meaningful shift.

e.      I made clear offers of my first book, ‘A Cure for the COMMON COLD-Call’, 101 Best Nurturing Tips, completely free, as a method of assessing the actual interest in Nurture within this business segment.

                                                    i.     The requests for the eBook were disappointingly small yet still encouraging. I always held as my real intention for each presentation anyway was to plant a seed deeply into their fertile and awake brain and nourish those who actually get the metaphor rather than to just pitch nurture as a service. It was a good intention, one that showed me that the laws of the harvest were achingly accurate still. “As ye sow” and “Ye always harvest in a different season than ye sow” comes to mind.

f.       The meetings last Friday were like fresh reminders of the spring. To see a renewed resurgence of the rightness of the concept of Nurturing Customer Relationships was for me like watching the sun rise over Haleakala Crater on Maui.

Good Nurturing

Jim