Mary Roberts
CEO, Rejuvenation
Alumnus, PSU SBA
Marcelo Spagnolo
MBA Student, SBA PSU
International Business Option
Curt Roberts
VP, Global Strategic Planning
NIKE, Inc.
Scott Dawson
Dean, SBA
Portland State University
The students, alumni, faculty and business partners of the School of Business at Portland State University help lead dialogue on today's most relevant business issues. Click on the videos for a sample.
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A CEO SPEAKS
Mary Roberts
CEO, Rejuvenation
Alumnus, Portland State University SBA
We listen very deeply to customers. We can actually hear their yearning for what’s next. And for our company, for example, we are now introducing a whole line of products for the fifties and sixties ranch homes. And that’s not something that people have really articulated to us in a list of ‘this is what I’d like to see you do’, but if we look to see where young people are now buying their first homes and what they really need to help them in refurbishing what they’ve just purchased, that’s really where they’re headed. So I’d say it’s a combination of the two.
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A STUDENT SPEAKS
Marcelo Spagnolo
MBA Student, School of Business Administration PSU
International Business Option
Customers should always drive your business, no matter what. That should be a given. Now, there are different ways to capture feedback from customers. Unfortunately, this morning I was dealing with the telephone company and I realized I’m just a number. They don’t even know who I am. So what I’m hoping is that over the next three to five years there can be tools developed to engage the customer and make the customer feel respected. It is about respect for the customer, for no matter what we do, business is driven by the customer.
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AN EXECUTIVE SPEAKS
Curt Roberts
Vice President, Global Strategic Planning
NIKE, Inc.
The cross-trainer might be a great example. We developed the cross-training category basically out of an insight that was connected to one specific athlete - that being Bo Jackson. And once Bo sort of created the idea that you could develop a shoe that had functionality that could be used on a tennis court, or potentially for a short run, for or a work out in the gym, or that sort of thing, an entirely new category of athletic footwear was born. You would have never found out by interviewing consumers that they needed cross-trainers. Nobody would have ever told you that. So, I think we’re at our best when we’re doing both, when we’re taking the consumer to unexpected places, surprising them with what’s possible. At the same time we’re also responding to very specific needs in the best way we possibly can. So I don’t think the answer is one or the other. I think the best companies do both.
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AN EDUCATOR SPEAKS
Scott Dawson
Dean, School of Business Administration
Portland State University
You know, there’s a guy named Clayton Christensen who’s written a book called “The Innovators Dilemma” and in that book he, through multiple sort of companies and multiple industries, illustrates how companies that become very profitable do so by listening to their customers. And those customers tend to buy a lot of product from them and that product tends to be very profitable and those customers have a very keen sense of what it is they want. And when a new innovation comes along that at its infancy looks like a clunky innovation, it’s never going to be any good to those customers, those customers say, “don’t do that, we don’t want that.” Well, lo and behold, fifteen years later that’s the predominant technology in the industry. So, listening to what you might call your light-house customers, yes, you’ve got to listen to them, but you have to listen to a whole lot else as well and you’ve got to take a risk to lead people. I firmly believe that. If you’re going to stay in command of a market you’ve got to take risks. And that means you don’t listen to your customers sometimes.
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