I just got back from a day and a half of noodling on interesting ideas at the executive summit for the Consortium for Service Innovation in Arizona. This year we discussed a Leadership Framework for Service Excellence and focused on the dynamics of control vs. alignment in the context of leadership.

I enjoy these discussions as they allow leaders to explore ‘crazy’ ideas to see what works and what doesn’t. For the most part the discussions are unstructured and power point free.

I’ve been asked to speak at the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge, specifically the Software Advanced Computing SIG.

I’ll be speaking on April 23rd, on software, service and delivery. They have a lovely description of it…

April 23 - Software Service, Support & Delivery
You’re credit cards are maxed out. The wife and kids are ready to leave. Even the dog . . . well, that’s another story. But the prototype is done. Now, how do you deliver and support it. This session focuses on the practical side, including when, what and how to deliver, managing customer expectations, planning for delay (and worse), and supporting your first customers without jeopardizing further product development.

Ah, very similar to what I did at Akamai, when I started the customer support team there.

At the HDI conference in Dallas yesterday (http://thinkhdi.com/hdi2008/) I gave a new talk, ‘Be the Voice of the Customer’. It is an adaptation of the full day workshop based on my book. Judging from the size of the audience (overflowing), a sneak peek at the reviews and the number of questions and comments afterwards, this seems to have gone well.

The jist of the session is how to earn then demand respect on behalf of your customer. Once you have that, I talked about techniques to unleash the power of the customer. Perhaps the comment that got the most questions/reactions was the comment about ‘level 1, 2 and 3 support is an obsolete concept.’

Yup, you read that right.