When organizations focus on what their customers will tell others, it opens performance to a new dimension. Suddenly, everyone from front-line employees to executives takes on a creative role that embraces exciting new ideas.

The lessons of improv comedy for businesses are to allow freedom to explore new areas that will make the connection with customers (or the audience). Instead of being restricted by what you perceive as rules, be open to where your customers want you to go. Be natural, but with a sense of play. Enjoy the freedom to say “yes…and” if the results are better for the customer.

Instead of fine-tuning the status quo, customer-centered organizations find opportunities to make the process more valuable by solving consumers’ problems.

Highly customer-centered organizations believe they live in the same environment as their customers and they educate their employees to carry out a strategy that judges every action by the customer success it delivers.

By being customer-centric, you will you position yourself to notice things that you hadn’t noticed before. Your creativity will increase and so will your proactivity in designing new ideas for customers.

Use creative ways shake up your thinking and to open “the floodgates of inspiration.” Lisa Aschmann's song scenarios provide innovative ideas for doing great things for customers.

Frank Lloyd Wright believed that buildings (like customer-centric companies) should fit into their environments, rather than the other way around. Wright said, “No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill--belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other.”

Formulaic lists about how to succeed in business are too prescriptive. Instead, go back to the basic needs that your customers are asking to be filled and work forward from that point. Produce intelligence that leads to meaningful answers about how the customer will prosper.

Our success in generating innovative customer-centered thinking becomes stronger when our "ability to make new combinations is heightened by our ability to see relationships.” As in a kaleidoscope. new patterns develop and create exciting combinations when the variety of experiences that our teams bring to the search lead to fresher ideas within our organizations.

“How can I make life easier for my customers (current and future)?" The answers will help your organization dramatically change its services in ways that will ultimately amaze your present customers and make new customers want to come to you.

Customers love creative companies. The best kind of creativity is built around ideas that focus on customers.