And the more you do this with that customer, the more you know about each other and the harder it is for the customer to switch. So you get tremendous opportunities to increase your intimacy with customers as you move to custom, knowledge-based transactions. One of the biggest misconceptions is that this is fuzzy. It really isn't. There are ways you can show the increasing power of information and knowledge.
Senior executives tend to think they manage knowledge better than they do.
One reason is that they have fewer information problems than the people who work for them. When the CEO asks for something, there are all kinds of people to go and get it for him. So that executive tends to think that they and their organizations use knowledge more efficiently than they do. It sounds like most companies have a long way to go in terms of effectively managing their intellectual capital. There are a number of ways of going at this.