There is a great scene in the movie The Godfather Part Two. Michael Corleone is visiting Cuba to decide whether he should invest in some mafia-owned casinos there. It is the time of the revolution that would eventually bring Castro to power. His car stops by an alleyway, down which he sees an armed soldier pointing his gun at some guerrillas who appear to have surrendered. Suddenly one of the guerrillas pulls out a grenade which explodes killing them all. Corleone drives on. Later when he is talking to the Mafia bosses, he asks them about the guerrillas. They are dismissive. He tells them what he saw in the alleyway. The bosses laugh pointing out that it proves how useless and stupid the guerrillas are. Corleone pauses and then disagrees: ‘It means they can win’ he says and tells them he is not investing.

It is a vignette that shows the power of instinct in business (because this was a business deal after all). Michael Corleone saw something, he felt something that made him think and that led him to do something that would save him a lot of money. Castro won and the mafia lost their casinos.  SEE, FEEL, THINK, DO: a simple process but a very powerful one.

Underlying the success of business is this simple process of observing and understanding human behaviour. The greatest entrepreneurs throughout history have been those who have understood – almost instinctively – what people would value and why and then delivered it as simply and as easily as possible. But over the years as markets have evolved and people have become more sophisticated, their needs greater and more intangible, we have begun to see business as not a simple process but a complex one.

Business has become so important that we have sought to eliminate the risk from it by believing that if we school ourselves in its best practices and develop rigorous tools for analysis we will be able to follow models for success. Executives do not even have to bother talking to customers any more; that is outsourced to specialist research firms and management or brand consultancies each with their own tools and processes for extracting the same information from the same customers. Short-term thinking, analysts and research have d vision, leadership and passion in many large businesses today.

This book sprang out of our last book Uncommon Practice in which we noted how little these companies relied on conventional research techniques and even less on the advice and wisdom of management consultancies. Instead they tended to rely on their own intuition, informed, but never governed, by research. They were able to do this and to be successful because the leaders of the businesses never strayed too far from the source of their profits: the customers. They regularly kept in touch with what their customers were thinking and experiencing by personally experiencing it themselves.

Over the last two years we have observed the behaviour of many different companies and researched the stories behind many of the ideas that we are now excited by and familiar with in life. We have also had the opportunity to talk to many leaders and idea creators in business, from restaurateurs to retailers, from product designers to public transport workers, to glean from them what has inspired them to do what they have done.  From this emerged a simple idea and an even simpler model: SEE, FEEL, THINK, DO. Put simply, SEE, FEEL, THINK, DO is about experiencing what your customers experience and using your instinct to change it for the better.

It requires three key human skills: observation, empathy and problem-solving. And anyone can do it. In fact the more you encourage people in your company to use these natural skills – particularly if they are directly involved in the provision of customer service – the better.

In our book we will be telling the stories of many different brands from around the world that have kept close to their customers, kept observing and empathising with their real life experiences and developing ideas that deliver value. Our simple toolkit, outlined within the book, will enable you to take these stories and the principles in this book and apply them practically within your own business.

Find out more in our book SEE, FEEL, THINK, DO.

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