Leadership is really tough – there’s always so much to think about, so many issues to balance, so many challenges to doing the right thing. However much is planned, there will always be the unexpected. But what you can always be certain about is that your business depends on your customers – without them there is no business for you to think about.

Your role as leader is to ensure that your team does not regard customers as a group ‘out there’, individuals or entities that they sell ‘to’. Your big task is to bring customers on the inside – to create a business culture whose very nature and whose every decision is informed by the perspective of what the customer wants.

This is not about ‘knowing the customer’, if that means understanding how to manage them; it is not about providing excellent service (important though that is); and it is not about regular surveys of what your customers think about you.

What it is about is opening the physical and mental doors to your business and forming partnerships so that customers shape your activities from their core outwards – it is about seeing customers as a key part of your business development process, not as a recipient of it; it is about strategic rather than transactional relationships. It is about knowing how much you can learn from customers.

Most of all it is about humility. It is about recognising that leadership of your business exists outside the potentially exclusive and excluding world you inhabit with your leadership team. In the best cases it lies within, and should be shared with, your most valued customers – they lead you to where your leadership alone would not have trodden.