Value creation: The higher you rise, the deafer you get

You have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars learning what your customers think. You have never once understood who they are.

Try this. Ask someone on your executive team to draw the letter E on their forehead — fast, without thinking. Some will draw it readable to themselves. Others will draw it readable to the person facing them.

The direction is not random. In a 2006 study published in Psychological Science, Adam Galinsky and colleagues at Northwestern and Stanford primed participants with feelings of high or low power, then ran this exact test. Those primed with power were nearly three times more likely to draw the E, facing themselves — 33 per cent against 12. Power does not sharpen your ability to see from another’s perspective. It systematically destroys it.

The researchers called this a “power-induced impediment to perspective taking.” I call it the occupational disease of every successful leader.

The deafness is not a character flaw. It is a side effect of the chair.

A lighthouse has the same condition. It throws light miles into the dark with total conviction — and cannot hear the ship scraping its own rocks. Most companies, after a certain age, become lighthouses. They broadcast. They do not receive.

Every company is broadcasting, but no one is listening.

The reason is structural. Sales is broadcasting. Fundraising is broadcasting. Recruiting is broadcasting. Every pitch, every earnings call, every all-hands is won by whoever stands up and explains, with conviction, why the world should bend toward their idea. For years, you are paid — in capital, in talent, in headlines — to transmit. So the beam grows brighter. And the faculty that no one ever promoted you for goes quietly dark.

No one was ever made CEO for what they heard

Here is where it gets expensive. Because you are not ignoring your customers. You are listening to them — or so the invoice says.

Every year, companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on surveys, focus groups, and NPS dashboards, then present the findings in slide decks as proof of customer empathy. It is nothing of the sort. A survey is a document you designed, with questions you chose, framed in language that fits your existing categories, delivered to people who answer in the format you provide. You are not hearing the customer. You are hearing yourself, refracted.

Also Read: The AI trust gap: Why SEA startups need proof before they scale

The focus group is worse. You bring people into a room — your room, your agenda, your moderator — and call it listening. Nobody tells the truth in a room they were paid to enter. Nobody says what they actually do in a life they were not asked to live in front of you.

The most expensive research in the world is still broadcasting, dressed up as a question.

CB Insights read 483 startup post-mortems. The leading cause of death was not capital, nor the team. It was “no market need.” Forty-two per cent. They built what the survey said people wanted — and found no one waiting.

Why startups die 

The leading cause of startup death is building what no one was asking for.

And the most dangerous signal is not the one you failed to survey. It is the one your own people already knew — and could not say.

When researchers interviewed 76 Nokia managers for a 2016 study in Administrative Science Quarterly, they found a company that had seen the smartphone threat clearly and could not speak. Engineers knew. Middle managers knew. Every report was softened on the way up until the truth reached the top floor, sanded into something survivable. Nokia did not lack the signal. It had built an organisation perfectly designed to dim it before it arrived.

Also Read: Great talent is what happens after AI creates the first draft

The market was talking the whole time. So were the people three floors below you.

There is only one way to understand a person. You have to go where they live, watch what they actually do — not what they say they do — and stay long enough to see the gap between the two. Nobody understands by watching from a distance. Nobody understands by asking. You understand by entering.

When Toyota redesigned the Sienna, the chief engineer did not commission a study. He drove 53,000 miles across North America — every US state, every Canadian province, into Mexico — because he believed he had no right to design for a life he had not lived inside. That is not a research method. That is a different idea about what understanding requires.

Hear. Then see. Then — only then — do.

Most companies stop at the first step and call it enough. Most never even get that far. They send a survey instead, then wonder why the product felt right in the boardroom and wrong in the world.

So before the next research budget gets approved, before the next focus group convenes, before you stand up at the all-hands and show the NPS score as evidence that the company is listening —

Draw the E on your forehead. Be honest about which way it faces. And ask yourself: when did you last enter a customer’s life, rather than summon them into yours?

This article is part of David Kim’s Value Creation column. It sits alongside the Asia Value Creation Awards, which aim to recognise PE and VC teams driving long-term, fundamentals-led value creation across the region.

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