When bosses walk in employees’ shoes

worth their salt knows the value of spending time “walking in their customers’ shoes”. There are many ways to do it. You can observe customers in their natural habitat. Pernod Ricard’s boss recently told Bloomberg, a news service, about his habit of bar-hopping in order to see what people want to drink. Such research is a lot less fun if your company makes soap dispensers for public toilets but the same principle applies. You can be a customer yourself, buying your company’s products, ringing your own helplines and enduring the same teeth-grinding muzak. Or you can hear from your customers directly. Jeremy Hunt, who has just been appointed Britain’s finance minister but was once its longest-serving health secretary, started each day in that job by reading a letter of complaint from a patient or their family, and writing back to each correspondent personally. If you cancel one internal meeting a week and use that time to hear from customers instead, you will come out ahead on the trade.