How to be smarter tomorrow than you were today: Think paranoid.

Posted Aug. 13, Mother (and Daddy) of All Lost Opportunities, we slapped around one of my corporate tours of duty without offering the antidote to the poison of prolonged inside-out thinking (and marketing). Recall that the inside-out syndrome is the result of a marketing gene failing to express itself in your company. Every enterprise begins life with an active, healthy gene. It enables you to see things the way your customers see them. Your company came into being by finding a need and filling it. In other words, seeing things from the outside in. OK. What happens over time is that while the company grows successful and larger, it tends to no longer see itself as a satellite of its customers and begins to perceive that customers revolve around the company. Easy trap to fall into. But not all that difficult to climb out of. Here's the tried-and-true method. Caution - implementation does cause perspiration: First, as a marketeer, it's imperative that you see yourself as a change agent, keeper of the vision, and the company conscience. This will not always make you popular. But it will ensure your usefulness, read: value. To the extent that you advocate change, you will raise the hackles of those who would try to post-pone the future. In other words, the guys vested in the status quo. Second, it is equally essential that the CEO share this view of who you are and what you do. CEO must be signed up to this. Third, you have to be the instigator and driver of the strategy review process. It's not enough to have a company vision, mission statement and strategy. Strategy is dynamic, not static, by definition. Circumstances perpetually change. What was solid yesterday may be softening today and might turn into quicksand tomorrow. Remedy: a routine, short duration-interval review of companywide strategy that's driven, monitored and shepherded by you, as chief customer officer. Depending on how quickly your technological and competitive environment is changing, and you can bet that it is, you should review strategy with an eye, and a stomach, to tweak it, change it or throw it out altogether as the case may be. Your survival just might depend on it. Don't take my word for it. No one less than Intel's Andy Grove wrote a book on it.