a little secret 🤫

We’ve been talking about our new podcast for months now, and it’s finally here.

The official launch of Land and Expand is this Thursday, but I wanted you to have early access to it. So the first episode, featuring my friend Rachel Orston, Instructure’s Chief Customer Officer, is available for you now. Find it (and please subscribe!) wherever you get your podcasts.

Look out for new episodes dropping every Thursday. The lineup for January is looking HOT:

• Ep 1: Rachel Orston, Chief Customer Officer - Instructure
• Ep 2: Toya Del Valle, Chief Customer Officer - Cornerstone
• Ep 3: Pete Harris, Chief Operating Officer - Pipedrive
• Ep 4: Kate Peter, Chief Customer Officer - Payscale

In episode 1, Rachel and I discuss the differences between venture, private equity-backed, and publicly traded SaaS companies, private equity “take-privates,” and how executives should leverage operating advisors.

While Pete and I were recording episode 3, the idea of MBWA—Management by Wandering Around—resurfaced. So today we’re dusting off a post from June 2024 that explains what MBWA is and how you can adopt it in 2025.

Let’s dive in…

Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett, the founding fathers of Silicon Valley and HP, believed in personal involvement and one-on-one communication with their people.

As a result of this philosophy, they developed a management practice called “Management by Wandering Around,” or MBWA for short.

MBWA is a technique whereby managers spend time listening to problems and ideas while “wandering around” the office or factory floor.

Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard managing by wandering around, 1965. Photo credit: hewlettpackardhistory.com

Using MBWA, Hewlett and Packard gained critical insights that informed their plans for the company. Insights which might otherwise have been hidden from plain sight had the duo only relied on traditional reports and information provided by middle managers. It also provided an outlet to proliferate their vision and strategy for the company in a hands-on way.

Despite its name, which would lead one to believe that it’s an unstructured activity, MBWA is hardly aimless. Instead, it’s a deliberate practice that curious leaders use to get closer to their people, customers, and partners.

Management consultant and author Tom Peters popularized MBWA in his 1982 book, In Search of Excellence. He boils it down to being in touch:

…what I really am in love with is it is more or less a metaphor, a metaphor for being in touch, a metaphor for not losing touch with your employees, your vendors, your customers or what have you.

Take the story of Allergan, which launched a new product line aimed at contact lens wearers.

Allergan’s Chairman, Gavin Herbert, didn’t settle for analysis of aggregate clinical data from eye doctors, the “middle-men of the optical industry,” as he referred to them.

He insisted that product designers talk with users themselves. In doing so, they uncovered complaints of “itchy-scratchy eyes.”

Here’s what Herbert had to say about that discovery:

Now you and I both know that no ophthalmologist, after twenty years of professional training, is going to write down has his diagnosis ‘itchy-scratchy eyes.’ It’s just not professional language. Yet it was the problem… That was the genesis of this immensely successful product line.

The insight gained from being in touch with customers directly unlocked a $100 million business (in 1980s dollars) for Allergan.

Or you might like the story of Gordon McGovern, chairman of Campbell’s Soup, who spent his Saturday mornings helping to stock shelves in his local supermarket.

According to one supermarket operator:

Gordon made it his business to be out in the marketplace, getting to know his customers, whoever they may be.

A senior executive who practiced MBWA at Levi-Strauss put it this way:

We haven’t burned the market research data, but I’ll tell you it’s a different view.

Given the shift toward remote work, MBWA is perhaps more difficult than ever to implement. But curious and creative leaders will always find a way. And, in doing so, will differentiate themselves from competitors whose leaders rely solely on reports and spreadsheets—proxies for what’s really going on—to guide decision-making.

So, how can you implement MBWA in this distributed, remote-first world in which we live and operate?

Here are a few ideas:

Secret shop yourself. Sign up for a demo or free account on your own website.

Conduct “naive listening” tours. Schedule time with customers and a loose agenda. Be ready to ask a few questions and mostly listen (pro tip: Ask every customer you meet the same set of questions so you can compare their answers).

Create working teams. Hold open working sessions with a small group of cross-functional leaders. Make the agendas light and real-time to leave room for open discussion and airing out current issues.

Hold skip-level listening sessions with front-line teams in small groups.

Shadow support reps for half a day and shadow their calls (the most daring execs will actually handle a few calls themselves!).

Schedule on-premise customer tours (I once joined a Domino’s Pizza exec on a single-day, 12-store tour across the greater Baltimore, MD area. A longer story for another day...).

Attend a new customer onboarding kickoff call.

Watch 5-10 recorded prospect and customer calls per week. At this point, there’s little excuse for not recording customer and prospect calls. It makes team members more efficient, and these calls are chalked full of insights that have largely been hidden from senior leaders in the past.

And yes, you should be watching prospect calls if you’re a director, VP, or chief-level customer leader.

Attend industry events and engage with communities. There are slack groups, online communities, associations, and professional trade groups out there for every industry and role you can imagine.

Hold regular “office hours” sessions with customers. Choose a topic and be ready to facilitate a two-way discussion.

I can hear some of you saying, “But Jay, none of these activities scale.”

You’re right.

But the opposite of efficiency is effectiveness. And when it comes to knowing your business—your employees, customers, and partners—the magic is in the detail.

You don’t have to burn the reports and spreadsheets. But effectiveness is about understanding the stories behind them.

That comes from MBWA.

Are you getting out from behind your desk often enough?

🤘

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