Seth Godin talks about the “me-conomy” but inversely at work, this has to become the “you-conomy” and we’re not all that good at switching from “me-conomics” to “you-conomics”.  From a management perspective “management struggled with disconnects between what was really needed by business managers… and what was actually delivered.” according to C.K. Prahalad in his book The New Age of Innovation.

The problem is we just don’t listen properly.  As humans, we are islands within our bodies – you are not in the world, you are sat behind an invisible curtain (your brain) that is VERY selective about what your conscious mind gets to experience of the world.  If you do experience something, you can be up to 6 seconds behind it actually happening (there’s a program on iPlayer that explores this http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00nhv56/Horizon_20092010_The_Secret_You/)

Such an isolation makes it much harder to listen and empathise than any of us actually realise.  For that reason, we spend a lot of time doing and talking about what we think should be done, having not spent the time really investigating what’s really needed.

That’s why there’s so many average products, poorly supported services, product failures and shoddy software applications – because we just don’t think enough about someone else.

And yet the more you think things through first from someone else’s perspective, the simpler the solution you create will be.  It is understanding the complexity of a problem that creates a simple solution not technology.  Technology is just another crutch of “lets do something” providing options to solving problems, that don’t need solving.  These problems would be better solved through the simple power of thought.