There’s a lot of speculation about why 60% of CRM installations fail, but in my view, I think a significant factor is the inherent dichotomy in the basic assumption – CRM is too frequently nothing to do with customer relationships, and everything to do with customer profitability. Customers know that, of course, and respond with cynicism and mistrust.

Jack Welch says that in restructuring GE he asked his managers to interrogate every process with the question “Is this good for the customer”? I’d take that a step further, and say “If I was the customer, is this how I would like to be treated?” If you can answer yes to that question, then you’ve probably got a pretty good level of trust from your customers.

I think embedding an ethical framework in the organization’s culture is also an important part of building trust, both internally and externally. If there is confidence in the intrinsic fairness of the people and processes of an organization, then trust can flourish.

My fifth, and final challenge is this: How can organizations develop an equilibrium that acknowledges the inter-connectedness of all our stakeholder groups – our shareholders, our suppliers, our employees, government, the community. The writer John Ralston Saul is a guest at this year’s Sydney Writer’s Festival, and his most recent book “On Equilibrium” I commend to you.

His book is an intelligent, persuasive defense of all our human qualities – commonsense, memory, imagination, reason, ethics and intuition. and argues that if we were to value all our qualities equally, we might have a more balanced, humane society.

It was his plea for a return to commonsense I found most compelling. He defines commonsense as using our shared experiences to draw conclusions about the likelihood of future events. The example that he uses is famine. He argues that we now have sufficient experience of the events that precipitate the regular famines that so decimate the horn of Africa to be able to predict with some certainty when they are likely to occur.

If we were to use our commonsense, we would start moving relief aid in as soon as we saw these conditions aligning, or even better, work together to prevent them happening. Instead, reason demands that we wait for evidence – and it is only when we start seeing emaciated bodies on the evening news that we seem able to motivate ourselves to get involved.

Both the public and private sectors these days make much of their commitment to evidence-based assessments – and that’s a very reasonable thing to do – but if we want to maintain our competitive advantage through innovation and new product development then qualities such as imagination, intuition, memory and commonsense are equally important. To rely on reason, to the exclusion of all else, is unreasonable. Can I urge you to reflect on the importance of equilibrium, both in your organization, and to you personally.