As for managing relationships, women absorb those lessons at their mother’s knee. We know all there is to know about managing relationships, and trust me, it doesn’t come in a computer program.

My favourite Gary Larsen cartoon shows a mother snake, facing dozens of identical, butt-ugly baby snakes, and the caption says “Come on, mum, you can tell us, which one do you like the best?” It’s been on my fridge for 5 years now, and it still cracks me up.

If common-sense is shared knowledge, then we can say that we know all human relationships are unpredictable, and that expecting a customer to want to have a continuing relationship with a supplier - that can be measured - is baying at the moon.

But we can use our shared knowledge to predict the future, as John Ralston Saul suggests.

For example, we know that any successful relationship, whether personal or corporate, has to have trust as one of its key components. No trust – no relationship.

So imagine the conversation that went on in the boardroom when the first customer relationship management programme was being sold in. It goes something like this: “Boss, we’ve got this great new marketing tool. It’s this fabulous new software programme that will track what our customers spend with us. We’ll be able to outsource our customer service people to call centres – so we’ll save heaps, and we’ll know everything about our most profitable customers. It’s really great, but we think there could be a perception problem with it – customers might twig that we’re just trying to manage them for profitability, but we reckon we can get round that by calling it customer relationship management – they’ll never twig”.

The voice of reason, it would seem - logical, measureable, accountable - what could be better? So the board gives it a big tick, and the dollars start to flow – a lot of it out of the advertising budget, alas.

But suppose reason had been balanced with common-sense at the board meeting. Maybe the conversation might then have gone something like this: “Customer relationship management is an interesting new development, but we have to consider the damage to our brand that will result from the bad publicity that massive lay-offs of our customer service people will inevitably attract; and we have to consider that computerized phone answering antagonizes customers, and that perhaps our customers will reason that if their call has been placed in a queue, then it’s not possible that their call is important to us; and that if the call-centre employees are not empowered to offer solutions outside of the spiel on their computer screens, then the outcome can only be a profound loss of trust in us, and consequent damage to our brand. Maybe this isn’t such a great idea.”

Now the loss of trust in all our major institutions is well documented – government, media, the church, sport, business – we don’t trust any of them anymore. But we still have trust in our family, our friends, and our community, so we know trust is still out there.

So perhaps in our mythical board room, an alternate decision, based on our shared knowledge - our common-sense - might have been to say:

“We know trust is the cornerstone of all human relationships, and the hallmark of all great brands. So instead of investing in something as a risky as a customer relationship management program, we are going to invest our money and our energy in integrating our brand values throughout the organization. We are going to drive our culture by ensuring that every employee knows that earning the trust of our customers is job one. Because if we do that, everything else will follow – loyalty, commitment, repeat business. For that trust to be sustainable over the long term, we will have to behave ethically, consistently, and this will deliver sustainable, strategic advantage, as well as minimize risk.”

“And because brand values are so key to our business success, then our advertising partners are key co-venturers in building trust in our brand.”

In your dreams, do I hear you say?

Consider where we are now.