What Mr. Jambo and Levi's Can Teach Us About Listening to Customers

Founders, chief product officers (CPOs), and chief marketing officers (CMOs) spend a lot of time talking with and listening to customers. As they should.And, by and large, they do it well. But there's one common mistake that many smart, strong-willed, and vision-driven leaders make. Ironically, I think it's illustrated perfectly by a Kyle Gordon parody song, Mr. Jambo, featuring Barry Bergen, a fictional, oblivious American tourist traveling through Africa in the 1980s. [1]If you haven't seen it, Barry is traveling in Africa in search of spiritual wisdom. He meets Mr. Jambo, who says something in Zulu:"Angikhulumi isiNgisi, unaye umhumushi? Yeka ukuklabalasa!"Barry doesn't speak a word of Zulu. But he's convinced he knows exactly what Mr. Jambo meant.“Well, I couldn't speak his language, I couldn't even understand a wordBut I knew the meaning was what I decided I had heard.” And what Barry had decided he had heard becomes the chorus:"The love you seek is in the valley of the soul. The…