Value the Customer

When networking with peers, especially product managers we always to argue on right balance of five P’s regardless of the product (diverse effect on off-the-shelf to search engine marketing). We are confronted with the mantra of enhancing shareholder value as the reason for being in business. In other words reason to exist in business is to increase the wealth of the owners. Regrettably, preoccupation of this rationale has led to several corporate disasters according to Market ting Top guns.
If I put my MBA hat, real reason for being in any sort of business is to bring value to the customer. the customer is the one asked to fork out money, and if the transaction does not represent value to the customer, the business fails and shareholder value goes down. Is that only theory to you? I think it is more than that. I think more pre-sales engineers want to be involved in an ethical exchange with the customer. they want to feel what they are doing gives more meanings to their lives at an ethical level and that the customer is the beneficiary. Moreover they want to take the ownership of the solution and obviously they will be accountable. In my experience, Architects, designers and pre-sales engineers are frequently prevented from achieving this level of fulfilment because of the dictates of the senior management and the lack of alignment between senior management and behind the scene staff. It can be the attitude but is it because of most senior management coming from sales/finance backgrounds? or because they are not up to date with hard core tech savvy? this is often always played in the failure to build organizational effectiveness to ensure customer satisfaction. I would give bit of weight to poor post-sale execution. Some argue this could be frequently compounded by the preoccupation of management with incentives to secure managerial goals.