In the Türkiye of the 21st century, the only way to survive in changing market conditions is to compete and to develop the power to compete. In a competition-based market, the marketability of a product or service gives it the quality of being competitive. The most effective way to achieve this is to be different and to be able to offer the customer a differentiated product or service. Being different means constantly keeping pace with change.

Change is a concept expressing the totality of the changes within a period of time. Considered for businesses, managing change is the only way to survive in the market. To realize change, businesses need to understand and interpret the concept of the customer correctly. When we define the customer as a being that must be satisfied, the question of what the types of customer are needs answering.

The concept of the customer should be separated into External Customer, Internal Customer and Supplier.
The external customer is the user of the product or service the business offers. The supplier refers to the business's partners. And the internal customer is the business's human resources — its intellectual capital.

The business's employees experiencing and managing change is the most important element directly affecting service or product quality.

Business blindness, in turn, is directly related to employees: it is the problem of employees being unable to perceive the errors in the methods and practices used in a business, and the possible opportunities and risks of the future. Because employees grow accustomed over time to the business's practices and ways of doing business, it becomes harder for them to see problems, risks and opportunities. What is more, this can be far harder for managers. Busy with daily problems, managers — because of business blindness — can struggle to find solutions even to problems that are extremely easy to fix, and especially on matters concerning the business's future, by failing to notice emerging opportunities or foresee risks, they can create serious losses for the business or deprive it of high gains. The most striking reason managers drop from the strategic level to the tactical level can be explained as business blindness.

Among the causes that can lead to business blindness are businesses:

Not focusing on the system with a holistic perspective

Lacking a strategic management approach

Management by objectives not being effective at every level

Lacking a performance evaluation system

A process-focused way of working not being effective

A lack of employee empowerment and delegation.

Together with these causes, when businesses — which should act within a dynamic structure with a logic of continuous improvement — take on a static structure, an increase in the degree of blindness, along with employees' habits, is inevitable.

With increasing business blindness, learned helplessness emerges. In this helplessness, the manager or employee will be unable to see the change taking place in the market through their blinkers, and will fail to notice opportunities and threats.
When the concept of learned helplessness comes up, the boiled frog syndrome comes to mind. The frog's nervous system is built to react to sudden changes. It cannot respond to slowly progressing stimuli. When you throw a frog into boiling water, it will jump to escape and get out. When you put it into lukewarm water and raise the water to boiling point over time, it will stay where it is and be unable to get out of the boiling water. Just like this, employees in businesses will grow accustomed over time to faulty or ineffective processes, fail to react, and keep them going. For this reason, businesses must have a management approach that will eliminate blindness.

It must not be forgotten: the management approach is businesses' most distinct and most distinguishing characteristic. Management has to be more effective and must be in communication with all processes. With a holistic perspective, it should focus itself on results and performance. It must be able to manage change and steer and organize employees so that they keep pace with change.

Management has four functions on which modern management approaches agree: planning, organizing, coordination and control.

Planning is determining the work that must be done and the path that must be followed to reach predetermined goals. For effective management, the second step to be taken after good planning work is successful organizing. Coordination, the third of the management functions, is ensuring that all the relevant units and people act in harmony so that the organization's purpose can be realized. Control — the fourth and final function of management — can be defined as the evaluation of the planning, organizing and coordination activities. The most important point in this function is that third-party oversight is also carried out effectively and efficiently. The most important step that will eliminate business blindness is the auditing of the business's services and activities independently, against defined criteria and measures.

In order to improve product or service quality in businesses, making plans that will eliminate business blindness is obligatory.

Author: Sait Sağlam