Are you a forest person or a tree person? Now, your immediate reaction might be "I beg your pardon?", but all organizations are made of tree people and forest people. Tree people are the folks who really know your products inside and out. They know the spec sheets and they know how many grams and gigahertz go into making a widget. Tree people also know, in great detail, how your company works. They know how the CEO thinks and what type of idea can get approval and which ones can't.
These people can see and catalogue every tree in the forest that your company exists in. And, that's not a bad thing. You need them. But they can't see the forest because they are always looking at the trees.
Acknowledging that most organizations have an abundance of tree people, I think marketing should be populated with forest people. Forest people can view things with a broader perspective and see how the whole forest works because they don't know much about individual trees. In other words they don't really know how many grams or gigahertz are in your products and they probably don't care. And that is a good thing, because your customers probably don't know or care either. What forest people do care about is how to make your customers care.
Seeing the forest instead of just trees means taking the same perspective as your customer - "I don't know, I don't care and unless you meet a need of mine I don't have to care".
There is tremendous value in not knowing. Not knowing is the world customers live in and if you know too much you can never fully embrace the customer's point of view.
So, if you are a forest person, rejoice. Embrace not knowing everything because you know the most important thing...the perspective of the customer.
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