While many senior executives continue to talk about the "voice of the customer," few demonstrate their commitment to this concept by spending time with customers. Many continue to use their intuition or `golden gut' in their attempt to provide superior customer value. Unfortunately, `senior executive intuition' is rarely attuned to the needs of their customers. While the competitive environment continues to intensify, executives have cut back on the time devoted to customers just when it should be increasing. This article discusses the need for senior executives to spend time with customers and provides examples of the benefits that this approach will provide.

This travelogue is an exploration into myself through a sensitive appraisal of my experiences in America, the Middle East and in India. My unpleasant and pleasant experiences together helped me to rediscover myself, who is essentially an outsider in my own country, on account of my Parsi heritage and personal propensity. My exposure to the world poets in translation in London, widened and deepened my poetic consciousness and encouraged my poetic creativity. The death of my father and my subsequent visit to Dharmasala, is a journey inward and outward. To me travel is like a seed that germinates in me and opens up fascinating casements of realization.

I never left my father's house until I was 20. At 20, I bade goodby to my dying mother (she was to die within the year) and went West. Los Angeles via Bangkok, Tokyo, Honolulu even in 1968 was a shock. As it is often said: `Nothing that is not broken first can be made whole again.' I soon hit the gay bars and baths of West Hollywood. But there was the Powell Library at UCLA, where I saw Uday Shankar dance and the Los Angeles County Museum with its huge Siva Nataraja from the Hiramanek collection, since returned to India. Jane Heider's family took me to Yosemite Valley that summer. We roughed it out in Holiday Camps. I had tasted the good life by then and asked to use my electric blanket at night. `Where will you plug it in?Into the trees!' asked Jane.

Indiana was flat and boring after the sea and mountains of California. Sea people look outwards, mountain people inwards. Indiana was insular. A Parsi meant `Apache' to some. People usually destroy what they don't understand. I was soon beaten up and left for dead. I awoke to the poet Josephine Jacobsen reading on the radio: `All need is dry / Rain is a metaphor!' I've spent the last 30 years explaining this phrase to myself and to my students. Jacobsen, since dead, was born a cripple. Her father moved her from bed to the window where she could see the passing seasons and squirrels in the yard.

Roots and Identity: Writing One s Way to Self-discovery, personal propensity, poetic creativity, West Hollywood, Hiramanek collection, Holiday Camps, Powell Library, fascinating casements, Los Angeles County Museum.