Extracts

Dialogue

In the past, when you knew where you were going, you went there, in an orderly and quiet fashion. Today, when all futures are possible, silence has become dangerous. Dialogue is essential.

As customers, we demand it. We prefer the companies that can build up and nourish our choices. They can listen to us in silence, but they find the words which express our needs and the answers that satisfy them, without arrogance or undue insistence. We like the companies that listen

to us without pestering us, that can recognise us or respect our anonymity. They share our passions, our enthusiasms, our uncertainties and our concerns.

Seen from the side of the company, dialogue is also essential. It is the invisible and permanent web of exchange and contact which links us together amid the tasks and aims of our daily work; we need dialogue to apply the rules, to understand their purpose, to expand them and adapt them to face new situations; we want to speak and be heard, to be respected as persons, to be able to intervene, to challenge. Finally, we know that listening to our customers, and being able to answer them is a difficult exercise, but richly rewarded in terms of loyalty and innovation.

The hypertext company is most at home with itself in the changing, unforeseeable and demanding relationship that dialogue calls for.

However, whether customer or producer, we are afraid of dialogue ; it can shake our deepest convictions. We do not like confrontation, because it can call us into question. It sometimes happens that meeting someone changes our ways of seeing things, and kindles in us the desire to tread new paths that we would not have to dared to take before