I’ve been included in the Global Guru’s list of “The World’s Top 30 Customer Experience Professionals” for 2022. Some commentary:

1. While it’s nice to be recognized for my contributions to the field I find the whole idea of gurudom faintly ridiculous. Every idea, book, or presentation I’ve done has been the result of teamwork, not individual expertise. I consider myself a student, mentee and open-minded collaborator with a lot to learn, not a wizened guru.

2. Appearing on these lists has much more to do with mouth radius than anything else. Inclusion tends to reflect how much energy people devote to self-promotion and social media not the calibre of insight or expertise per se so they should be taken with a heap of salt. I personally believe that the people we can learn the most from are the leaders and managers within organizations who are actually changing things for the better in challenging environments. But those people tend to have their heads down getting on with the work so are less visible and harder to access.

3. More important than either of the above: nobody seems to be mentioning that of the 30 global gurus 23 (77%) are men, and the vast majority of those are middle-aged white guys (about two thirds of the total list). Anyone who is plugged into this industry knows that this is totally non-representative of the real world distribution of expertise and influence and I find it wholly objectionable.

TL;DR — thanks but no thanks. Back to work.

See this post on LinkedIn