Making the Picture Real

Patricia Seybold says she is more of a catalyst than an innovator. As the CEO and founder of her own Boston-based consulting firm, she works with “customer-centric” businesses that let their clients co-design their future products, services and business models. As she sees it, her role is to “help people realize their visions.” 

She believes there are two types of visionaries—the truly outstanding inventors who make incredible things happen and the lone wolves who work day in and day out to grind it out with people who don’t think outside the box. Many of her clients are lone wolves, she says.

“They have a peculiar ability to see what the impact of a technology is going to be on the way we do things, but nobody else around them gets it,” she explains. “They ask themselves, ‘How do I get people to see what I see? How do I get them to move toward that vision?’ They are persistent. They keep on pushing the envelope, but they never get a lot of credit. They just manage to make things happen, and they get gratification from that. I see it as my job to gather smart, like-minded visionaries around them for energy and support.”

Seybold attributes much of her capacity to move people and businesses in creative directions to the influence of her father, John W. Seybold, who worked as an arbitrator in the printing industry over 50 years ago—when professional compositors were still setting type line by line with hot metal. Realizing there was a better way to do things, Mr. Seybold initiated research and development in computer typesetting techniques that moved the printing industry into the world of computerized typesetting, including a generalized markup language—the precursor to html—which lets designers and writers essentially ‘set’ their own type, revolutionizing the printing and publishing industry.

“It was very clear to him even in those early days that the people who should be setting type were the people who were writing,” Seybold says. Her brother Jonathan was also a key player in the industry. He worked with Apple’s Steve Jobs and Adobe’s Paul Brainerd to create the killer application for the Mac: PageMaker, the first desktop publishing program to hit the market (in 1985). Desktop publishing and WYSIWYG word processing empowered customers to become their own publishers.

Major typesetting innovations and family genius aside, the Seybold secret is creating the mental picture itself and then believing in the possibility of making it real. It’s a process that calls for shaking things up. 

Seybold acquired what she calls an “unconventional education”—“studying stuff I wanted to do rather than following a curriculum”—which made her an open-minded, confident thinker. But her real education came when she apprenticed with her father, she says. 

“He put all of the parties around the table, arbitration-style,” Seybold says. “He’d get them to paint the whole picture of how things are today and how we would like them to be. By talking through it together, we would get this shared mental model of where we were going. I didn’t think there was anything special about it; it was just the way my father did things and it has become very fundamental to the way I do things.”

Seybold’s job is to get her clients and their customers to think in terms of structural tension—‘to help them brainstorm together and then motivate them “to actually stand up and co-design how they want to get something done.” It’s not always an easy task because many of us consider the notion of structural tension as uncomfortable; not a friendly, creative state.

Seybold’s three books on customer-led innovation have been translated into 10 languages.  Many people tell her that her first book, Customers.com (1998) has become their “bible.” She enjoys profiling leaders who transform their organizations from the outside in—from the customers’ point of view. But her true gift may be in the way she listens.  She has a way of drawing ideas out of people, getting them to describe what they want and thereby, make that first crucial step toward actualization. 

“People are always capable of stretching to see what they want,” she says.