ABSTRACT

Who (or what) is a Customer? The next part of my story about strategic planning describes an approach which depends greatly (as you can see from the title to this chapter) upon the potential value of metaphor in helping each of us promote that unlocking of our understanding of our own existing practices, and the effective reappraisal of these, which is the necessary corollary of any form of truly strategic development. However, in deliberately proposing this approach which de­ pends for its efficacy on the value of metaphor I was reminded of an article (Beavis and Thomas, 1996) which pointed to what the authors (two university teachers in Australia) rightly see as a danger in this use of metaphor.