The warm towel calms your eyes as it’s draped over your face. You breathe deeply, relaxed. A kind voice asks if you’d like another cold drink, a pillow, or some reading material.

Despite arriving at the airport just ten minutes earlier, you parked, got to your gate, walked through with your luggage which was carefully stowed by a helpful employee, and sat down on the plane to await takeoff.

That was fifty years ago. What happened?

Technology has progressed.

Today you’ve got WiFi, online booking, multiple apps for checking your status, Uber for pickup and drop-off, updated airports, more flights, and more options.

You’ve also got less leg room. Hours instead of minutes in line. Arbitrary limits on the size of the shampoo bottle in your toiletries bag. Constant cancellations, lost baggage, and a Kafkaesque labyrinth of robotic phone and internet operators to navigate if you have any kind of problem.

Worse, nobody seems to care.

Is the world falling apart?

It’s not just the airline industry. And it’s not just across decades. It happened in just a few years.

Stop for a second and ask yourself how the world feels today versus 2020.

Things are changing faster than ever. Everything is getting stranger and more complex. Simple problems, simple narratives, simple tools, and simple solutions don’t seem to cut it.

Everything is more complex and everyone seems to care less.

Technology is accelerating, but it’s also falling apart. It seems to work less and less predictably.

How often do your apps break? How often do you find a truly helpful person who knows what they’re doing and takes pride in solving problems? 

Not to mention, the amount of time it takes to get help when you need it. Talk to a bot, wait on hold, schedule a meeting next week, and if you truly want help, prepare to fork up even more dough for services just to get the initial value out of the thing you paid for! 

Maddening.

Despite great advances in technology and information, they have to be paired with a desire to make them work for us. They aren’t magic by themselves. They need focused people, intent on turning them into something usable, beautiful, and helpful.

Like a garden or orchard, technology untended by thoughtful human care won’t stop growing, but it will stop being useful.

The interconnected world compounds complexity

Today’s enterprises are faced with an increasingly interconnected web of relationships, technology, and change. Channel programs are facing the compounding effects of this complexity because it’s not only their own business trying to adapt, it’s all of their partners too. 

Partner Relationship Management (PRM) and partner portals have long been the tech foundation for orchestrating channel programs and partners. While powerful, implementations take time and customizations are paid features and services. Unfortunately, by the time a portal launches and hits an ecosystem, it’s already out of date.

And channel programs are left chasing updates on their own or paying, yet again, for more services and waiting longer only to arrive back where they started:

• A portal that needs to be changed, again
• More features or customizations that need to be bought, again.
• Services that need to be paid for, again
• Partners that need to be updated and trained, again. 

And the worst part, as enterprises work relentlessly to pull off this complexity, their portal vendors don’t seem willing to help as their partner engagement declines and channel fatigue sets in. 

Every partner is different. Every channel is increasingly complex.

And yet the technology isn’t served that way. 

Making channel and partner ecosystem technology work for each partner feels increasingly like air travel. 

No one seems to be listening to how bad the experience has become. Instead of helping build and navigate the complexity, technology and the service behind it try to “simplify,” the experience. 

Sure, simple is great. But simple isn’t a solution. Today, the simple solutions simply don’t work.

Innovation must be customer-led and human-enabled

Everything in this business comes from how I see the world. It’s not about making money, it’s about making a difference. It’s not what you’ve done with your quarterly earnings report, it’s what you’ve done with your life. It takes a long-term commitment to care and doing things right. – Harbinder Khera

Complexity requires care. Mindmatrix is obsessed with bringing it to the world of partner relationship management.

Mindmatrix has been growing for 25 years. They were building solutions for partner ecosystems long before it was a buzzword.

They serve some of the biggest logos in tech. The reason they have grown and earned the trust of these companies is because they focus relentlessly on the very things most tech companies ignore. Service. Care. Working with the complexity of technology and business problems to ensure innovation and growth go hand in hand.

Mindmatrix, a fully profitable bootstrapped company from day one, is an interesting contrast to the tech scene of the last decade, which is largely venture-backed. Both are innovative, but the difference between the customer-led innovation of Mindmatrix and the venture-led innovation of most tech companies is stark.

Customer-led innovation starts with empathy. Knowing and feeling the customer’s pain, and innovating to address it. Venture-led innovation starts with spreadsheets. Figuring out where to get the quickest return for solving the smallest problem.

Pitchbook estimates that since 2011, over 40,000 venture-backed tech companies have been founded in the U.S. alone. More than three-quarters of them failed to return money to investors - which means they failed to create enough value for customers to justify the cost of doing business.

There have been many huge successes, and the VC model is intentionally high-risk. But it has also warped the perception of founders, executives, and employees. The focus on instant scalability has created a culture of “thin” solutions, trying to handle the narrowest slice of a problem, and offering as little support as they can get away with.

Few tech companies are willing to get into the trenches with customers, solve complex problems on a human level, or build for the long term.

Mindmatrix has zigged while everyone else zagged. They provide unlimited support to all of their customers - one of the most radical, customer-centric things a tech company can do.

But it’s been part of their DNA from the beginning and the secret to their success.

We don’t see service as a revenue stream, but a foundation of the company and product. – Vaughn Mordecai

Complexity requires care

The world of channel sales and marketing is complex – it’s the nature of all ecosystems. Channel, tech partners, affiliates, agencies, aligning indirect sales with direct sales teams, attribution, payments - there are too many moving parts to count.

As data sharing and open APIs have grown, so has the complexity. Partner Relationship Management (PRM) software like Mindmatrix does not solve a simple problem. It coordinates and harmonizes dozens of complex problems into something usable by humans. Scalable, controllable, and valuable.

Too many solutions attempt to oversimplify and ignore big chunks of the problems, or the service required to solve them. It’s not simplicity that’s needed as much as care in navigating the complexity.

It’s a complex world with complex problems. You don’t need simple solutions, you need good solutions — and real service. You can’t strip everything down to the least common denominator and still expect world-class outcomes.

What does it look like to not walk away from the complexity, the data, the connectivity. But to make sense of it?

Restoring the wonder with order from chaos

When the pace of change is accelerating and tech gets messier as it grows, it’s tempting to metaphorically (or literally) retreat into the woods.

But humans aren’t made to stagnate. Tech progress, information expansion, connectivity, and automation are deeply human. The tools we use to manage and work with this world are also deeply human when properly wielded. They are wonderful servants but terrible masters.

The magic isn’t in the tools themselves; it’s in the outcomes.

Mindmatrix brings chaotic tech complexity into order humans can take charge of. The combination of the mind (people) and the matrix (complexity and data) to create value is where the magic happens.

Anything that’s alive is complex. Humans are complex. Relationships and networks are complex. To win, you have to work with them, not against them.

Voicemaker.in.