Every company patiently, and with the best of intentions, builds its own waterproofing. Processes, procedures, approval levels, reports, Monday meetings. They serve to keep out the noise, protect what works, ensure that things repeat themselves unchanged. And rightly so: without them, an organisation would dissolve at the first shower.
The trouble is that the water we keep out is not just noise. It is also the world.
In biology, a cell survives not because it is sealed, but because its membrane is semipermeable: it keeps almost everything out and lets through what is needed. And it is on the membrane, not at the centre, that the receptors which sense the environment are found. Organisations work in the same way, though they tend to forget it.
In a company, one of the most important receptors is at the edge, where those who sell are. There the membrane is thin. There the company touches something it does not control: a customer with their problems, their timescales, their fears, their muddled ideas about what they really need.
I have spent almost all my working life in sales, and I learnt something early on that continues to surprise me: those who sell know many things the company does not. Not because they are better. Because they are there.
What is known at the edges
Those who sell know, for instance, that the customer did not buy for the reason recorded in the CRM. They know we did not lose that tender on price, but because their IT manager no longer trusted us after a project went wrong two years earlier. They know that a proposal which seems complete to us has, for the customer, a hole right in the middle: exactly where their real problem lies.
They know that three different customers, in three different sectors, have asked the same question in the past month. And that nobody inside has heard it yet.
These are weak signals. They do not sit comfortably on a slide and often have no number attached. They arrive as remarks made at the end of a meeting, while looking for a parking space, on the phone in the evening. And they almost always get lost on the journey from the edge to the centre.
Mark Granovetter showed that genuinely new information travels along weak ties, the light and occasional ones, more than along strong ones. In these pages, Marco Zampollo has explained why they need to be designed into the organisation. I would add that a company's most valuable weak tie is the one that connects it to the outside world: the customer.
Why this knowledge gets lost
There are, I think, three reasons.
The first is that the traditional organisation sends information upwards level by level, and each level summarises it. A summary is useful, but it is also a filter: at every stage, whatever does not seem relevant is removed. And what does not seem relevant is often precisely what is new.
The second is that those who sell have learnt not to share it. If every time you flag a problem you are told ‘that's the price list’ or ‘that's not what we do’, after a while you stop. You keep the information to yourself and use it to close your deal. It is intelligence that remains private: it helps the individual, not the company.
The third is the most uncomfortable. For a long time, we have asked salespeople to bring home a result, not to bring knowledge inside. We have paid them for contracts, not for what they understood. And people, understandably, do what they are paid to do.
Power lies where information lies
Organisations know an old principle perfectly well, even if they do not say it aloud: information is power. That is why, in hierarchical structures, information goes up and decisions come down. Those at the top know more, or so it is assumed, and therefore they decide.
At the edges, this logic is reversed. Those at the top see the numbers; those at the edge see the customer. And when the world changes quickly, it is the customer who changes first. The numbers come later, after the fact.
That is why I think the right question is not ‘how can we get information to travel upwards more effectively?’, but ‘why don't we move decisions to where the information is?’. If the person facing the customer has the profit and loss account, the business case and the risk in front of them, why must they ask permission to offer a discount? And what does the person answering know that they do not already know better?
It does not mean everyone does whatever they like. It means the boss is consulted for their expertise, not their rank: they are asked for an opinion because they know, not for authorisation because they are higher up. It seems a small difference, yet it changes everything. Power is not delegated, which is to say lent and therefore revocable. It is relinquished.
David Marquet did this on an American nuclear submarine. Instead of giving orders, he asked his officers to come to him saying ‘I intend to’, not ‘may I?’. If distributed authority works there, it has all the more reason to work in front of a customer.
More edge
There is a further step. If intelligence lies at the edges, it makes sense to have more edge.
For years we thought it was chiefly the salesperson who was in contact with the customer. That is not true, and perhaps it never was. Every day, the customer speaks to the project manager, the consultant, the person managing the service, the technician who comes to fix a fault. Each of them gathers pieces of truth the salesperson will never see. Each of them, in a sense, is already selling, or already losing the customer, even if nobody has told them.
A company in which the whole company sells is not a company without salespeople. It is a company that has understood that its surface of contact with the world is far wider than the sales department, and that it is worth making it permeable everywhere.
But beware: ‘everyone sells’ risks becoming ‘nobody sells’. Someone needs to be accountable for the result, to hold the pieces together, to get the others playing. More a coach than a playmaker. The coach does not play in the team's place or direct them move by move: they enable them to read the field and make good decisions.
From selling to helping others succeed
In the end, I think the point of all this lies in how the word ‘selling’ changes.
On the first rung, you sell: you have a product and look for someone to buy it. On the second, you help the customer buy: you listen, understand, work with them to arrive at the right choice. On the third, you help the customer succeed: in their business, in their market, in the changes they are making.
On the first rung, intelligence at the edges is of little use. On the third, it is everything. To help someone succeed, you need to know things no report will ever tell you. And you need to be able to use them straight away, there, at the point of contact, without waiting for the centre to notice.
Waterproofing remains necessary. But an organisation that wants to understand the world must choose where to let the water in. And listen to those whose work has already left them with wet feet.
References
Granovetter, M. (1973). The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360–1380.
Marquet, L. D. (2012). Turn the Ship Around! Portfolio/Penguin. Ed. it.: The Leader Ship. La vera storia di un capitano capace di distribuire l'autorità al suo equipaggio, trad. di Caterina Ciccotti, Ayros, 2022.
Zampollo, M. (2026). La “filter bubble” delle organizzazioni. Pensieri Densi, Anno I fascicolo 2, 2026.