Have you seen the movie The Vantage Point? It was a suspense thriller, easy to watch, with an intricate plot, showing the same 20 minutes or so as experienced by six or eight different people.

As you can probably guess, what actually happens looks radically different through each different set of eyes and ears, not to mention location, and intention. I found it fascinating. Nobody gets more than a glimpse of what’s really going on.

I realized later that the vantage point problem is a real problem in growing a business. The view from different places — the owner, the receptionist, the programmer, the marketing person, the sales manager, the admin and accounting people — is all different.

How often is the sales people’s favorite customer the accounts receivable clerk’s nightmare? The marketing people see the product in a radically different way than the production people? What do you do, in your business, to get the whole view?