Leadership Quote by Lance Secretan

Secretan slips a market metaphor into the soft-lit world of “higher ground” leadership, and the friction is the point. Calling followers “customers” is a deliberate provocation: it yanks leadership out of heroic self-myth and into service, accountability, and the cold reality of choice. Customers can walk. Followers can, too. The line smuggles in a modern truth about organizations where loyalty is no longer guaranteed by titles, tenure, or tradition.

The phrasing “outer and inner needs” does even more work. “Outer” is the measurable stuff businesses like to count: pay, tools, clarity, growth opportunities. “Inner” is the squishier terrain leaders often ignore until it becomes a retention crisis: dignity, meaning, belonging, psychological safety. Secretan is trying to fuse two eras of management thinking: the customer-obsessed logic of competitive markets and the post-90s leadership industry’s insistence that people aren’t machines.

There’s also a subtle rebranding maneuver here. If followers are customers, then leadership becomes an experience design problem. The leader “strives to meet or exceed” suggests a service standard, not a command. It recasts power as obligation, elevating empathy from nicety to performance requirement.

Still, the metaphor carries a risk: customers aren’t responsible for the enterprise, and followers often must be. Treating employees purely as customers can flatten the mutuality that healthy cultures need. Secretan’s intent is aspirational, even corrective; the subtext is a warning that in an attention-scarce, talent-competitive economy, leaders who don’t serve will simply be left.