The days of timeless management wisdom are over. Long gone is the lotus position guru, gathering dust in some back room, humming out a map for the future. Today's gurus instead live by the mantra: "Go to market, go to market, go to market."

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Nobody is exempt from the need to anticipate dramatic swings in market demands. If you're thinking, "There will always be a strong demand for what we do today" you better have a good pension plan.

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Not long ago, we lived in the information age. Now, we're in the information management age. There's no shortage of information. What there is a shortage of, is the ability to absorb all this information, and to package it in a digestible, usable form in support of effective, timely decisions.

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As a market oriented manager, chances are that one of your key service points is this tailored management of information. Your constituents (parents, students, alumni, and faculty) now have, courtesy of the wired world, access to countless new options by which to satisfy their information needs, and access is next to free. Parents (for example) know a lot more about options in education than they did just five years ago. As a result, they are demanding a much more active role in mapping out the future of their children's education. This, in turn, has heightened the need for an informed exchange of ideas going both ways.

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You can protect and promote your market position by regularly going to your market with constituent surveys. If you don't, be assured, others will.

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Here are just a few of the benefits. Check as many as apply for your school:

• Show your constituents that you care enough to ask. You'll be impressed by the public relations value derived from merely asking.

• Eliminate the guesswork. You may know your constituents very well. They know themselves even better. Here's their chance to tell you where they are now and where they want to be in the future.

• Give voice to the silent majority. Regularly, you hear comments, good or bad, from a vocal minority of constituents. This is your best opportunity to learn more from everybody else.

• Quantify your understanding of what constituents like and dislike; of what constituents value; of what constituents feel about your programs; and, of what constituents would like you to do for them in the future.

• Differentiate constituents by satisfaction ratings; by attitudinal measures; by what they value; and, by demographics.

• Dissect your organization. Learn which specific elements of what you do are the most important determinants of satisfaction. These key factors separate your successes from your failures.

• Efficiently allocate scarce and diminishing resources. With a survey, you'll know where you're doing well and where you need attention. You'll be well poised to apply time, energy, and dollars in areas most likely to yield the greatest improvements in overall satisfaction next year.

• The bottom line. All the number-crunchers in the world can slice and dice the cost side of your operating statement until there are no operations left. But it's constituent satisfaction that drives the top line. And the top line is the most important driver of the bottom line. By conducting a survey of constituent satisfaction, you're investing in a better understanding of what drives your business.

• Commit to continuous improvement. "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it!" If you can measure it, however, you'll have a benchmark against which all future progress, gains and losses, can be compared.

• Follow a constantly moving target. There isn't a market today without exposure to change. A regular cycle of constituent surveys gives you the timely intellectual capital with which to anticipate this change. Be able to stop and turn on a dime. Build and sustain competitive advantage.

• Take your mandate from the market. Heated debates on program offerings are quickly concluded when you can drop a survey report on the boardroom table and declare, "I hear what you're saying, but that's not what our constituents are telling us."

• You win either way. If, by doing a constituent satisfaction survey, you find that your constituents love everything you're doing for them, tell the world, year after year. On the other hand, if there's a key area in need of improvement, you need to know about it now.