Remove Customer Intimacy Remove Development Remove Leadership Remove Management
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Gutting the Talent Bench

Lead Change Blog

What is your organization’s claim to fame—operational excellence, customer intimacy or product leadership? If your focus is customer intimacy, do the employees who personally excel at operational excellence and product leadership feel engaged or disenfranchised in your workplace?

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The Senior Leader’s Checklist for Shaping Company Culture

Next Level Blog

The authors argued that companies had to pick between one of three paths to value creation and success in the market – operational excellence, customer intimacy or product leadership. And once you picked one, the work of leadership was to align the culture with the chosen path.

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IBM at 100: How to Outlast Depression, War, and Competition

Harvard Business Review

Throughout the 1920s, and even in the midst of the Great Depression in the early 1930s, he kept the company focused on what was then cutting-edge tabulation — the punch card machine — pouring profits back into research and development. Know your customers intimately. The deadline for the IBM PC's introduction was Fall 1981.

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How IBM, Intuit, and Rich Products Became More Customer-Centric

Harvard Business Review

In this article we look at three very different organizations – IBM, Rich Products, and Intuit – and the three different paths they have taken in reconfiguring their operations for more customer intimacy, by changing methods, reengineering processes, and transforming culture. IBM: Applying a Hybrid Design-Thinking Approach.

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Are You Leading Cash Registers?

Lead Change Blog

Bar coded packaging today drives inventory control, P&L calculations, and all manner of financial management processes. And, maximizing the clerk’s productivity meant keeping her focused on the rules of the registry more than on the concerns of the customer. We seem to be getting longer on high tech; shorter on high touch.

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What Apple, Lending Club, and AirBnB Know About Collaborating with Customers

Harvard Business Review

It starts by understanding customers’ affinity with the brands. Through our research on network-centric businesses and our experience advising hundreds of companies we have developed a framework for understanding customer affinity. Over its lifetime, the app store has generated more than $25 billion for developers.

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Standard Operating Procedures Can Make You More Flexible

Harvard Business Review

For example, we are building a development platform for the iPad, and defining how it will interact with our electronic medical record system. Yet at the same time they use these standards as a springboard for creating unique solutions for each customer based on a deep understanding of their needs. (I