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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. Back in my own days as an executive, I was hugely influenced by a book called The Discipline of Market Leaders.

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Operational Excellence, Meet Customer Intimacy

Harvard Business Review

Most organizations continuously strive to achieve operational excellence, but they spend less effort understanding customer needs — and few marry these two sources of customer value effectively. In 1996 Tesco adopted Toyota Production System approaches to take its supply chain operations to an even higher level.

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The Small Business Advantage

Six Disciplines

In small businesses, however, there are fewer decision-makers, and they’re so close to customers, employees and daily operations that they can get a sense of whether a decision is right or wrong very quickly. Customer Intimacy. In smaller organizations, a much greater percentage of employees work with customers directly.

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The Small Business Advantage

Six Disciplines

In small businesses, however, there are fewer decision-makers, and they’re so close to customers, employees and daily operations that they can get a sense of whether a decision is right or wrong very quickly. Customer Intimacy. In smaller organizations, a much greater percentage of employees work with customers directly.

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Good Cybersecurity Can Be Good Marketing

Harvard Business Review

Online security and customer intimacy go hand in hand. Developing deeper knowledge of your organization’s consumers may be the best way for you to simultaneously secure their online touchpoints while providing a better customer experience. And this customer intimacy can be leveraged to protect your customers.

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

Harvard Business Review

Yet wanting to be closer with customers, and knowing what actual, operational pathways to take in order to achieve this are two very different things. Consider the battle waged by IBM’s software development teams between competing methods for getting closer to customers. The Future of Operations.