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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? How are you doing in the other two areas?

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The Number 1 Tip to Ensure Returns on Your Firm’s Digital Strategy

N2Growth Blog

A review of the project identified an opportunity to build an online customer support portal as a means to better capture and understand customer needs; Sales Support Project: A global manufacturer determined that its sales force performance was less than stellar.

Strategy 191
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Creativity - The Key To The Challenge of Complexity for CEOs

Six Disciplines

Standouts practice and encourage experimentation and innovation throughout their organizations. To succeed, they take more calculated risks, find new ideas, and keep innovating in how they lead and communicate. By drawing more insight from the available data, successful CEOs make customer intimacy their number-one priority.

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

Harvard Business Review

At its 100-year milestone, IBM shows us what it takes to outlast depression, war, and intense competition in order to remain a market leader in the midst of ongoing technological innovation. Know your customers intimately. Newly appointed CEO Lou Gerstner logged thousands of hours visiting customers, industry experts and analysts.

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How Location Analytics Will Transform Retail

Harvard Business Review

Leaders with digital chops and an understanding for how to translate digital-age innovations such as location analytics into compelling analog world experiences are now the ones to watch. We are in the Age of the Customer. In order to survive and prosper, firms must embrace customer intimacy — online and offline — as a core competence.

Retail 11
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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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Win the Attention of Your Distracted Consumer

Harvard Business Review

But here are some examples of how brands are meeting the challenge: Develop customer intimacy. Every strategy begins with an understanding of your target customer. Innovations in Digital and Mobile Marketing An HBR Insight Center. It''s easier said than done. We already know that. The Rise of the Mobile-Only User.