Remove Customer Intimacy 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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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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Creativity - The Key To The Challenge of Complexity for CEOs

Six Disciplines

In a recently released study from IBM , based on face-to-face conversations with more than 1,500 chief executive officers worldwide, “creativity” has been identified as the single most important leadership competency for enterprises seeking a path through this complexity.

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

Harvard Business Review

Know your customers intimately. Never settling, IBM management charged a taskforce with developing a personal computer to compete in the young, growing market for smaller, more versatile machines. Faster, cheaper and more nimble competitors had eaten away at Big Blue's market leadership.

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Standard Operating Procedures Can Make You More Flexible

Harvard Business Review

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 I call this understanding and tailoring "customer intimacy" ). The result is a powerful combination that fulfills two customer value propositions at the same time.

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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.