Book Summary Preview : The Agenda

The best-selling author of “Reengineering the Corporation” gives us nine powerful and practical concepts for today’s competitive and turbulent business arena. Make life easy for your customers. Be a process fanatic. Measure like you mean it. Walk your talk when it comes to teamwork. Link companies through the Internet. Redesign your operations in tandem with suppliers and customers. Learn more about these winning ideas offered by one of America’s most influential business thinkers.

Agenda item 1: Run your business for your customers.

Become ETDBW, or Easy To Do Business With.

Making it easier for customers to do business with you entails:

• Presenting a single face to your customers.
We’ve all experienced the frustration of being passed around from one clueless department customer representative to another. Companies need to see their service from a customer’s point of view. It is confusing and tiresome to interact with so many different people. Some companies have created systems to identify a customer through his or her telephone number, making it easy to reconnect them to the customer rep they previously spoke with.

• Segment operations by customer characteristics.
You may need to have bilingual operators. Perhaps you should segment your operations by high-end and low-end customers? Think about ways you could serve your customer based on their lifestyle, needs, and history.

• Anticipate the customer’s needs. If they need to ask, then it’s too late.

•Provide the customer with a seamless experience across all interactions with you. At 3M, people know that the customer doesn’t care if there are several departments handling one account. At your company, create a team to care for all the needs of one client, so the client doesn’t have to deal with departments, just one contact.

•Exploit the power of customer self-service. Technical assistants can talk a customer through a service manual, while the customer does the fixing himself. Customers really don’t mind doing some of your work, as long as it brings results.

•Use customer-centered measures. You may think your operations are ETDBW, but where is the raw hard data from customers that tells you if you truly are?

Agenda item 2: Give your customers what they really want.

Deliver MVA, or more value-added services.

Business is no longer about delivering product on time at the customer’s doorstep and then leaving it there. Your company needs to deliver a whole system or solution. When a customer needs a car, he also needs gasoline, maintenance, insurance, and spare parts. The key to success lies in turning your focus away from your self and your products and toward your customers and the total solutions they seek. A customer is not just looking for a car. Realize he really needs transportation. People don’t need computers. They need the software and the technology to do their work more efficiently and quickly. If you think about the total problem, then you can design and sell them a total solution.

• Think of yourself as a provider of solutions, rather than a provider of products or services.
• Distinguish between what you are selling and what your customer is actually buying.
• Take a broad view of your customer’s underlying problems that go beyond you and your products.
• See what your customers do with what you give them. Do it for them or help them with it.
• Price in terms of value rather than cost.

GE supplies refrigerators to Home Depot, while taking care of delivery of goods to Home Depot customers. Only a few items are on display, while customers browse a computer kiosk to look for the specific type, color, or size of refrigerator to suit their kitchens. When they order, GE flies into action and everyone is happy. Home Depot is happy. The customer is happy. Most of all GE is happy because it doesn’t lose a sale just because Home Depot runs out of stock.

Agenda item 3: Put process first.

Be a process fanatic! Create a process-centered enterprise.

• Be meticulous about the end-to-end processes that create value for your customers. From the moment the order is placed (If you haven’t yet anticipated their needs) to the actual use of your product and its maintenance, restocking, or replacement.
• Ensure that everyone understands the processes and his or her role in the grand scheme of things.
• Appoint process owners to measure, manage, and improve processes.
• Create a process-friendly company by aligning facilities, compensation, and structure around process.
• Develop a culture of teamwork and shared responsibility. The days when the accounting and finance people have no idea what the creative team or frontline operators are up to are over.
• Set up a process council.
• Manage in process terms.
• Make process a way of life.

Agenda item 4: Create order where chaos reigns.

Systematize creativity.

This means turning creative work into process work. Bring the power of discipline to sales, product development, and other creative tasks. Success in these areas should be a result of design and proper management.

• Recognize champions and heroics for what they are: signs of dysfunction.
• Leverage your people’s creativity with the power of process.
• Make innovation repeatable through detailed process design.
• Don’t let people tell you that creativity conflicts with process.
• Be resolutely committed to discipline and teamwork.
• Accept the fact that not everyone will get it.

Your software engineers may be holed up in their cubicles designing things that are tested in a crisis environment of last minute. Without order in the creative process, your delivery will only frustrate the customer.

A close up view of a process:

For product development, form a team with the sales rep who has identified a new opportunity as its leader. Let engineers, project managers, and other key people in the team collaborate.

First, lay the initial groundwork for the project:

• Work with the customer to spell out the opportunity, developing an overview of the customer’s needs and information to be used in every step.
• Does this opportunity fit our technical and business strategies? Can we deliver? Can we meet the time frame the customer requires?
• Analyze your competition. How would other suppliers approach this opportunity?
• Develop a preliminary business case. This is a rough but complete estimate of the cost of this deal, the revenue it will deliver, and the contribution to profit it will make.
• Decide what priority should be given to this opportunity. At this point, abandon low-priority cases to conserve resources for the best opportunities.

Second, develop a project strategy to dig deep into your ’s requirements:

• Assemble a multi-skilled project team with relevant specialties (sales, marketing, finance, engineering, etc) let them be responsible for this project until it is successfully finished. Allocate resources to make sure people don’t get pulled off the project.
• Refine customer requirements, through in-depth discussions with the customer.
• Identify risks associated with pursuing this opportunity, from technological uncertainties to competitor response.
• Finalize the business case, based on all information gathered thus far.
• Have management review the team’s strategy. Disapproval scraps the project.
• Double-check with the customer if you have an accurate understanding of the customer’s needs. Correct all inaccuracies.

Third, the company invests resources in developing a solution for the customer’s needs.

• Allocate any additional resources needed for solution development.
• Develop and evaluate alternative designs for a solution. Select the approach to be proposed.
• Develop an analysis of likely competitor approaches to this opportunity and how they will be priced. . . . . . .