Letter to the Board: Competive Advantage & Customer Centricity (relevant to 99% of companies)

Dear Board of Directors

Your Current Reality:

We understand that any organisation looking to work, and to win, in the 21^st Century is impacted by political, economic, social and technological challenges simultaneously. Leading in this environment is a major challenge.

There are four trends reshaping the world of business – technological advances and the speed with which new technologies are created and copied, the loss of geographic advantage resulting from globalisation, the shake-up of traditionally stable industries as a result of deregulation and the rising power of the consumer and their ability to get what they want, when the want it, from whomever they want.

We understand that your primary objective is to make a profit and to maximise that profit over as long a time period as possible.

Your approach, however, to maximising profits is the same as roughly 99% of other organisations on the  planet…………..through volume and market share. Volume and market share are driven by growth and growth is derived through market expansion and through the launch of new product.

You’re a product centric company (irrespective of your grandiose statements about being customer centric or customer led). Your long term focus is to strengthen and expand your product portfolio. You reward your employees on their ability to create new products and/or create new ones. Your divisions/teams are set up around products. All your strategic advantage is set up around product and the product expertise behind those products. Your brand is perceived to have greater value than your customer.

So we challenge you……………will this approach allow you to deliver sustainable corporate earnings and create a sustainable competitive advantage? What is your unique differentiator? What are you uniquely known and recognised for? How meaningful is that to your customer base? Does your ‘uniqueness’ influence customer behaviour in your favour?

Your world is saturated with largely undifferentiated goods and services. According to Gartner Group less than 10% of brands will be able to provide meaningful differentiation for consumers through differences in core products and services, by 2020. We are of the opinion that this is the current reality in any event. Goods and services are simply no longer enough.

It’s easy to forget that customers don’t really care about your offerings. What they care about is their own needs and how best to meet those needs.

You cannot ignore 2 major realities – the 1^st is that competitors cannot allow you to go unchallenged as you launch new products, drive price leadership, gain market share, and expand into new territories. The 2^nd, is that you are not only competing with other businesses in the customer markets – you are also competing with them in the capital markets for the critical funds needed to build and sustain a competitive position.

Your Challenge:

The reality is that you’re on a path to mediocrity unless you radically change the way you’re working today. As a product centric business it is highly unlikely that you can build a sustainable uniqueness, unless you have a similar ‘make up’ to Apple. Yes, you heard right – Apple is primarily product centric, not customer centric as many believe.

You need to think differently. No-one ever buys a product. They always buy what they think the product will do for them. They buy the sum of the benefits that the product delivers.

Your corporate machine has remained a machine of mediocrity for customers. Your business continues to be defined by the traditional silo structure – what goes out to market is defined by your dis-connected silos/functions. Because of your structure there is no complete understanding of the customer experience. As a result your management team is unable to grasp how the company performs from an end-to-end customer experience perspective. They are therefore incapable of developing a ‘customer management strategy’ that they can clearly communicate internally and externally. Instead, all you see is a bunch of ‘tactics’ being embraced. The strategic customer issues lie in wait as the corporate machine scuttles around reactively fixing complaints that have escalated to senior management within the corporation.

Your Desired Reality

To be differentiated, increasingly relevant and able to charge a premium you have to move beyond delivering ‘goods’ and ‘services’ to staging experiences. The mind-set must be away from focussing merely on what employees do, to one of how the tasks are actually performed. The emotional component is as important as the rational elements. The ability to design and deliver a unique and distinctive customer experience is your competitive advantage.

Your business performance is directly linked to your ability to compete.

The mandate to your management team shouldn’t be to manage the business or to create and sell products. It should be to develop and sustain value driven, mutually beneficial, relationships. It is these relationships that are the core of sustainable success. Everything else they do is to support those relationships.

Organisations seeking a competitive advantage must examine every component of their internal systems. That competitive advantage results from the inter-relatedness of the functional areas which is required if a business is to deliver a consistent customer experience.

Jack Welch of GE fame said this: – ‘There are only 2 sources of competitive advantage. Firstly, the ability to learn more about your customers faster than the competition and, secondly, the ability to turn that learning into action faster than the competition.’

To do as Jack Welch says requires an ‘outside-in’ approach or a ‘customer centric’ approach.

You require a framework for Customer Centricity where Customer Centricity is defined as the business system and way of managing that enables your organisation to design and deliver a unique and distinctive customer experience in order to acquire, retain and develop targeted customers efficiently, for improved business performance.

That framework must provide your management team with a completely objective and comprehensive understanding of how well you are managing customer profitability across the 4 levers of Customer Value Management – Retention, Efficiency (understanding cost to serve), Acquisition and Penetration (cross-sell and up-sell).  Your business capability must be reflected in a single ‘leading’ indicator or metric that cascades into a number of individual capability areas to provide a detailed view of organisational maturity and understanding of where improvement in capability is most needed. This should be based upon a clear methodology and model to drive focus and consistency as well as benchmarkability to other organisations that will be setting prospect and customer expectation. Just think about having every senior stakeholder in total alignment about the direction being taken in order to drive up customer performance in enough detail to know exactly what they need to be doing differently, with a clear set of prioritised and detailed activity, underpinned by a realistic set of expectations about the financial benefits that could be delivered by getting to the desired state, and how long it is likely to take to deliver a return on investment.

Your role:

Your role, as business leaders, is to ensure that your organisation has a business model/ecosystem in place that fully supports the development of a competitively superior business. Your role extends further to ensure that the management team is capable of driving the transformation necessary to ensure that the strategic transformation programme is a success.

the risk of NOT building customer centric capability

For an organisation to be deemed  ‘customer centric’ it will have developed the
capability to design and to deliver a unique customer experience – an
experience that profitably and positively impacts  customer acquisition initiatives, customer
retention initiatives and  the cross-sell
and up-sell initiatives. However, in order to profitably and positively impact
these three extremely important value drivers, the business needs the insight
to optimally allocate resources to profitable customers. Importantly,
‘profitable customers’ doesn’t only mean those whom are profitable today. It
includes those whom will be profitable in the future through normal commercial
engagement and through equally
important and sometimes intangible value contributions such as positive ‘word
of mouth’  and referral  value.

We can confidently predict that the future will look
different from the world we inhabit today. How quickly or how slowly that
landscape changes remains highly uncertain. The future includes:-

• New technologies that will better enable
  organisations to both ‘sense and deliver’ what consumers want
• Interactive dialogue and 2-way conversations
  that provide free flowing information exchanges in both directions
• Younger generations who have developed different
  buying patterns from older generations
• Multichannel options for buying, interacting,
  problem solving and communicating
• Evolving organisational design that is more
  dynamic and more team based than the traditional hierarchical structures

If businesses do not build customer centric capability they
simply will be unable to offer superior customer value propositions. They will
remain ‘mired’ in mediocrity and frustrated with their efforts that lead to
small, insignificant improvements that customers barely notice and lead to
nothing other than ’better sameness.’ Their ability to deliver sustained,
superior business performance will be more ‘uncertain’ than their ‘customer
centred’ competitors.

Many CEO’s believe that to grow requires the seeking out of
new markets, new territories and/or acquiring new businesses. Many don’t
realise that they can grow (with much less risk) by tapping into and exploiting
their customer base. There is significant competitive advantage locked within existing
customer information.  If businesses get
to understand their customers better they are able to provide more relevant and
meaningful engagement that becomes increasingly difficult for other suppliers
to provide or imitate.

If a customer purchases from more ‘categories,’ their future
profitability increases. If customers utilise and spend more across more
channels, they have a greater lifetime value. If the duration of the
relationship is increased, lifetime value increases, especially with higher
value customers.

Organisations need:-

• Clarity of vision
• A deep understanding of what that vision means
  to the way they manage customers
• The foresight to ‘bring the customer into the
  boardroom ‘ – by that I mean the appointment of a Chief Customer Officer responsible
  for customer governance
• A culture of continually asking ‘what would the
  customer think, say and do’ if he/she was a participant in the boardroom
• Channel integration enabling a ‘single view’ of
  customer , irrespective of which channel is selected to engage
• A deep understanding of customer journey’s such
  that the impact of various processes can be measured, rather than measuring the
  efficiency of the process
• Business Intelligence capability to deepen
  understanding of current and future customers.

The Case for a Chief Customer Officer (CCO)

Current reality:

Let’s face it! Organisations that focus on building short-term and long term customer value significantly improve the sustainability of their business performance.

Many organisations ‘wax lyrical’ about their undying customer focus and their customer centric organisational structure and culture designed to deliver a unique and differentiated customer experience. In some, albeit few, organisations this is true. In others, partly true and in the majority, this is little more than an erotic dream in ‘cloud cuckoo’ land. Research has shown that up to 5 times as many executives believe they and their companies are customer centric relative to the number of customers who agree. Talk about different perspectives!

Desired Capabilities:

We’d be hard pressed to find an organisation that publicly states that it has no desire to be customer centric. Whilst I’m sufficiently open-minded to recognise that certain organisations in certain industries may derive no benefit from building customer centric capability I admit that I cannot share an example there-of – I honestly don’t know of one. Clearly, there is a business argument that will support the fact that certain organisations in certain industries across differing geographies require differing levels of customer centric capability. The challenge is in defining what level of customer centric capability is required and building the plan that’ll get us there, within the defined time horizon.

The role:

So what is the role of the Chief Customer Officer? Primarily, this is the individual who is ultimately responsible for customer governance. It is this individual who is accountable for maintaining and enhancing the value of the customer base through an understanding of the current market place and future trends, such that strategy informs organisational change and actions necessary for servicing customers profitably. It is the individual responsible for the design and delivery of customer experience across all customer touchpoints. It is the individual responsible for aligning and integrating customer input, marketing, sales and service.

The Outputs:

This position is, first and foremost, about improving business performance.

It’s about building enterprise wide customer capability improvement and execution abilities in all the identified practices across a leading Customer Management Capability Indicator such as the CMAT™ model of Customer Management.

 

The CMAT™ Model of Customer Management

It’s about gathering customer insight and integrating it across channels and product development. It’s about business process re-engineering such that the organisation becomes easier to do business with. It’s about building a unified customer driven culture. It’s about injecting a customer balance into executive decision making such that traditional focus on revenue growth and cost containment don’t result in damaged customer relationships and diminished long term results. It’s about creating a 360˚ view of the customer through needs based dialogue, new customer acquisition, cross-selling and up-selling existing ones, improving customer satisfaction and loyalty indicators and, of course, retention.

Measurements:

The challenge is in agreeing to a set of well balanced and meaningful measures representative of both business performance and customer centric capability.

CMAT™ is a leading indicator (indicative of current and there-after on-going improvement in cross functional customer centric capability.) The CMAT™ measure should be supported by a Customer Satisfaction index (CSI,) a loyalty index (NPS,) an Employee Engagement Index (measuring the level of understanding of a customer centric philosophy and strategy & the level of engagement/agreement with the philosophy) and an Employee Satisfaction Index.

Business Performance measures should be crafted around a set of Customer Value drivers such as REAP (Retention, Efficiency (Cost-to-serve understanding,) Acquisition and Penetration (cross-sell and up-sell)

In Closing:

According to analysis from the Chief Customer Officer Council the Chief Customer Officer position has enjoyed an overall average growth rate of 41% since 2000. It is absolutely essential that the CCO role has the unequivocal support of the CEO. It is a strategic position with the responsibility to improve upon any process that impacts the customer. To do that requires ‘organisational permission’ and support to perform the integration function.

Sources: Chief Customer Officer – Jeanne Bliss; 1to1 Media; REAP Consulting (Pty) Ltd; Chief Customer Officer Council.

Customer Centric Organisational Blueprint

The Customer Centric Organisational Blueprint™ visually represents the logic, thinking and business system that enables the execution of a Customer Centric business strategy. It is the blueprint for the design of both meaningful and sustainable competitive differentials and the delivery of superior business performance, short term and long term.

Central to the architecture of a Customer Centric business model is a clearly articulated set of strategic outcomes. These will typically be a blend of financial targets, well defined competitive differentiators, the delivery of customer excellence and quite possibly aspirational or iconic brand status.

Any business looking to work, and to win, in the 21^st century is exposed to a convolution of  political, economic, social and technological issues. Aside from the complexity that these events bring, unrivalled business opportunities exist for those organisations innovative enough to look for them. These opportunities result from access to global sources of brainpower and skills, extraordinary advances in communications and an almost limitless access to information. 

A deep 360˚ business assessment will assist in creating context and highlighting  organisational challenges around how to best deal with complexity,  legacy issues, decision criteria, organisational structure, performance measurement and short-termism.

Business performance today is grounded upon an ‘existing’ set of organisational assets. These need to be clearly identified, understood and documented as they underpin the organisations’ value propositions. They define the current competitive advantage and must be the ‘point of departure’ in the journey towards customer centricity.

An integrated company vision that seeks out real differentiation, innovation and ‘game changing initiatives’ should be in place and well understood across the business. The route to delivering the ‘vision’ is via a focus on a number of ‘strategic themes’ (e.g. Leadership, People, Customer Experience, Execution, Design Thinking and Innovation.) These strategic themes are fully aligned and supportive of the strategic outcomes identified earlier.

The pursuit to develop a Customer Centric based business strategy is reliant upon the identification and understanding of the organisations current capability across a number of  cross-functional practices that enable the organisation to treat different customers differently. This is a fundamental step as a Customer Centric business model requires cross functional collaboration that allows the organisation to design and deliver a distinctive customer experience. The customer experience itself is a blend of the physical product, communication or service and very importantly, the emotions evoked, before, during and after engaging with the organisation across any chosen touchpoint.

What lacks in most organisations is a clear, well defined, well aligned and agreed ‘future state’ of the Desired Customer Management capability. This is a critical step and is needed in order to clearly define the ‘scale of change’ required to move the organisation from its current to its desired capability. This clarity of thinking informs the design of the structures and supporting systems that will enable the organisation to embed the changes required.

Without this the business is unable to determine the capability required to make this change (e.g. skills, internal resource requirements, external resource requirements, non-manpower costs), the costs of the change programme itself (measured against the incremental uplift in profit as a result of the improved organisational capability), the improvement in the quality of decision making (improved effectiveness and efficiency)and the delivery of the defined Customer Experience (and therefore profitability) and the time horizon over which the change will be delivered.

Clarity of the current organisational capability as well as the desired capability enables the design of the transformational journey towards a truly customer centric operational model.

The ultimate objective of the transformation is to develop a way of engaging with client/customer such that the association becomes one of ‘indispensability.’ This is about defining  ‘what we will be’ and executing accordingly.

To become ‘indispensable’ to client requires a proactive design of the intended customer experience across a defined number of customer journeys. The design of the Customer Journey Maps (the steps that customers  go through in order to experience the ‘proactively defined experience’) is reliant upon a deep understanding of the distribution of value and needs across the customer base. Different customer journeys and therefore different experiences may be offered to clients of different value.

Optimising customer value requires proactive initiatives that impact key metrics that address the Retention, Efficiency, Acquisition and Penetration (REAP) drivers. REAP planning is a mechanism/way of proactively managing the profit stream e.g. for a particular decile/segment is value being optimised through improved retention (R), through more effective cost-to-serve management (E), through acquisition of more of that type of customer (A), through improved take up of additional products/services(P) or a combination there-of? For optimum value the organisation should consider how to balance resource allocations and actions across the REAP drivers by decile/segment. This will mean that a consistent set of scorecard measures exist (REAP) albeit that targets will vary by decile/segment.

Recognising the systemic nature of this approach enables the articulation of what we refer to as the ‘Refined conditions of Business.’ These will be aligned with the strategic themes however they address the outcome of the strategic theme in the ‘desired future.’ e.g. the outcome of the Leadership theme will be a more effective team, the outcome of the People theme may be greater levels of staff engagement, the outcome of the Customer Experience theme may be improved levels of customer preference, the outcome of the Execution theme may be improved economic profit (EP) and so forth.

The result of the adoption of this blueprint is a well understood, measureable and sustainable improvement in competitive advantage and business performance.

What Leaders of 21st Century Customer Centric Organisations do!

Roger Martin, in his Harvard Business Review article (Jan-Feb 2010) entitled ‘The Age of Customer Capitalism introduced a new principle called Customer Driven Capitalism. He introduces this as the third era of modern capitalism and builds an argument that society should rapidly shift towards this principle which is based upon a logic that shareholder value can be best optimised by focussing on the customer. This is radically different from the two previous eras of modern capitalism – the first, Managerial Capitalism, began in 1932, and was defined by the then radical notion that firms ought to have professional management. Business leadership moved from entrepreneurs and founders to an elite group of professional managers. The second era of modern capitalism began in 1976 and, known as Shareholder Value Capitalism – defined and built upon the premise that the purpose of every organisation should be to maximise shareholders wealth.

Roger Martin shares statistics that prove that shareholders weren’t necessarily any better off during era 1 when professional managers came in to look after their interests. Similarly, during the last quarter of the 20^th century and through till the end of 2008, when the maximisation of shareholder value was the ‘calling cry’ – shareholders aren’t shown to have benefitted any more as a result of their interests being put first and foremost. In fact, during this period, the focus of many organisations and stock markets became increasingly short-term. This focus on quarterly results led many executives to ‘dilute’ their focus on longer term sustainable earnings, to the detriment of those shareholders who were longer term focussed. We’ve all seen the results and possibly felt some pain resulting from Worldcom, Enron, Madoff and the 2008 financial meltdown. This is largely due to leadership focussed on serving themselves and short-term shareholders rather than leaders who are focussed on building both short and long term sustainability and earnings.

Bill George, in his HBR article entitled ‘The New 21^st Century Leaders’ highlights the fact that a new generation of leaders is re-shaping the best led global companies. Authentic, customer focussed leaders are replacing hierarchical leaders who have focussed on serving short term customers.

The late Peter Drucker probably said it best when he stated that the purpose of a business is not to create a product – it is to create a customer.

So what needs to be done to focus new age leadership on delivering sustainable superior business performance and where does leadership focus to deliver against the mandate?

Sadly, measures and bonuses are often structured in such a way that management is incentivised to do the wrong things. Silo mentalities remain embedded, functional areas operate in their own isolated universes oblivious to the customer experience, often a business focuses on optimising a functional area unaware that ‘fixing the part’ often breaks the whole –  (e.g. Optimising operational efficiencies of the call centre by measuring AHT (Average Handling Time), Time to Answer etc without realising that the Call Centre is very often the only channel that a customer will proactively use to make contact with the business and instead of encouraging  customer interaction the focus remains on getting customer off the line as quickly as possible so that operational metrics can be achieved.)  This is often at the expense of brand reputation and customer experience – real drivers of organisational value.

Bonus payouts are very often based upon Revenue, EPS, Market Share and such like. These metrics seldom correlate with building sustained value.

Furthermore, the analyst community very often ‘rate’ companies according to aggregated and generic measures that do not necessarily correlate with building organisational value. For example, ‘Net New Customers’ is often viewed as being representative of an organisations growth capability. The higher the number the better! Well, reality is sometimes different if viewed from a value perspective e.g. Net New Customers may equal 1 Million, made up of 1.27M newly acquired customers and 270K lost customers. What if the bulk of the newly acquired customers were low value customers and the bulk of the lost customers were high value? This may well represent value erosion rather than be reason for celebration.

So…..in the Age of Customer Capitalism leaders need to create organisations that have the capability to Influence Customer Behaviour – they need to demonstrate an ability to Acquire customers more effectively than their competitors through high quality, relevant product and service. Their Value Propositions need to be targeted and appropriate. They also need to create an organisation that has developed capability to Retain customers through the delivery of a service promise that aligns with the value proposition and brand. Corporate social responsibility, socio economic commitments, sponsorships, environmental awareness are all important as part of Retention capability. The organisation also needs to develop the capability to cross-sell and up-sell their customers – to develop trusting customer relationships that encourage customers to be open to additional, relevant products and services.

The ability to Influence Customer Behaviour is reliant on having a solid base of Committed Customers, not merely satisfied customers. It is this group of customers who, through consistency in terms of product quality, relevance and service, become company ambassadors.

The only way to build real commitment is through the Design and Delivery of a Unique and Distinctive Customer Experience. This is a blend of the rational and the emotional – it is a mix of the traditional product, service, communication offering and the emotions evoked when engaging with the business across various touch-points and/or channels. New age leadership needs to proactively design this experience at each and every moment-of-truth and ensure that employees are empowered to deliver according to the agreed upon standards

Lastly – to deliver the defined experience requires Engaged Employees – employees who are fully aligned around the organisations values and its purpose. These employees need to be committed to deliver upon the promises they will have made to ensure that the intended experience is brought alive

Organisations developed around these principles will indicate that the ‘Age of Customer Capitalism’ has come of Age.

Why Organisations are Failing to Build Customer Centricity

For an organisation to be deemed  ‘customer centric’ it will have developed the capability to design and to deliver a unique customer experience – a principle that is the blend between the product, communication and/or service and very importantly, the emotions evoked across all moments of contact – an experience that profitably and positively impacts the customer acquisition initiatives, the customer retention initiatives and  the cross-sell and up-sell initiatives. However, in order to profitably and positively impact these three extremely important value drivers, the business needs the insight to optimally allocate resources to profitable customers. Importantly, ‘profitable customers’ doesn’t only mean those whom are profitable today. It includes those whom will be profitable in the future through normal commercial engagement and through equally important and sometimes intangible value contributions such as positive ‘word of mouth marketing’ and referral  value.

So……….when we read those lofty mission statements that paint the picture of a ‘customer 1^st’ business, gawk with wonder at those ‘organisational values’ that promise the world, stare with amazement at press articles and web-entries that freely use self proclaimed descriptors such as ‘customer centric’ and ‘world class service’ we have the right to be cynical. Not many organisations get it right.

Our global customer management capability benchmark (CMAT™) indicates that customer management capability, in general, remains fairly static year on year. This indicates that although many organisations have recognised the need to become customer centric (and in fact have done something about it by having their capabilities professionally assessed through a methodology such as CMAT™) they are failing to execute in a meaningful and  sustainable way. They are failing to re-orient the organisation around a true customer centric mindset. In so many cases there is confusion about what customer centricity means and a distinct lack of enlightened leadership that recognises that economic and market changes are calling for a different way of doing things. Increasing competition, more insightful and educated customers, evolving customer needs, diminishing levels of loyalty and trust are all ‘alarm bells’ that are being ignored.

Not only are the ‘organisation’ systems broken but so too are the ‘market’ systems. The obsession with shareholder value has boosted market capitalisation but has led to financial meltdown.  Increasing pressures from investors require short term results. Corporate boards are challenged by the analyst community to report against aggregated metrics that are deemed to be indicators of business success and sustainability. These are often so aggregated and short term driven that they have little bearing on sustained longer term results. These realities force executives to focus on raising expectations about future performance and then to drive hard to meet those expectations in whatever way possible. In too many cases the decisions made are not in long term interest and are more focussed on ‘puffing up’ short term income statements than building sustainability.

With this as a backdrop it’s no wonder that organisations are failing to live up to their customer centric aspirations. We can confidently predict that the future will look different from the world we inhabit today. How quickly or how slowly that landscape changes remains highly uncertain but we all know how quickly change happens. Amongst other realities the future promises:

• New technologies that will better enable organisations to both ‘sense and deliver’ what consumers want
• Interactive dialogue and 2-way conversations that provide free flowing information exchanges in both directions
• Younger generations who have different buying patterns from those of older generations
• Multichannel options for buying, interacting, problem solving and communicating
• Evolving organisational design that is more dynamic and more team based than the traditional hierarchical structures

When we add these few realities  to the mix we recognise that the future is going to consist of increasing  levels of complexity, particularly for those organisations chasing the ‘customer centric’ differentiator. In this rapidly evolving world there is increasingly less tolerance from the consumer for mediocrity and false promises.  We already have significant lower levels of belief and trust in organisations and brands that have, in the past, stood for stability and consistency.

Quite simply, if businesses that believe their own rhetoric about customer centricity being their competitive advantage don’t really start to ‘practice what they preach,’ they need to move away from their perceived point of differentiation and channel their energies elsewhere. They need to find some point of differentiation that is meaningful and relevant to their customer base. At least then they may be perceived as more authentic, even if less customer centric

Customer centricity ain’t gonna happen without the appropriate metrics, stupid!

An American academic by the name of Steven Kerr wrote a profound article in 1975 entitled ‘On the folly of Rewarding A while Hoping for B’

Central to the content of the article is the reality that reward systems exist which encourage behavior contrary to what is wanted/desired. The behaviours that are desired are frequently not rewarded at all. Steve’s article provided examples of these ‘fouled up systems’ within politics, in war, in medicine, in universities, in consulting, in sports, in government and in business.

I’ve been promoting the fact for many years that one of the only ways of creating sustainable competitive advantage is through the design and delivery of a unique and distinctive customer experience. Achieving this outcome is a consequence of enlightened leadership and organizational design based upon systemic thinking such that all business resources and capabilities are aligned, embedded and mobilized in order to achieve the business purpose. The only way to achieve this is by creating and managing ratios and metrics that drive the appropriate behaviours to achieve the ultimate objective.

In today’s world (and more importantly in tomorrow’s world) this becomes even more important if businesses are going to differentiate themselves and become more accountable for their actions. I think it was Lou Gerstner, IBM turnaround fame, who said that ‘you get what you inspect, not what you expect.’

So, until businesses establish some ‘balance’ in their ‘un-balanced’ scorecards, until businesses truly start collaborating and co-creating with a real commitment and understanding of the ‘meaning’ behind their stated vision, mission and strategic intent, until businesses start seeing and understanding the critically important links across systems, resources, processes, policies AND their strategic  objectives and until organizations establish metrics that underpin EXACTLY those behaviours that they desire, we will continue to see ‘more of the same!’ When the rate of change inside the organization is less than the rate of change outside the organization, that organization is living on borrowed time. Sadly, the consequence is that you and I, as consumers, will continue to suffer mediocre and random experiences at best. AND, that sucks!