Book Review: Reorganize for Resilience: Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business
by Miki SaxonHow many times have you heard it—focus on the customer blah, blah, blah?
How often does it prove to be true?
How many times have you said it— it’s about what the customer wants blah, blah, blah?
How often do you practice it?
For too many companies being customer-centric happens when it’s convenient—if it happens at all.
Enter Reorganize for Resilience: Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business by Ranjay Gulati, the Jaime and Josefina Chua Tiampo Professor of Business at Harvard Business School, who offers a comprehensive, practical and inplementable guide to creating a customer-centric business.
Utilizing an outside-in approach means focusing on delivering something of value to customers, as opposed to focusing on products and sales.
Gulati discusses 5 key levers from both “why” and “how”:
- Coordination: Connect, eradicate, or restructure silos to enable swift responses.
- Cooperation: Align all employees around the shared goal of customer solutions.
- Clout: Redistribute power to “bridge builders” and customer champions.
- Capability: Develop employees’ skills at tackling changing customer needs.
- Connection: Blend partners’ offerings with yours to provide unique customer solutions.
Gulati is blunt and his approach isn’t for those who prefer incremental change to revolutionary, but it is MAP that will stop many leaders from embracing Reorganize for Resilience—because you can’t implement that in which you don’t sincerely believe.
Since the advice to be customer-centric isn’t new, following it isn’t easy and may actually require difficult, even painful changes to your MAP, so why bother with Reorganize for Resilience?
Because it carries the biggest bottom-line payoff, both short and long-term, in any economy and for any company—from Fortune 50 to the neighborhood copy shop.
Image credit: Harvard Business Publishing
