Towards the Agile Enterprise: Where Are We Now?

Context

Western supply chain management has recently come under scrutiny and has been the subject of considerable change as e-Commerce has taken off around the world. Until recently, the US and Canada have lagged behind progress by Japanese companies implementing Just In Time, Lean Manufacturing and Kaizen (continuous improvement). However, with developments in communications technology, Western companies have been changing to reach out to their customers, both B-2-C and B-2-B. By adopting Agile manufacturing and supply chain management, they are leap-frogging their Japanese competitors. In future, each supplier will use the Internet to develop mobile, One-to-One marketing that treats each customer as a single market. While some progress in this field occurred in the 1990s and 2000s, this article looks at how the Agile Enterprise is developing in 2017 and beyond.

Introduction

I recently spoke to Rick Dove, CEO of Paradigm Shift International, specializing in Agile systems research, engineering and project management, as well as author of the book Response Ability: The Language, Structure and Culture of the Agile Enterprise. I asked him what were the basics of Agile marketing strategy, and what progress has been made since the early 1990s in the field of Agile customer response.

According to Dove, the value proposition of an agile system is rooted in risk management, providing options when system mission or system survival is threatened. Agile systems exhibit the ability to survive, even thrive, in uncertain and unpredictable environments. The pace of technology and social collaboration on a global scale increases the pace of technological and social innovation, which brings all kinds of benefits and vulnerabilities. Agility is one way to address these changes.

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Agile systems are designed in counterpoint to their operating environments, characterized as an Uncertain, Risky, Variable, Evolving (UURVE) framework:

• Unpredictable: randomness among unknowable possibilities
• Uncertain: randomness among known possibilities
• Risky
• Variable
• Evolving: gradual (relatively) successive developments

The architecture of Agile systems will be recognized in a simple sense as drag-and-drop, plug-and-play, loosely coupled encapsulated modularity.

What is an Agile System?

In the 1980s, the world conceded that the Japanese lean manufacturing concepts led to superior competitive manufacturing capability. Major manufacturers world-wide were scrambling to catch up. However, Charles Kimsey, in the office of the US Secretary of Defence, thought some effort ought to be spent trying to identify what would be next, and arranged to fund this look-ahead project at Lehigh University. The project’s conclusions identified an emerging problem so common and key to competition that it would become the next differentiator once lean was broadly diffused.

That problem was identified as the ability to respond effectively and with competence to operational environments with increasing uncertainty and unpredictability. That ability was named Agility, and the project at Lehigh spawned the Agility Forum in 1992 to explore the nature of the Agile enterprise throughout the 1990’s.

With the Agile label and concept in play, Hewlett Packard was the first company to initiate a program to educate its customers and subsequently bring to market IT support under the Agile Enterprise banner, in 1993.

Defining Agility

In an invited synopsis paper of the 1991 Lehigh study, Dove identified agility as “that characteristic which allows an organization to thrive in an environment of constant and unpredictable change.” Effective response has four metrics: timely (fast enough to deliver value), affordable (at a cost that can be repeated as often as necessary), predictable (can be counted on to meet the need) and comprehensive (anything and everything within the system boundary). Since the early Agile work in the 1990’s, the point has been made that agility is composed of both reactive and proactive change proficiency.

An agile system’s response to a change in the environment, whether to take advantage of an opportunity, or to respond to a threat, is achieved, metaphorically, by reshaping the system so that it is compatible or synergistic with the changed shape of the environment.

Agile Architecture Fundamentals

We are all familiar with the architectures that accommodate and facilitate structural change. Think of the construction sets we grew up with: Erector Sets and Lego, says Dove. There are three critical elements in the agile architectural pattern:

1. Modules, which are self-contained encapsulated units complete with well-designed interfaces
2. Passive infrastructure, which provides drag-and-drop connectivity between modules.
3. Active infrastructure, which assembles new system configurations in response to new requirements.

In addition, Response Situation Analysis (RSA) guides architectural design, by identifying response requirements that inform the design and implementation of the agile architecture pattern. These requirements may not be directly present in customer requirements.

An Agile system must be both reactive and proactive.

Proactive responses are generally triggered by the application of new knowledge to generate new value. I think this should include customer input. This new knowledge generally enables the transition to possible and potential next generation capabilities; capabilities that require something unlike anything already present, or an upgrade or change to something which does not exist.

Reactive responses, says Dove, are generally triggered by events which demand a response: problems that must be fixed, opportunities which must be addressed. They may be responses to new customer demands, legal and regulatory issues, agility deterioration, product failures, market restructuring and other non-competitor generated events.

Either way, I believe Agile systems are core to including customer feedback into the new product generation process, thereby supporting Mass Customization and One-to-One Marketing. Dove is now working on an Agile Lifecycle Development model, which builds upon the traditional ‘waterfall’ product development process. This includes constant product evolution of all prior lifecycle stages as the lifecycle progresses through maturity.

Dove intends the practitioner to take away the model of Agile-systems engineering as the engineering of a system construction kit, and the introduction of the UURVE framework. Now we know what an Agile system is, next, Dove explores Agile processes in the creation of such systems.

Agile Systems-Engineering Context

How do we go about building an Agile system? “Soft” systems thinking is said to be appropriate in messy problem situations characterized by obscure objectives and multiple clashing viewpoints. (Checkland and Holwell, 2004.) As discussed in a 1986 Harvard Business Review paper (Takeuchi and Nonaka), soft systems often involve a general process that engineered breakthrough innovative products composed more of hardware than of software, using what they called  “subtle management,” working behind the scenes to constantly rebalance diversity within the development teams.

In developing an Agile process, defining a solution in terms of the problem understanding and defining the problem in terms of the solution understanding is a spiral iteration of discovery and learning convergence through an evolving engineering environment; an Agile System that facilitates continued change and adaptation. This process is key, I believe, to involving the customer in new product design iteration, supporting Mass Customization.

Agile System Life-Cycle – SCRUM

Life Cycle, as a term applied to systems, traditionally demarcates the progressive maturity flow of a system through a linear sequence of stages, from concept to disposal. Inherent in this model, says Dove, are the notions that the system is in one and only one stage at any point in time, and progresses from one single-state stage to another in a proscribed sequence. But must a system be either in a state of development or a state of utilization, but not both at the same time?

Agile systems engineering processes, by definition, are capable of responding to their environment as their environment changes, regardless of why or when these changes occur. Dove uses the software development process called SCRUM to illustrate these processes. They deliver products iteratively and incrementally, maximizing opportunities for feedback. Incremental deliveries of ‘Done’ product ensure a potentially useful version of product is always available during the development Life-Cycle.

SCRUM is a proactive initiative, productively confrontational in nature. It is highly intense in the people interaction area. Optimal development team size is small enough to remain nimble, and large enough to complete significant work. The sweet spot for participative collaborative-learning that spurs productivity lies between three and nine. Hardware product systems can facilitate adoption of SCRUM learning with an Agile product architecture, featuring collaborative, concurrent product development.

Agile Case Study – CubeSat

In addition to Hewlett Packard and SCRUM, CubeSat, Motorola phone and the automobile industry have all experimented with Agile theory. The CubeSat project set out to provide a low-cost and condensed development time approach for very small satellites. According to Dove, the first specifications came in 1999 by California Polytechnic University and Stanford University.

The CubeSat Agile-System architecture specifies internal plug-and-play infrastructure for satellite construction and external interfaces for launch-vehicle compatibility. The System Life Cycle for the CubeSat program included both iterative and incremental development strategies. Several stages of the ISO 15288 Life Cycle were performed in parallel, ensuring constant product availability and including customer at all stages of the design and build program.

Elastic capacity, according to Dove, was not employed to any meaningful extent as no issues existed that needed this capability. Development teams were purposefully kept small so they could quickly react to changes, and only two spacecraft were required.

Discussion – Going Forward

Since Dove published Reponse Ability in 2001, relevant thought in both Agile software and Agile hardware development has emerged. This includes Peter Checkland’s Soft Systems methodology as well as the introduction of the ISO 15288 compatible Life Cycle framework for Agile Systems Engineering. In addition, the publication of Agile Software Development with Scrum (Sutherland and Beedle) and Agile Software Development Ecosystems(Highsmith 2002) have brought awareness of the Agile label in software development.

When asked, Dove explained that Mass Customization needs a modular, Agile process to deliver on its promises. He also said that in addition to Motorola H.P., SCRUM and CubeSat, examples of Agile production can be found in the Automotive industry, which uses inventory management and transparency through the supply chain to deliver Agile response to customer specifications. SPAWAR is also using Agile methods to build and deliver Unmanned Autonomous Systems to the battlefield.

For information on the financial modelling of the advantages of going Agile, Dove suggested reading work by Bill Scindell. Finally, the future of Agile is suggested by an Agile Lifecycle Model Development that conforms to the IEEE ISO 15288 standard.

According to Dove, the ball is rolling towards the goal of an Agile –Systems Engineering discipline.

Mass Customization Customer Strategy Visionary

Above, I discussed the work of the guru of Agile business systems, Rick Dove. Agility deals with the internal corporate operations and IT support needed to respond with excellence to changing business environments. This time, I am moving up the supply chain, from operations to marketing and sales, discussing another aspect of Agile response: Customer-Centricity. Recognized for more than 20 years as one of the world’s leading authorities on customer-focused business strategies, Don Peppers is an acclaimed author and a founding partner of Peppers and Rogers Group. Collectively, Don Peppers and Martha Rogers have spoken in over 30 countries on 6 continents. The UK’s Chartered Institute for Marketing put Peppers on its list of the “50 most influential thinkers in marketing and business today.”

His thought leadership, keynote presentations and executive workshops routinely focus on the business issues that today’s global enterprises are grappling with while trying to maintain a competitive edge in their marketplace. These include:

• Building stronger customer relationships, better customer experiences and trust.
• Stimulating innovative thinking and benefitting from new ideas
• Engaging employees in order to create a stronger, more competitive corporate culture
• Dealing with social media, customer advocacy, and increasing business transparency
• Balancing long- and short-term financial goals by focusing on customer value, and
• Using scientific reasoning to make better business decisions on data

In addition, Peppers and Rogers are often credited with having launched the CRM revolution, with their very first book, “The One-to-One Future; Building Relationships one Customer at a Time”

Frictionless Customer Experiences

On his website, www.1to1media.com, Peppers talks about the kind of customer experiences which make customers come back for more. For the vast majority of businesses, he writes, the ideal customer experience is not so much delightful or surprising, as it is frictionless – that is, an experience that requires no extra time or effort and imposes the least possible burden on the customer. Indeed, once you’ve made your customer experience reliable, relevant, valuable and trustable – the four primary qualities of a frictionless experience – then delighting or wowing the customer with something unexpected or ‘over the top’ can be a very effective way to gain that customer’s genuine emotional commitment to your brand.

The most direct way to connect with a customer emotionally is simply to allow your own humanity to show through. After all, writes Peppers, smiles and empathy are free. For example, the massive and hugely successful UCLA Health System has a reputation for delighting its ‘customers’, i.e. the patients it serves. The System’s entire culture is based on reaching out to patients individually, showing respect and courtesy, listening to their problems, and responding to their issues. And at Southwest Airlines, the flight attendants are well known for their playful shenanigans, going that extra mile to ensure that everyone enjoys the flight, even when it is crowded.

Importantly, each of these businesses is competently operated and has already eliminated all possible points of friction in its customer experience. Southwest runs a tight ship, more on-time and dependable than most airlines. And the human-like quality of this kind of service is what delights a customer. Because it offers a glimpse into the humanity within an organization, true, customer-oriented service can create a genuine emotional bond. And this bond is what clearly differentiates your brand in the minds of customers, building loyalty.

Treating Different Customers Differently

“Treating Different Customers Differently” is an accurate but concise definition of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). The actual process goes by many names – CRM. Personalized marketing, customer centricity, and one-to-one marketing. But whatever you call it, the process commences when you start treating Customer X one way, and Customer Y another way, based on what you know about their differences. Before the advent of computer databases and interactivity, it wasn’t practical to treat different customers differently. It was the advent of the Worldwide Web that generated what we now recognize as the customer revolution. But how are customers different, actually?

There are really just two ways your customers are different:

• Customers have different values to the business
• Customer have different needs from the business

All other descriptions of customer differences, including the widespread method of segmentation (demographic and psychographic), are really just interim steps designed to allow businesses to infer the answer to these two questions: How much is this particular customer worth? And what does this particular customer want? So simply ranking customers by their values, and then treating gold and platinum customers differently from other customers, for instance, is one route to better financial results for many customers.

However, a company following this strategy all by itself – ranking customers by their value – isn’t really focusing much on its customers’ different interests at all. It’s focusing mostly on its own financial interests. Your customers really only care about the second difference – Customer Needs. For the most part, customers don’t know and don’t care what their value is to you. What the customer is concerned with is what he or she needs – what problem do they want solved, or what task accomplished, etc. The issue of Needs-based customer differentiation, writes Peppers, is really where the pay dirt is for CRM. Ranking customers by their value isn’t likely to generate much customer goodwill or genuine, emotional loyalty. And it will leave your company vulnerable to some other firm that can better tailor its own offerings to the more finely differentiated needs of your customers.

Empowering Employees

One of the most important tasks that any company faces is providing a good customer experience, by empowering its customer-facing employees to make right decisions and take the right actions whenever its own policies or processes don’t adequately tell them what to do in that particular situation. When trying to address some customer problem, says Peppers, there are many different possible actions, but if your employees all agree on the proper direction of success, then you can have more confidence that they’ll be able to select the right action.

Peppers’ view is that the most reliably useful direction to provide customer-facing employees is to treat customers fairly, the way you’d want to be treated yourself.

A financial services company in Australia, for example, says Peppers, has put in place a highly innovative method of empowering their front-line employees. Basically, when a problem arises that might require an exception to prescribed policy in order to satisfy the customer, the worker trying to solve the problem is encouraged to come up with a creative resolution that he or she thinks is appropriate – even if it is ‘out of policy.’ But then, before they are authorized to apply that solution, the worker is required to seek the agreement of at least one other customer-facing employee, who will sign on to the action.

Focus on the Changing Face of Retail

Since this blog discusses the innovations in One to One Sales and Marketing, we need to focus on where the majority of the customer interface takes place: i.e. the retail environment. Peppers writes that the evolving customer behavior and innovative new technologies mean that customers cross-shop the competition before they enter the retail store, or even when they are standing in it. As a consequence, brands must be ready to:

• Create an optimal omni-channel experience
• Invest in a mobile presence and embrace mobile payments
• Bring the personalized online experience into the bricks-and-mortar world

Peppers helps companies around the world cultivate loyalty, revitalize sales and maintain the agility to keep up with evolving customer behavior, across the customer life-cycle.

One example of this, was a company which was great at tracking warehouse-related costs but not good at tracking their complete inventory management cycle. Peppers delivered a solution which would put the client back in control of their spending, by identifying three key areas of the product life cycle to model:

• Corporate administration costs
• Distribution centre costs
• Store functions and In-Store merchandising costs

In particular, marketing and merchandising costs could now be considered as part of the cost of each product, using Activity Based Costing (ABC). This resulted in true cost knowledge to guide accurate decisions, collaboration between business units to reduce waste, and purchasing decisions being tested before they are made.

Going Forward: Understand the Customer – Implement the Strategy

According to Peppers, customers are more demanding and connected than ever. Margins have been squeezed to the limit, so how can a company differentiate itself and grow? The answer is twofold:

1. To understand the customer, identifying each customer as an individual, differentiating into actionable segments, interacting, providing frictionless experiences, and customizing based on customer profiles.
2. To implement the strategies, creating the following operational enablers: Organization, Process, Information and Technology.

Peppers delivers services across Customer Experience strategy, Operations and Technology excellence, Learning Innovation (training and coaching) and Customer Insight Analytics (management reporting and predictive analytics). From vision and strategy in the boardroom to execution and measurement in the front lines, the Peppers and Rogers team brings the knowledge, rigor and creativity required to help clients compete and win.

More information can be found in the newest book from Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, called “Extreme Trust: Honesty as a Competitive Advantage.” Peppers and Rogers look to the future, predicting that rising levels of transparency will require companies to protect the interests of their customers and employees proactively, even when it sometimes costs money in the short term. Success won’t come from top-down rules and processes, but from bottom-up solutions on the part of employees and customers themselves.

This bottom-up approach is, after all, the focus of Peppers’ work as a Customer Strategy Visionary.

Mass Customization after 20 Years of Development

Above, I discussed another aspect of Agile response: Customer-Centricity. Now I shall discuss Mass Customization and how Joe Pine sees this topic developing 20 years after he wrote and published a seminal 1993 book in the field, called ‘Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business.’ In 1992. Pine, a business strategy consultant working from Strategic Horizons LLP, read Stan Davis’ seminal 1987 book ‘Future Perfect’ when a consultant with IBM. This book apparently gave him an epiphany, namely that every customer is unique and deserves to be treated this way, and this lead him to write his book. I was intrigued to learn his thoughts on the topic now in the new Millenium, when new technology is available.

What Examples Exist in 2015?

According to Pine, Last.fm, Pandora and Spotify are doing well using ratings and ‘likes’ to customize services. The two industries that should shift to Mass Customization are the apparel industry and the automobile industry. Both of them produce personal goods and the financial logic is that by using Mass Customization, they could reduce their fixed inventory costs, following the example set by Dell computers.

The development of Mass Customized goods are all about helping clients and customers uncover their identity and create who they are – their ‘Brand Me.’ There are no truly mass markets anymore. The truism is that we have to go beyond looking at market segments and niches to understanding that every customer is his or her own market. But it doesn’t end there. In fact, every customer is multiple markets. Customers want different offerings at different times under different circumstances. When Joe wrote his book in 1993, it really was the new frontier. Now, it is imperative in industry after industry to discover and fulfill the multiple markets whithin each customer.

To develop skills in such marketing, Joe Pine recommends using a Design Tool – whether online under the customer’s control, in a physical place where you can collaborate with them, or one that only you use to presciently determine customer needs so you can figure out what they want in this moment in time, and then get that information back into operations to do something different for that customer.

Mass Customization – The State of the Art

In 2011, Pine posted some thoughts on Mass Customization in the Harvard Business Review, part of ‘Creating a Customer-Centered Organization.’ He wrote that most so-called customer-focused organizations focus on markets, (anonymous agglomerations of customers) rather than on any real, living, breathing individual customer. Beyond Mass Customization means recognizing multiple markets within each individual.

Joe exhorts us to think of travel. If you travel for business, you want one thing from the airline, the hotel, the rental car company, the restaurants you visit, and so forth. Bring your spouse with you and suddenly, all your requirements change. That’s why mass customization is so important today. To make it work, you must modularize your capabilities. Then you must work with each individual customer, says Pine, creating a design experience through some sort of design tool that helps customers figure out and configure exactly what they want. Fundamentally, customers don’t want to be overwhelmed by choice, they just want exactly what they want.

The design tool can be as simple as Dell’s website configurator, or as sophisticated as LEGO’s Design By Me. Recognize that mass customization is not being everything to everybody; rather, it is doing only and exactly what each individual customer wants and needs. The former is a surefire route to higher costs; the latter can actually lower your costs by eliminating waste in your operations and sacrifice in your customers’ lives.

Customization is the antidote to commoditization. Where commoditization drags you down the supply chain year after year, customization enables you to differentiate yourself because you create customer-unique value. It helps customers figure out exactly what they want, so when you mass-customize your good you are really in the service business of helping customers define their individual goods and then make and deliver it to them.

Beyond Mass Customization – Experiences

Joe Pine has written some recent books which examine the space beyond mass customization. First he wrote ‘The Experience Economy’ in 1999, which was published in twelve languages and named among the top five business books on Amazon.co.uk. It triggered a revolution in how businesses perceived their customers. All of a sudden, the emotional and behavioural responses of a customer to a company were important. How they interacted with the company were paramount and Pine was the guy to make that happen. Then he wrote and published ‘Infinite Possibility: Creating Customer-Unique Value on the Digital Frontier’ which discusses how technology flips the universe of time, space and matter on its head, to create new worlds in both our imaginations and in our experience. This, says Pine, is the future of manufacturing.

In a paper written for Dassault Systems, Pine recommends manufacturing companies to reimagine their enterprises as being in the industrial experience business, rather than merely in industrial equipment. Then, you can create greater economic value for your company by innovating in 3D experiences that engage your customer and get them to want to spend time with you. Experiences are one step up on the supply chain from services, which are one step above goods and products, etc. The 21^st Century has ushered in the Experience Economy, where memorable events which engage each individual in an inherently personal way, are fast becoming the predominant economic offering in terms of GDP and employment, as well as in customer desire and company value.

Experiences, says Pine, are not just for consumer industries. Think how great B2B salespeople have always engaged their potential customers in dramatic stories, sensory-filled dinners and challenging golf outings. Manufacturers can stage experiences too.

• Lutron Electronics Co. created a number of Experience Centers around the US
• GE runs a number of Innovation Centers around the world to showcase its brand
• Case Construction operates the Tomahawk Experience Center so potential customers
  can try out its construction equipment
• Boeing created its Dreamliner Gallery to experience their designs in a physical mock-up

Digital technology can be embedded in a physical good, as Lutron does, to customize it to each customer’s end use. In much the same way as EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) revolutionized customer-supplier relationships, today, the ability to design, simulate, share, promote and modify products inside of a computer system with a single source of truth revolutionizes engineering, testing, marketing and lifecycle management. The possibilities for reducing cost, eliminating waste, and adding value are just beginning to be explored.

Not only can engineers collaborate today in shared virtual places, they no longer have to do so at the same time. Pine says that technology allows us to explore possibilities to envision the future and then to determine to make that future happen through 3D simulations. In addition, the ‘Internet of Everything’ allows us to put sensors on all physical things and monitor their location, useage, condition etc. and we can now synchronize all of our designs, all of our operations and even all of our equipment in customers’ hands.

Beyond Mass Customization – Transformations:

The next step after offering your customers Experiences, is to enable your customers’ Transformations. These are the final economic offering in the progression of economic value from commodities and goods all the way up to transformations. Pine exhorts us to think of fitness centres, universities, hospitals and even management consultants. No one buys their offerings unless they have particular fitness, educational, health or business aspirations that they need help in achieving.

How can you go beyond your industrial equipment goods, beyond the leasing, warranty, monitoring, repair and operational services you wrap around these goods, and beyond even the 3D experiences you can stage around and through your goods and services? You need to answer the question: What Business are you Really In?Customers want delivery of full systems and in actuality, they don’t really want products, systems or even solutions. They want a better business. There is nothing more valuable than helping your customers achieve their aspirations.

What customers want today are 3D experiences and the transformations they enable. If you innovated in 3D experiences, what value-creating offerings would actually get your customers to want to spend their hard-earned money and time with your enterprise? Pine also asks, if you took from your advertising or trade show budget, how great a marketing experience could you stage that would generate more demand for your industrial equipment? If you viewed, he continues, your company in the business of transformations, how could you guide your customers in achieving their aspirations?

Pine says that if you can effectively answer these questions, then you cannot only transform your company and create more economic value for your company and create more economic value for your customers, but just possibly change the world.

CRM – What Mass Customization is Not

In 1993, nine months after Pine wrote ‘Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Competition’ he noticed and read Peppers and Rogers’ book ‘The One to One Future: Building Relationships One Customer at a Time.’ He immediately recognized kindred spirits and started exploring areas of commonality between the two texts. One answer came from this: A Learning Relationship between company and customer which means a company-customer connection that grows and deepens over time, as with each interaction the company learned more about this particular customer, which caused it to mass customize something different for that customer, by which he or she benefitted, and because of which he or she wanted to interact again. This resulted in the Harvard Business Review piece “Do You want to Keep your Customers for Ever?” (1995).

By this time, many Mass Customization examples were proliferating, with large scale implementations in process. At this time, Amazon.com became so customer-centric  that it now recognized that every customer is now multiple markets, enabling individuals to segment its purchases by recipient to separately learn about and make recommendations for each one. Other people who really pushed the boundaries of Mass Customization included Paul Greenberg, Denis Pombriant and Adrian Payne, among many others, as 1:1 marketing really hit its’ zenith in the late 1990’s.

Around this time, people began referring to 1:1 marketing and Mass Customization as Customer Relationship Management (CRM). This was inevitably falling short of the ideals of what 1:1 marketing really was about. CRM lost its heart. Out of the failures of some CRM projects came the naysayers, according to Pine, some denigrating the entire concept of creating relationships with customers, and thereby throwing out the baby of 1:1 marketing with the bathwater of CRM.

Pine says instead of this state of affairs, it is time to jump of the CRM lifecycle and onto a new one: one that flows from the heritage of what 1:1 marketing really is. Let’s not go forward to social CRM, says Pine, let’s go back to implement authentic 1:1 marketing. To do that, let’s go back to basic ideas from Stan Davis’ ‘Future Perfect’:

• Share of Customer, not Share of Market: Focus on individual customers one at a time and sell that customer as many products as possible.
• Collaborate with Your Customers: Spend time on retaining customers you have by figuring out what they want as individuals.
• Differentiate Customers, not Just Products: People are more unique than products are, so differentiate them to determine who brings you the most value.
• Economies of Scope, Not Economies of Scale: The new learning curve – the basis of mass customization – is that customer sacrifice comes down with every interaction
• Manage your Customers, not just your Products: A modular organization dispatches on-demand to meet individual customer needs.
• Engage you Customers in Dialogue: Dialogue means you have to Listen, not just talk.
• Take Products to Customers, not Vice Versa: Products now include Experiences and Transformations mentioned earlier.
• Make Money Protecting Privacy, Not Threatening It: Customers don’t mind you having information on them if you use that information for them.