The Sound and the Fury of Enterprise-Wide Process Management

When did “customer centric” first become the clichéd buzzword it has turned into today?

Fifteen years ago, perhaps? “We’re CUSTOMER CENTRIC!” “The customer is always right; We put the customer first!” Yeah, yeah, yeah, blah, blah, blah … And then they trot out their customer-centric diagrams, typically something circular /radial with the CUSTOMER in the bulls-eye, depicted visually either as encircled like the Siege of Stalingrad, or else as being attacked like a parasite by assorted organizational macrophages. Over time these representations evolved into a pyramid structure, with the customer either at the BASE, purportedly demonstrating how everything at this organization emanates from the customer, or at the APEX, showing the customer as the ultimate goal of the organization’s functions and activities.

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Hybrid Strategy Management

Despite my lack of doctoral and/or Harvard credentials, I’m going to go out on a limb and challenge a bit of the conventional wisdom that’s been passed unto us by Michael Porter (Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors – 1998), later revised by Treacy and Wiersema with their Value Disciplines model (The Discipline of Market Leaders – 1997), now taught in nearly all business school programs, and which crops up at least once at every business conference.

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Conversational Analytics

When you begin your career your most important skills are your hard, technical skills; the finance and accounting, the statistics and economics, the physics and chemistry, the engineering and calculus. But as I tell my business school mentees, as your career progresses, the emphasis changes such that much sooner than you might initially think, the most important courses you took in college turn out to be psychology, philosophy, literature, sociology and anthropology.

We all bring important skills to the myriad of different conversations we participate in every day, and while confrontation and intervention might not be your cup of tea, applying the right type of analytics to the problem, consistent with its level in the Conversation Pyramid, can immediately make you and your team valuable in either catalyzing your own organizational transformation, or simply improving your organization’s value creation or mission effectiveness.

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The Red Queen Economy, Running in Place Faster

The Red Queen gets an undeservedly bad rap in most modern theatrical presentations.

Remember though, she is still a queen, able to move in any direction over the entire surface of the chess board, and despite all this talk of running in place, she is there at the end to celebrate Alice’s own promotion to queen as she reaches the edge of the board. This treadmill economy won’t last forever, and with proper preparation, you may even be able to step off yourself before the rest of your industry catches on.

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