"The customer is the sole reason organizations exist," Craig Cochran points out throughout this concise and practical book, which outlines the fundamentals of building process controls around internal and external customers' true needs. Cochran walks readers through a self-assessing customer focus inventory and from there explains how an organization can shape its processes to meet its customers' demands. Learn how to develop customer surveys that produce useful data for refining production and administrative processes. Understand the importance of customer-satisfaction training. Motivate top management to instill a customer-focused orientation throughout the organization. -- From publisher's description.

Differentiate your business by sharpening your Customer Focus or risk giving your competitors a competitive advantage.The-best-of-the-best do this. They know that the only long-term strategy that effectively creates customer loyalty, long-term profitability and which strengthens both internal service performance and productivity is a Customer-Focused strategy.This outstanding book explains what it takes to become truly Customer-Focused. It provides detailed, step-by-step instructions on what you need to do to create customer focus throughout your entire organization. We describe in detail, 12 proven 'best practices' strategies which you can learn from and use to create your own customer focus strategy and implementation plan. This book contains over 200 pages of detailed explanations, real world examples, stories and case studies as well as exercises and worksheets which have been designed to help you achieve greater customer focus in your organization, company, department or team.

If you’re striving to make products and services that your customers will love, then you’ll need a customer-driven organization. As companies transform their businesses to meet the demands of the digital age, they find themselves grappling with uniquely human challenges. Organizational knowledge becomes siloed, employees move to safeguard their expertise, and customer data creates polarization and infighting between teams. All of these challenges widen the distance between the people who make your products and the customers who use them. To meet today’s challenges, companies need to do more than build processes for customer-driven products. They need to create a customer-driven culture. With the help of his friend and mentor Monty Hammontree, Travis Lowdermilk takes readers through the cultural transformation of the Developer Division at Microsoft. This book shows readers how to "hack" their culture and reduce the distance between them and their customers’ needs. It’s a uniquely personal story that’s told amidst a cultural revolution at one of the largest software companies in the world. This story acts as your guide. You’ll learn how to: Establish a Common Language: Help employees change their thinking and actions Build Bridges, Not Walls: Treat product building as a team sport Encourage Learning Versus Knowing: Help your team understand their customers Build Leaders That Build Your Culture: Showcase star employees to inspire others Meet Teams Where They Are: Make it easy for teams to to adopt vital behavior changes Make Data Relatable: Move beyond numbers and focus on empathizing with customers

Not all customers are created equal. Despite what the tired old adage says, the customer is not always right. Not all customers deserve your best efforts: in the world of customer centricity, there are good customers...and then there is pretty much everybody else. Upending some of our most fundamental beliefs, renowned behavioral data expert Peter Fader, Co-Director of The Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative, helps businesses radically rethink how they relate to customers. He provides insights to help you revamp your performance metrics, product development, customer relationship management and organization in order to make sure you focus directly on the needs of your most valuable customers and increase profits for the long term.

For many in Product Management, success comes from mastery of tools like roadmaps, MVPs, strategy frameworks and OKRs. These and other technical skills describe what a product person does to design, build and support new complex technologies for our users. But as technologies quickly become ubiquitous, it's the human approach to creativity, innovation, decision-making, and leadership that makes the difference in whether an individual, team, product, and even organization is successful or not. These human skills describe how a product person works and must go hand-in-hand with the technical skills.Through the story of a new director of product's missteps as he and his team try to hire their way to become a thriving product organisation at a global financial services firm, the author pulls from her experience in product management, org design and leadership coaching to introduce practical tools that will change not only how an organisation hires, but how they think of a healthy product management culture and essential product skills. Working together, the team begins to understand and grow their Product EQ, and through the easy tools and exercises in this book, so can you."This book is a fantastic catalyst to rethink which skills you need in a product team in order to be truly innovative - and then details exactly how to change both your hiring and coaching practices to foster those skills in your organisation." Martin Eriksson - Co-Author, Product Leadership " I loved this book. It pin points the aspects of Product Management we often gloss over, hiring theright people. Kate shows us that human skills are a pre-requisite for all successful product people, notjust technical skills. Follow her advice and approach, and you'll find the right product person for yourproduct team in no time."Adrienne Tan - Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Brainmates

In The Focused Organization Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez shows you how fewer, more effectively elected and managed projects are the key to strategic and long-term success. Using his own research and work experience he explains how and why those organizations that focus on just a few key initiatives can perform significantly better than unfocused organizations, not only financially but also in achieving their strategic objectives and motivating their staff. The author introduces a new way of looking at a company through two very different and often conflicting dimensions: running-the-business and changing-the-business. What you add to one dimension you have to subtract from the other one. Finding the right balance between these two dimensions represents one of the major challenges to successful strategy execution. Becoming a focused organization involves a radical change in the way companies are organized and the way they select and manage projects - the creation of a new culture. The Focused Organization discusses the characteristics that comprise a focused organization. It describes key areas where a focused organization builds its levels of maturity; provides examples of focused organizations that outperform the rest; and explains in practical steps how all enterprises can become focused. The book finishes with a unique and inspiring case study that transports us to the early days of the current business world. Through the main character, Benny White, we learn how a business was conducted and how management evolved over decades with the introduction of business theories, including project management.

You must deliver an amazing customer experience. Why? It is the competitive edge of new-era business—in any market and any economy. Renowned customer experience expert Shep Hyken explains how consistently amazing customers through stellar service can elevate your company from good to great. All transformations require a role model, and Shep has found the perfect role model to inspire your team: Ace Hardware. Ace was named as one of the top ten customer service brands in America by Businessweek and ranked highest in its industry for customer satisfaction. Through revealing stories from Ace’s over-the-top work with customers, Shep explores the five tactical areas of customer amazement: leadership, culture, one-on-one, competitive edge, and community. Delivering amazing service requires everyone in your organization to step up and be a leader. It doesn’t take a title. It takes the right set of tools and principles. To help you empower employees at all levels, Shep brings the content to a deeply practical level. His 52 Amazement Tools—like “Ask the extra question” and “Focus on the customer, not the money”—are simple, clear, useful for almost anybody, and supported with compelling research and stories. Between these covers, you will find the tools and tactics you need to transform your company into a seriously customer-focused operation that will amaze every customer every time.

Thinkers50 Top 10 Best New Management Books for 2022 A distinguished Harvard Business School professor offers a compelling reassessment and defense of purpose as a management ethos, documenting the vast performance gains and social benefits that become possible when firms manage to get purpose right. Few business topics have aroused more skepticism in recent years than the notion of corporate purpose, and for good reason. Too many companies deploy purpose, or a reason for being, as a promotional vehicle to make themselves feel virtuous and to look good to the outside world. Some have only foggy ideas about what purpose is and conflate it with strategy and other concepts like “mission,” “vision,” and “values.” Even well-intentioned leaders don’t understand purpose’s full potential and engage half-heartedly and superficially with it. Outsiders spot this and become cynical about companies and the broader capitalist endeavor. Having conducted extensive field research, Ranjay Gulati reveals the fatal mistakes leaders unwittingly make when attempting to implement a reason for being. Moreover, he shows how companies can embed purpose much more deeply than they currently do, delivering impressive performance benefits that reward customers, suppliers, employees, shareholders, and communities alike. To get purpose right, leaders must fundamentally change not only how they execute it but also how they conceive of and relate to it. They must practice what Gulati calls deep purpose, furthering each organization’s reason for being more intensely, thoughtfully, and comprehensively than ever before. In this authoritative, accessible, and inspiring guide, Gulati takes readers inside some of the world’s most purposeful companies to understand the secrets to their successes. He explores how leaders can pursue purpose more deeply by navigating the inevitable tradeoffs more deliberately and effectively to balance between short- and long-term value; building purpose more systematically into every key organizational function to mobilize stakeholders and enhance performance; updating organizations to foster more autonomy and collaboration, which in turn allow individual employees to work more purposefully; using powerful storytelling to communicate a reason for being, arousing emotions and building a community of inspired and committed stakeholders; and building cultures that don’t merely support purpose, but also allow employees to link the corporate purpose to their own personal reasons for being. As Gulati argues, a deeper engagement with purpose holds the key not merely to the well-being of individual companies but also to humanity’s future. With capitalism under siege and relatively low levels of trust in business, purpose can serve as a radically new operating system for the enterprise, enhancing performance while also delivering meaningful benefits to society. It’s the kind of inspired thinking that businesses—and the rest of us—urgently need.

With emerging technology transforming customer expectations, it's important to keep a laser focus on the experience companies provide their customers. Tomorrow's customers need to be targeted today! Customer experience futurist Blake Morgan outlines ten easy-to-follow customer experience guidelines that integrate emerging technologies with effective strategies to combat disconnected processes, silo mentalities, and a lack of buyer perspective. The Customer of the Future explains how today's customers are already demanding frictionless, personalized, on-demand experiences from their products and services, and companies that don't adapt to these new expectations won't last. This book prepares your organization for these increas­ing demands by helping you do the following: Learn the ten defining strategies for a customer experience-focused company. Implement new techniques to shift the entire company from being product-focused to being customer-focused. Gain insights through case studies and examples on how the world's most innovative companies are offering new and compelling customer experiences. Tomorrow's customers will insist on experiences that make their lives significantly easier and better. Craft a leadership development and culture plan to create lasting change at your organization!

Use inbound principles to build and strengthen your company’s future We’re in a major shift in a fundamental aspect of how businesses grow, how buyers purchase, and how businesses build meaningful conversations and customer relationships. Companies who align their mission, strategies, action plans, and tools with the way buyers think, learn, discover, and purchase will have a huge competitive advantage. Organizations need to adjust their mindset and build a strategic foundation to deal with these facts and not just update a business plan. Inbound Organization shows leaders how to build their company's future around Inbound principles and strengthen the structural foundations necessary to deal with the changes in buyer behavior. It explains how and why Inbound ideas and how to create a remarkable customer experience belong in the boardrooms and on the desks of founders, entrepreneurs, business leaders, and anyone who has a responsibility to lead their organizations into the future. • Discover the foundation of inbound principles • Learn how to put ideas into practice today • Read about organizations that successfully apply the principles of Inbound • Keep your business on course to succeed amidst buyer changes Stay ahead of the curve and learn how to use Inbound principles to ensure you’re always ahead of the curve.