What do Toyota, Apple, and Zappos have in common? CUSTOMER-CENTRIC CULTURE And now, with this research-based method, you can replicate their success with your business Based on more than 60 studies and the authors’ three-year proprietary research project with more than 100 companies, The Customer Culture Imperative demonstrates that organizations exhibiting a strong "customer-centric culture" do, in fact, produce superior business performance. It provides diagnostic tools and a roadmap for effective implementation, designed to make cultural change concrete and actionable in any organization. Dr. Linden R. Brown is chairman and co-founder of MarketCulture Strategies Inc. Christopher Brown is the former marketing director for Hewlett-Packard for the South Pacific and is presently a Silicon Valley-based sales and marketing consultant.

Designing Future-Oriented Airline Businesses is the eighth Ashgate book by Nawal K. Taneja to address the ongoing challenges and opportunities facing all generations of airlines. Firstly, it challenges and encourages airline managements to take a deeper dive into new ways of doing business. Secondly, it provides a framework for identifying and developing strategies and capabilities, as well as executing them efficiently and effectively, to change the focus from cost reduction to revenue enhancement and from competitive advantage to comparative advantage. Based on the author’s own extensive experience and ongoing work in the global airline industry, as well as through a synthesis of leading business practices both inside and outside of the industry, Designing Future-Oriented Airline Businesses sets out to demystify numerous concepts being discussed within the airline industry and to facilitate managements to identify and articulate the boundaries of their business models. It provides material from which managements can set about answering the key questions, especially with respect to strategies, capabilities and execution, and pursue an effective redesign of their business. As with the author’s previous books, the primary audience is senior-level practitioners of differing generations of airlines worldwide as well as related businesses. The material presented continues to be at a pragmatic level, not an academic exercise, to lead managements to ask themselves and their teams some critical thought-provoking questions.

Rebuild customer loyalty, strengthen customer relationships, and leverage the immense power of customer co-innovation! Harvey Thompson's Who Stole My Customer?? is the world's definitive guide to rebuilding customer loyalty: must-reading in C-Suites and top business schools worldwide. That's no surprise: for decades, Thompson has been the go-to expert for CxOs seeking to optimize their customer growth and retention strategies. Now, in this extensively updated Second Edition, Thompson sharpens his focus on two of the most crucial strategic challenges identified by 1,300+ current CEOs: strengthening customer relationships and promoting innovation. Drawing on his immense enterprise experience, Thompson helps you overcome fundamental corporate culture issues that impede both relationship-building and innovation. Next, he demonstrates how to construct customer-driven business models and management systems that improve retention by systematically involving customers in co-innovation around goals and visions they help define. Who Stole My Customer?? Second Edition helps you identify up-to-the-minute answers to the classic "tough questions" surrounding loyalty: Who's stealing my customers? Why is it happening? How can I stop it? How can I win back lost customers? You'll discover new ways to view business processes through customer's eyes... identify today's real drivers of loyalty... tightly focus relationship investments for maximum value... rebuild touch points around customers' current and future needs. Throughout, updated questions help you apply Thompson's techniques in your competitive environment. Thompson's questions have also been updated to serve MBA or Executive MBA level students more effectively as they seek to add more value in future work assignments.

"A first-class template demonstrating how to use superior leadership to drive performance in large organizations." - Paul Myners (Lord Myners), former FTSE100 Chair and Treasury Minister Leadership effectiveness drives organizational performance, yet almost half of all organizations face some kind of leadership gap that they are not able to fill. In Leadership at Scale, McKinsey experts C laudio Feser, Michael Rennie and Nicolai Nielsen share their secrets on how to increase leadership effectiveness across an organization. Using extensive research, distilled insights from McKinsey's leadership development work in practice, and lessons from a highly successful leadership development program, this book will focus on the leadership behaviors that matter most.

Maximize customer satisfaction and maximize your bottom line Over the last decade, too many organizations have assumed that their products or services were so superior that customers would automatically keep coming back for more. But in order to compete effectively in today's marketplace, organizations must change their strategy to become more customer focused, not product focused. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is the best way to integrate this customer-facing approach throughout an organization. Aimed at understanding and anticipating the needs of an organization's current and potential customers, this innovative book shows how CRM links people, process, and technology to optimize an enterprise's revenue and profits by first providing maximum customer satisfaction. * Covers developing a market-oriented strategy, innovation in products and services, sales and channels transformation, customer relationship marketing, and customer care Stanley A. Brown (Toronto, Canada) is Partner in Charge of the Centre of Excellence in Customer Care at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Toronto.

Company culture (noun) kuhm-puh-nee kuhl-cher: The values leaders and employees share, language they use, behaviors they display, and connections they have that establish how they engage and interact in the workplace. Company culture influences the roles and responsibilities of every employee within the organization, from executive leadership down to the front lines. A strong, healthy company culture drives productivity and raises profitability, and disengaged employees cost companies billions, yet many executives rarely associate their culture with their bottom line. Today, employee engagement stakes are higher than ever because executives have to consider the impact their company culture has on external stakeholders as well. Investors, consumers, and even the government are now interested in whether the organizations they do business with have values that align with theirs and demonstrate behaviors that match those values. Executive leadership must define company culture and understand how to implement it and, ultimately, measure and improve it. In From CULTURE to CULTURE, Dr. Donte Vaughn and Randall Powers introduce their culture performance management methodology and present a behavior-driven system to operationalize company culture and increase employee engagement.

Now beyond its eleventh printing and translated into twelve languages, Michael Porter’s The Competitive Advantage of Nations has changed completely our conception of how prosperity is created and sustained in the modern global economy. Porter’s groundbreaking study of international competitiveness has shaped national policy in countries around the world. It has also transformed thinking and action in states, cities, companies, and even entire regions such as Central America. Based on research in ten leading trading nations, The Competitive Advantage of Nations offers the first theory of competitiveness based on the causes of the productivity with which companies compete. Porter shows how traditional comparative advantages such as natural resources and pools of labor have been superseded as sources of prosperity, and how broad macroeconomic accounts of competitiveness are insufficient. The book introduces Porter’s “diamond,” a whole new way to understand the competitive position of a nation (or other locations) in global competition that is now an integral part of international business thinking. Porter's concept of “clusters,” or groups of interconnected firms, suppliers, related industries, and institutions that arise in particular locations, has become a new way for companies and governments to think about economies, assess the competitive advantage of locations, and set public policy. Even before publication of the book, Porter’s theory had guided national reassessments in New Zealand and elsewhere. His ideas and personal involvement have shaped strategy in countries as diverse as the Netherlands, Portugal, Taiwan, Costa Rica, and India, and regions such as Massachusetts, California, and the Basque country. Hundreds of cluster initiatives have flourished throughout the world. In an era of intensifying global competition, this pathbreaking book on the new wealth of nations has become the standard by which all future work must be measured.

A radical new management model for twenty-first century leaders Organizations today face a crisis. The crisis is of long standing and its signs are widespread. Most proposals for improving management address one element of the crisis at the expense of the others. The principles described by award-winning author Stephen Denning simultaneously inspire high productivity, continuous innovation, deep job satisfaction and client delight. Denning puts forward a fundamentally different approach to management, with seven inter-locking principles of continuous innovation: focusing the entire organization on delighting clients; working in self-organizing teams; operating in client-driven iterations; delivering value to clients with each iteration; fostering radical transparency; nurturing continuous self-improvement and communicating interactively. In sum, the principles comprise a new mental model of management. Author outlines the basic seven principles of continuous innovation The book describes more than seventy supporting practices Denning offers a rethinking of management from first principles This book is written by the author of The Secret Language of Leadership—a Financial Times Selection in Best Books of 2007.

For any CEO who wants to achieve and sustain superior shareholder value growth. All chief executives want to deliver superior returns for their shareholders, however only a few have been able to do so on a sustainable basis. Beliefs, Behaviors, and Results profiles how the best Fortune 200 CEOs have been able to outperform their peers and sustain superior shareholder returns by institutionalizing a set of beliefs and behaviors in their organizations. Through the words and case examples of these leading chief executives, the authors capture the five core principles that have transformed the performance of some of the world's best corporations. Readers will learn how the CEOs of these companies united their organizations around a common definition of winning, how they helped their managers capture a greater share of market profits, and how they established a culture where all managers think and act like entrepreneurial owners. Readers will learn how the best executives: * Look at markets differently to identify new profitable growth opportunities * Develop strategic innovations that are at least as valuable as new product innovations in driving shareholder value growth * Establish a reinvestment advantage that is difficult for competitors to match * Sustain superior performance over time In addition, the reader will learn the: * Common mistakes that prevent most management teams from maximizing profitable growth and shareholder value * Specific actions that all senior managers can take to materially change sustainable performance of their corporation

Discover the practical, step-by-step guide to creating a workplace culture that’s better for employees, customers, and stakeholders—and your company’s bottom line. For decades, talented people have tolerated old-school leaders who put results before respect, toxic company cultures, and workplaces that suck. But those days are over, and if leaders want to attract and retain the best employees—while improving productivity, customer service, employee satisfaction, and profits—it’s time for them to create work cultures where good comes first. The problem is that because the corporate world has too often been driven primarily by results, we seldom ask leaders to change their work cultures. Even if we did, most leaders don’t know how. This book provides the actionable inspiration and practical direction needed to make that change happen. In Good Comes First, S. Chris Edmonds and Mark S. Babbitt go beyond theoretical advice, using their combined 50 years of experience to present proven strategies for creating purposeful, positive and productive work cultures. Cultures where good comes first for employees, customers, leaders, and stakeholders—and where improved business outcomes quickly follow. In these pages, readers will learn to: Appreciate why a good comes first culture is a business imperative – especially for younger generations. Distance yourself from the competition that maintains its undefined work culture (one that most likely sucks). Identify what “good” means for your company in today’s business climate – and in the future of work. Define your uncompromising work culture as you build a foundation of respect AND results. Formalize your team’s servant purpose so that everyone understands how what your team does improves lives and communities. Specify respectful behaviors, so your desired values are observable, tangible, and measurable. Align your entire organization to your desired work culture – where good comes first every day. Assess the quality of your current work culture by measuring and monitoring how well your leaders and your executive team demonstrate your servant purpose, valued behaviors, strategies, and goals. Hold everyone accountable for both respect and results through modeling, celebrating, measuring, coaching, and mentoring leaders and team members. Implement real, needed change – and quit “thinking” and “talking” about change (but never really get change started). Become a change champion while creating a lasting legacy as a business leader. Build a team of good people doing good work in a good company. What’s more, Good Comes First shows you where potential barriers to success hide—and how to push through them—and illuminates the moments when you’ll feel the most satisfaction and gain the most traction. After reading this book, you will see that when done right, change is not only possible—it’s practical, powerful, and profitable. And you will realize that you are the right person, at the right time, to make that change happen.