Shaping Customer Focus

Speed of decision making slows down and in many businesses decision making actually grinds to a halt. It is a strange organizational phenomenon. Paradoxically, the demands for change and improvement urgently require solutions to promote organizational effectiveness. But what typically happens?

Incapacity to Make Strategic Decisions

The capacity of the organization to arrive at and implement decisions freezes completely. We have found that organizational changes put many people into a 'hold' pattern of activity struggling for several months. This freezing or slowing down in the 'change process' exists because of a high degree of perceived uncertainty in how the organization manages ambiguity in its environment.

Fundamentally, this is a reflection on the business in terms of its ability to delight the customer and is particularly a problem when managing the expectations of customers. If companies fail to prove to their customers that they are responsive to change, the customer will go elsewhere. Customers are fickle and desire perfection.

Failing to Deal with the Rapidity of Change

Organizations in both the private and public sector, need to respond rapidly to meet customers' changing expectations if they hope to survive. Companies that fail to commit to delighting their customer and using any complaint as a business opportunity to enhance customer loyalty will soon lose their customers.

Organizations that have failed to master 'customer relationships' (internal and external) usually have major difficulty mastering human relations inside the business. Businesses that have not yet captured fully the skills and abilities of their most able employees are failing to master their potential. A tremendous opportunity is wasted.

Passion & People make the Difference

We believe the dual challenge to any organization is the ability to nurture and develop its people, to drive, align and meet and eventually exceed customer expectations.

This challenge is sadly lacking in the average enterprise. If an organization is not investing and striving to get better at using its people to delight the customer then it is probably standing still. If you're standing still, chances are that you're slipping backwards and the competition will have overtaken you.

Powerful Organisational Model of Continuous Improvement

This book has been written to push the average organization forward. The focus of the book is to outline a powerful change model, not just to give a business an advantage but to develop the capability of a strategic trajectory and powerful propulsion system for continuous improvement - totally focused upon aligning with the customer.

The book focuses upon three Strategic Imperatives for change

• Achieve 100% alignment with the customer
• Develop as a core competency the internal capability to create change agents to drive change within the organization
• Create and refine a process of continual organizational renewal and improvement

It is a fact of life that business is becoming far more complex and those organizations that are going to survive will have to learn to master and drive change rather than be a victim of it.

Change in business in the past 30 years has been slow in comparison to that which will have to be mastered in the future. In the new Century, more organizations will have to give special attention to rapidly implementing changes.

Change is Accelerating

Change itself is accelerating at an accelerating rate. We recognize that probably 90% of organizations are failing to maintain their ability to adapt and change at the rate at which they should. Their future is not rosy. Consider the top 100 of the Fortune 500 companies in the US in 1988.

Today less than 50% register in that same list. Some no longer exist.

This is not a temporary trend. For organizations to prosper and change it is imperative that they learn to master rather than merely adapt to their environment.

This book addresses the need to fully understand the dynamics of customer focused change in order to develop and practise change itself. It also deals with a variety of diagnostic and change tools, which will help internal change agents analyze the situations and respond swiftly and accordingly.

A combination of these cultural tools and methodologies can be used to 'triangulate' the causes of such problems and then quickly act to implement any necessary improvement.

We focus on the difficult side of the change process - namely the dynamics inherent within the business culture.

Fundamentally, we have four Sections each with specific Chapters focused upon those areas for installing Customer Focused Continuous Improvement.

Philip Atkinson  and Ian Millar

Price £30 plus Postage £3

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