Kendall Consulting Group - Hot Topic Overview - Value Disciplines
HOT
TOPIC OVERVIEW -
Value Disciplines
Overview
Over a dozen years ago two colleagues of ours were looking for a way to articulate the differences between customers and how companies approaches their customers. They collected a mountain of information about customer preferences and company responses and then had the ephihany that led to the book, The Discipline of Market Leaders, and the related Harvard Business Review article. Michael Treacy and Fred Weirsema had done what no other market researchers had done at the time; they'd created a new landscape for marketing, redefined the relationship between a company and its customers, and created a much more solid basis for reengineering a company's operations.
Since that time, Kendall Consulting Group has worked with companies to apply the Value Disciplines concept that resulted from the work of Treacy and Weirsema. Their thesis is that companies want one of three basic value sets when they deal with a supplier:
• Operational excellence
• Customer intimacy
• Product leadership
The activities, services and behaviors that customers valued, fit distinctly into one of these three categories.
If customers valued Operational Excellence, then cost was often an issue, but also quality, delivery reliability, ease of service, and many other similar values. If customers cited values such as anticipation of needs, having an institutional memory regarding my needs, and the creation of unique relationships, then they customer intimacy was their primary value set. Lastly, customers that had to have leading edge products or services, were those that valued product leadership more than any other discipline. How did we learn what customers really wanted from a particular set of suppliers? We asked them in a carefully crafted survey that went far beyond merely asking questions about customer satisfaction.
Companies wanting to serve these customers were more successful when they aligned their operations, culture and systems towards the value discipline that their customers felt was most important. Certainly, they had to maintain acceptable levels of performance in the other discipline areas, but they had to work to excel in the area that their customers valued most.
As we started to work with this concept we were surprised at how few companies adhered to these principles. Instead, they muddled through with mixed reviews from their customers base. Occasionally, we observed a company trying to be something that their customers didn't value, and in these cases they were failing to achieve their strategic objectives.
The articles we present in this Hot Topic area are to help readers understand the Value Disciplines concept and its application. Most recently we have been helping several companies use the concept as a driver of business change and organizational innovation towards a particular value discipline. Often these project activities have been called business process reengineering. The question with reengineering, however, often turned out to be "how will I know when I've been successful?" Putting value disciplines ahead of such a methodology provided the strategic direction and goal sets so that process innovators knew which direction to move and how far.
The articles and cases listed in this hot topic area take a look at Value Disciplines from the viewpoint of a consultant practitioner. We have used these techniques successfully to help transform companies and to help them help themselves to be more of what their customers really want. In doing so, they've become winners.
###
Articles directly related to becoming a market leader
Read
the Hot Topic Overview!! (Click Here!!)
•
Do You Want To Be A Value Discipline Leader?
(New)
•
Visit To An Operational Excellent Company (New)
• Value Disciplines
•
Role of IS Strategy in Making Market Leaders
•
Change Management
•
Strategy
Implementation
• Case study: Coming Soon
• Case study: Coming Soon
More coming soon!!!
Kendall Consulting Group is an international general management consulting firm specializing in strategy execution, change management, and executive education. We invite you to contact us for how we might help you and your company grow and prosper.
You may reference and use the material from any of the articles provided that full written credit is given to the company and authors in your work.
© 2004 Kendall
Consulting Group of Sarasota, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
