Reorganize for Resilience: Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business

Description

In an era of raging commoditization and eroding profit margins, survival depends on resilience: staying one step ahead of your customers. Sure, most companies say they're "customer-focused," but they don't deliver solutions to customers' thorniest problems. Why? Because they're stymied by the rigid "silos" they're organized around. In Reorganize for Resilience, Ranjay Gulati reveals how resilient companies prosper both in good times and bad, driving growth and increasing profitability by immersing themselves in the lives of their customers. This book shows how resilient organizations cut through internal barriers that impede action, build bridges between warring divisions, and transform former competitors into collaborators. Based on more than a decade of research in a variety of industries, and filled with examples from companies including Cisco Systems, La Farge, Starbucks, Best Buy, and Jones Lang LaSalle, Gulati exploresthe five levers of resilience: * Coordination: Connect, eradicate, or restructure silos to enable swift responses. * Cooperation: Foster a culture that aligns all employees around the shared goals of customer solutions. * Clout: Redistribute power to "bridge builders" and customer champions. * Capability: Develop employees' skills at tackling changing customer needs. * Connection: Blend partners' offerings with yours to provide unique customer solutions.

Ranjay Gulati is the Jaime and Josefina Chua Tiampo Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School and previously the Michael L. Nemmers Distinguished Professor of Strategy and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. He is an expert on strategic and organizational issues in firms. His work has focused on intra and inter-firm partnerships with a focus on the patterns of network of ties that emerge over time. He is the past-President of the Business Policy and Strategy Division at the Academy of Management. He was recently ranked as among the top 10 most cited scholars in Economics and Business over the last 10 years by ISI-Incite. In 2005, he received the Best Professor Award for his teaching in the Kellogg-Schulich executive MBA program. He received the same award in 2003 for his teaching in the Kellogg-HKUST executive MBA program. In 1998-1999 and also 2004-2005 he received the Chairs' Core Teaching Award for his teaching in the MBA program at Kellogg.