Free, Perfect, and Now: Connecting to the Three Insatiable Customer Demands: A CEO's True Story - Softcover

Rodin, Robert

 
9780684863122: Free, Perfect, and Now: Connecting to the Three Insatiable Customer Demands: A CEO's True Story
Softcover
ISBN 10: 068486312X ISBN 13: 9780684863122
Verlag: Free Press, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

In a world where knowledge is king, the Web never sleeps, and competitive challenge increases exponentially, Robert Rodin shows you how to prepare for the three insatiable demands of today's customers: they want their product or service FREE, they want it PERFECT, and they want it NOW. No matter what business you're in, you have to find a way to respond -- or risk losing your customers to competitors who are discovering new ways to sell your product or service cheaper, better, and faster than you've ever imagined.
As the dynamic CEO of electronics distributor Marshall Industries, Rob Rodin engineered the astounding reinvention of his company, turning a conventionally successful $500 million business into a Web-enabled $2 billion competitive powerhouse. Free, Perfect, and Now tells the dramatic story of that transformation from the inside. Detailing the hard lessons learned in competitive battle, it offers a compelling new perspective on the most pressing issue facing businesspeople today: how to prepare a customer-focused corporation for a future you can't predict.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert Rodin is the former CEO and president of Marshall Industries. He is presently founder, chairman, and CEO of eConnections, and creator of the world's number-one business-to-business Web site, providing services, management, and infrastructure to create supply chain solutions.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One

The Customer Connection:

Addressing the Problem

"Why Do They Call It an Idiot Light?"

Do you lie awake at night, as I do, worrying that someone will come along tomorrow and eat your lunch?

In the electronic '90s, knowledge is king, the Web never sleeps, and competitive challenge increases exponentially. It's easy to feel overwhelmed. Dizzied by the frenetic pace of change and confused by overwhelming choices, too many managers react with too little too late -- then sit back and watch as their companies or their careers slowly wither.

Could this be you?

Absolutely.

Does it have to be you?

Absolutely not -- if you can open your eyes to the three new imperatives of customer-focused organizational design: free, perfect, and now.

Whether we work in the glass towers of the Fortune 500 or a garage startup in Silicon Valley, all of us in business wrestle with the same intractable dilemmas. How do we compete in a networked world of mass customization,
shrinking margins, and global competition? Yesterday change came gradually; today it comes in a flood. How can we ensure that our organizations offer substantial value to our customers now -- and in the future? No one knows what the world will look like in five years or even five minutes. How can we prepare for a tomorrow that we can't predict?

I don't have an easy answer to either of these questions. If there were a pill you could take to stay ahead of the curve, I would have taken it myself long ago. What I have instead is a story of management on trial; a tale of transformation, of great risk for great reward, and of the hard lessons we have learned about inventing a new future.

As it happens, it is my own story, and that of Marshall Industries, the electronics distributor I lead, but the challenges we faced at Marshall are those confronting every organization anywhere in the world today. I'm not a consultant pretending that change is a matter of five steps and a pep talk: I've lived inside its gut-wrenching turmoil. Six years ago we bet our company on a radical experiment, tearing our healthy $500 million business down to bedrock. We threw out all of our old motivational tools, taking 1,100 managers off management-by-objectives (MBOs) plans and incentives as well as abolishing commissions for our 600 salespeople. We changed every operating system at the same time. Then we set out to reinvent ourselves. From those sleepless nights and desperate choices, I've brought back a new perspective and a new prescription, tested in a bare-knuckle business: a better way to think about designing an organization to master the currents of change.

It starts, like everything else in business, with customers. No matter what business you're in, your customers all want the same three things: They want it free, they want it perfect, and they want it now.

Impossible, you say? What do you want when you buy? Don't you think your customers want the same things?

Impossible or not doesn't matter in the end, because these three things are what the market searches for regardless. I guarantee you that as you read this, somewhere, around the corner or around the world, someone is figuring out how to sell your product or service cheaper, faster, or better than you've yet imagined. Recognizing your survival depends on your ability to create an organization that can chase those same elusive goals, only even faster -- or risk losing your customers to the competitor who does.

Look at how drastically your own day-to-day activities have changed, from the way you book your airline ticket to how you get from an ATM to shopping for car prices on the Internet. Five years ago, who had a cellular phone or a fax machine at home? Now they're everywhere, changing the way all of us connect and communicate. The business landscape has changed even more dramatically. Today, the world competes in ways we couldn't have imagined a few years ago, driven by six powerful forces: networked technology, globalization, demographics, the compression of product life cycles, mass customization, and the growing importance of supply-chain management.

"Only Connect"

Marshall Industries is a fifty-two-year-old, $1.7 billion electronics distributor, traded on the New York Stock Exchange. But we're as different today from the old seat-of-the-pants middleman as the Internet is from a cow path. Think of us as a high-speed junction box, connection between two sets of incredibly demanding constituencies. On the one side, we have some 150 suppliers, such as Toshiba, Texas Instruments, and Hitachi, all depending on us to get their products to market. On the other, we have over sixty thousand customers including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and WebTV, who rely on to us to get them what they need. We're in the middle, thirty-seven locations and 1,600 people, 600 of them salespeople.

It can get pretty intense inside all that. Suppliers and customers measure the life cycles of successful products in months. They live or die on their time-to-market and time-to-volume, and turn to us for help with increasingly complex inventory, manufacturing, and quality-control problems.

And Marshall delivers. We still move boxes -- we ship over ten thousand cartons through our robotic warehouse each day -- but we also sell our ability to move information, the real-time business intelligence our customers need most, available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week by phone or fax or over one of our twenty-four Internet sites. We still deliver parts -- over 250,000 different items, ranging from semiconductors and disk drives to liquid-crystal displays and programmable logic devices -- but we also sell our ability to create made-to-order solutions, our collective thinking power to anticipate the customer's business problems and to design processes to solve them.

"Virtual distribution," we call it, and it has turned our conventionally successful $500 million company into a $1.7 billion iconoclast in under six years. No less an authority than Bill Gates has decreed that in the wired world, the middleman is obsolete, but we're proving him wrong. We are becoming our customers' connection to the future, connecting people to people, people to technology, answers to questions, solutions to problems, and order to chaos.

Virtual distribution didn't spring fully formed from my head one bright spring morning. The initial vision of value-added service through a seamless and frictionless connection with each customer's infrastructure was largely mine. But the reality, however, was developed through thousands of conversations over the last six years, involving everyone in the company talking day to day with their customers and one another, taking thousands of small steps up the
learning curve.

Every day, suppliers and customers make instantaneous choices about which distributor to use. The challenge is to nurture relationships that become more meaningful as they progress. We have to be able to provide sophisticated answers to problems that customers may not even know they have. Like a furniture designer trying to create an ergonomic chair, we've tried to design our interface to fit customer needs, letting their voices tell us how our processes should look and feel. Everyone at Marshall asks the same one-on-one question: How can I serve you better? How can we more quickly achieve the goals of free, perfect, and now? We are discovering what virtual distribution can mean, together, through the answers we find.

Of course we're open twenty-four hours a day -- customers around the globe want service around the clock.

Of course we're open-book, open-architecture, open-door -- knowledge is power, and it needs to be spread, not hoarded.

Of course we're continually...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Free Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2000
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
068486312X
ISBN 13 
9780684863122
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
260
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9780684850221: Free, Perfect, and Now: Connecting to the Three Insatiable Customer Demands: A CEO's True Story

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  0684850222 ISBN 13:  9780684850221
Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 1999
Hardcover