The Customer is the Only Boss
Steve Towers, author and renowned speaker on Business
Process Management, explains how complete focus on the
customer is the route to success.
them into dashboards and scorecards
and … wait.
The language of business seems to be
about the battle between companies
and customers. What about the phrases
“front line” or “customer engagement”,
even ‘the customer is always right’? They
are all confrontational.
Think about how we organise ourselves.
If I asked you to sketch your
organisation chart what it would look
like? Yes, a hierarchical pyramid with the
“There is only one boss. The
big jobs at the top. Why is that so? It is
customer. And he can fire everybody
a mindset that was created in command
in the company from the chairman
and control times and relates to
on down, simply by spending his
effective warfare strategy from the
money somewhere else.” Sam
middle of the nineteenth century.
Walton, founder of Walmart
Effective warfare strategy?!
And never has there been a time when
So why organise ourselves and work
this is more true. Competition,
that way? Because we always have. Now
globalisation, conformance, complexity
changing times and new, volatile
are all things forcing us to look at how
demands are meaning that those ways of
work gets done. To do it better, faster,
doing stuff are just no longer as
cheaper. And boy, are we trying. We are
effective. Organisations who understand
looking at efficiency, effectiveness and
that have already transformed to a
waste. We monitor the numbers, put
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