Competing Globally Through Customer Value: The Management of Strategic Suprasystems

As more countries experience growing political freedoms and gravitate toward market-based economies, as Europe becomes further integrated, as Japan targets new industries, worldwide competition should become even stronger. As global competition intensifies, business must develop new ways of managing and competing. Those firms that do not, may not survive the global economic competitions of the 1990s. The answer the contributors give in this book to the questions why should management practices change? and how is change implemented? is embodied in the phrase customer value . The central focus of management, they argue, should be the determination, creation, enhancement and delivery of best net value to the customer. In their view, customers do not care about the firm’s profitability, quarterly earnings per share, the firm’s stock price or how much the firm shipped last month. They do care that a company has taken into account their concerns of quality, cost and response/delivery time of products/services. The company sees evidence of customer appreciation through the residuals of higher market share and profitability, as well as no longer having to worry about the competition. The second major theme of the book is a natural outgrowth of the central theme: management must continuously improve strategic suprasystems which focus upon discovering, creating, improving and delivering value to the customer. A strategic suprasystem is the collection of resources and activities which are crucial to producing and delivering customer value. Such new roles for managerial-leaders are the backbone of a new managerial paradigm, a paradigm made more accessible by the inclusion in the book of several case studies of companies engaged in competition through customer value.