Here is another real-world challenge to which we can apply the Zone to Win principles. Question: Hi Geoffrey, I’ve been reading a lot about your Zone to Win model online, (which I am entirely bought into and I am about to order the book as a result). I run a…

What Happens When the Productivity Zone Rules the Roost? “You are old, Father William,” the young man said, “And your hair has become very white; And yet you incessantly stand on your head- Do you think, at your age, it is right?” Zone management is founded on the principle that the core of any company is its Performance Zone…

One of the fun things about blogging and writing is that you get pinged from time to time with real-world challenges to your perfectly presented blog posts! Here is a recent exchange which helped me clarify my thinking on applying Zone to Win principles to the 3 Horizons Principles. Question: …

Once you get it up and running in full production, the XaaS business model is a beautiful thing. Each fiscal year you start with a greater proportion of your upcoming annual revenue target already booked-provided, that is, that your customers don’t churn. Aye, there’s the rub! Which brings us to…

In the Age of the Product, customer service ensured that the product lived up to its specifications. Everything after that was the customer’s responsibility, not the vendor’s. In the Age of the Customer, the bar has been raised. Now it is the outcome that must live up to the customer’s…

Data-driven decision-making: who doesn’t think it is a good idea? But it typically has a rough go in the real world of enterprise management, in part because the data itself often proves unreliable. For much of my business life IT has been tasked with building systems that could represent a…

As technological innovation continues to disrupt industry after industry in waves of what Joseph Schumpeter taught us to call “creative destruction,” executive decision-making is being driven down in the organizational hierarchy, closer to the customer, nearer to the action. This in turn is putting pressure on the HR function to…

Six-Sigma is Not Just for Supply Chains Okay, so you know a sector is in trouble when there is a Web page in Wikipedia entitled “The Retail Apocalypse.” This post is not about how much trouble retail is in. This one is about how it can get out. Let’s set the table first. In the past several…

Waking up to a World in which the Customer is King There is a lot of serious talk in America these days about improving the state of our manufacturing sector. Smart products, Internet of things, robotics, predictive maintenance-all great stuff. …