In service‐based industries employees are in direct contact with customers, either personally or electronically, completing transactions that are part tangible and part…
Abstract
Purpose
In service‐based industries employees are in direct contact with customers, either personally or electronically, completing transactions that are part tangible and part experiential. In such industries, people have become integral to the value proposition. This paper aims to investigate this issue.
Design/methodology/approach
Case examples show how innovative service providers are learning to reconsider their service delivery employees as critical contributors to the value of the firm's offering. The paper focuses on two key questions: Is there a way to tell how people in a service firm are viewed and managed as strategic assets? How can they become strategic assets if they currently aren't?
Findings
To make people strategic assets of the firm: Criteria for selection and retention of people must be consistent with company values. Performance management must be linked through measurement to the firm's strategic goals.
Originality/value
The paper shows how in today's service‐based companies, employees are “the center of organizational performance.” Where people drive low‐cost service (Walmart) or where they become inseparable from the service (JetBlue and Starbucks), employees feel they are valued because they possess an acute awareness of the impact they have on their company's strategy.
Details
Keywords
David W. Crain and Stan Abraham
The paper aims to offer a five‐step method for discovering a customer's particular strategic needs based on a unique application of value‐chain analysis.
Abstract
Purpose
The paper aims to offer a five‐step method for discovering a customer's particular strategic needs based on a unique application of value‐chain analysis.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper presents a five‐step approach. Step 1 explains how internal and external value chains can be used separately and in related ways. Step 2 shows how to construct a customer's value chain. Step 3 shows how to identify the customer's business strategy by examining this value chain and using other kinds of information. Step 4 explains how to use additional information and intelligence to leverage that understanding into strategic needs and priorities. Step 5 explains how a firm's marketing function can best use this method of value‐chain analysis as a new strategic capability.
Findings
The benefits for doing this analysis on important customers include: identifying new high value business opportunities (and improving revenue); and strengthening the business‐to‐business (B2B) customer relationship: clarifying their strategic priorities allows enhanced alignment of actions with desired results.
Practical implications
A value‐chain analysis – combined with other kinds of information –is key to discovering the B2B customers' strategic needs and creating new business that will not only get a receptive audience but also command premium margins.
Originality/value
For B2B service companies, it is the external value chain that presents many new opportunities for business growth. Even though these processes occur outside the corporation, the strategic opportunities they reveal and areas of risk they highlight warrant careful study.
Details
Keywords
Reviews the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoints practical implications from cutting‐edge research and case studies.
Abstract
Purpose
Reviews the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoints practical implications from cutting‐edge research and case studies.
Design/methodology/approach
This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.
Findings
In today's service‐based companies, employees are “the center of organizational performance”. For the service‐based firm, where people deliver the service or where they become inseparable from the service, employees feel they are valued because they possess an acute awareness of the impact they have on their company's strategy.
Practical implications
Provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world's leading organizations.
Originality/value
The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy‐to digest format.
Details
Keywords
Previous studies of late adolescent protesters on university campuses have generally focused on the social, psychological, and political differences between protesters and…
Abstract
Previous studies of late adolescent protesters on university campuses have generally focused on the social, psychological, and political differences between protesters and non‐protesters. Yet differences among the protesters themselves have rarely been the topic of intensive inquiry. Caught by surprise at the rapid surge of New Leftist campus protest, social scientists and psychologists hurriedly attempted to explain the phenomenon by discovering the differences between activists and non‐activists. Thus university protesters have generally been conceived as a somewhat homogenous mass set against their less radical fellow students.
This article employs a system analytic framework to categorize the available research literature on the politics of education in order to explain the inter‐relationship of private…
Abstract
This article employs a system analytic framework to categorize the available research literature on the politics of education in order to explain the inter‐relationship of private and public interests and of different levels in primary and secondary American schools. The objectives are several: to explain and develop the analytical framework of David Easton; to illustrate its heuristic utility by categorizing empirically‐based research within the components of that framework, and to suggest and encourage future research directions in the subject. Education has escaped application of traditional policy analysis in America because educators have convinced scholars and laymen that they are “non‐political,” a label which even most political scientists have accepted without challenge. However, during the 1960s, a few scholars in education and political science began to apply political analytical methods to public school conflict. This research has begun to change perceptions of education and to provide a beginning set of research projects whose data support tentative generalization about the policy‐making process and the total system of public schools. This orientation is bound to increase because of increasing national government intervention in local schools, both through integration and financial policies. These have provoked growing conflict locally over the proper direction of school policies. In this article, we see how such stress is transmitted in the form of “demands” and “supports” into the “political system”, that persistent social mechanism known in all societies in different forms provides an “authoritative allocation of values and resources”. The political system, in this case public school bodies, “converts” such “inputs” into “outputs” of public policy, which in their administration create outcomes which later cause a “feedback” into the political system as the material for new policy demands. For each component of this Eastonian system, this article examines relevant research, providing an extensive annotated bibliography. From this review, it is possible to suggest lines of needed research.
This masterclass aims to consider a number of recent business articles and books that can help practitioners clarify the distinction between the strategy development and business…
Abstract
Purpose
This masterclass aims to consider a number of recent business articles and books that can help practitioners clarify the distinction between the strategy development and business model approaches and decide which is appropriate for their situation.
Design/methodology/approach
The article defines the difference between the two approaches this way: business models explain who your customers are and how you plan to make money by providing them with value; strategy identifies how you will beat competitors by being different.
Findings
The paper reveals that a business model approach has limitations. It will not help an organization develop a competitive advantage, outperform its competition, acquire or merge with another organization, or diversify. However, corporate strategy does not identify how to deliver unique value to meet customers' needs.
Practical implications
The main reason why organizations fail at business‐model innovation is too much “tweaking” – incremental attempts at improvement in myriad projects when more radical change to its business model is the answer.
Originality/value
The article proposes that businesses need both strategy development and business model innovation to adapt and thrive as conditions change.