Brown - The Customer Culture Imperative: A Leader’s Guide to Driving Superior Performance.

PRAISE FOR THE CUSTOMER CULTURE IMPERATIVE

Smart phones, smart networks and personalized apps are changing the way people live and work, giving control to an emerging class of globally connected customers that have the power to shift markets. Linden and Chris Browns work will help you understand what is happening and what it means to your business.
David Thodey, Telstra Chief Executive Officer

Over the 40+ years of my life in business I have always known that a customer culture is the key to success. How to achieve it has been a continuous search and challenge. This book is the clearest roadmap I have read to truly achieve a customer culture and all the benefits it brings.
John Stanhope, Chairman, Australia Post

Some books, alas very rare, summarize well-researched management theory, combined with current best practice, to deliver powerful and pragmatic guidelines for growing shareholder value. This is one such book. Read it. Enjoy it. It is a powerful contribution to best practice.
Malcolm McDonald, Emeritus Professor, Cranfield University School of Management

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From Linden

To my wife and life partner, Marie-Noelle, whose tireless work in helping othersextended family, friends, and the wider communityreminds us every day what it really means to be customer-centric.

From Chris

To my best friend and wife, Stephanie, my personal role model for how to be customer-centric.

I also want to dedicate this book to my grandfather, grandmother, mum, and dad, who instilled in me from an early age a love of learning and the passion and drive to take on big challenges. They taught me that doing the right thing may sometimes be the hardest thing in the short term but always pays off in the long run.

This book is about creating, building, and maintaining customer-centric organizations and how leading companies have done it. It gives you a framework for assessing your businesss customer-centricity and steps to strengthen it. From our detailed research of more than a hundred companies in 20072010 we became convinced that whats best for the customer is also best for the business. Those companies that have strong customer-centricity outperform those that dont. When we started our journey down this path we had a vision to spark and sustain a customer culture transformation in organizations around the world that inspires employees, delights customers, and rewards shareholders. In talking with business leaders over the past two years who have willingly given their time and experience for stories and cases for this book, we have realized that customer-centricity has a much higher purposea purpose that has benefits not only for customers and stockholders but also for employees, the community, and the planet. We would be so bold as to say that it can act as a transformation of the way business works for the betterment of society if enough organizations truly adopt a customer-centric culture as the enduring way in which they do business.

We believe that if more companies follow the lead of Virgin, Starbucks, Amazon.com, Zappos, Costco, and salesforce.com, where their purpose is beyond short-term profit and they enact their real vision of doing good for people (their customers, employees, and the wider community), a transformation will occur. This will result in more satisfied and less-stressed customers, happier and highly engaged employees who look forward each day to contributing to their companys higher purpose, fewer layoffs of highly competent people with the associated stress for their families, more effective innovation that produces products and services valued by customers and the wider community, and a longer-term legacy. We believe this aspiration is worth striving for, and as leaders in organizations, large and small, we will all be far happier and will leave an enduring legacy for the generations to come.

Richard Branson puts it this way: