Suman Sarkar - Customer-Driven Disruption: Five Strategies to Stay Ahead of the Curve

Praise for Customer-Driven Disruption

Suman Sarkar redirects the focus back to what made your business a business: its customers. With many case studies and concise takeaways, this book is a handy guide to shaking up your innovation strategy.

Crystal Kadakia, author of The Millennial Myth

Suman Sarkar is a strategist after my own heartlike me, he believes that real change and innovation come from customers actual needs and wants, not from researchers in lab coats. Customers will tell you how to make your business thrive and win the futureif you learn how to listen. This book explains how to open your ears.

Jeanne Bliss, President, CustomerBliss, and author of Chief Customer Officer 2.0

Sarkar puts forth new, actionable definitions of customer focus, personalization, and quality along with a road map that your team can use to think creatively and be more willing to take intelligent risks.

John A. Goodman, Vice Chairman, Customer Care Measurement & Consulting

This is an excellent, thought-provoking book that offers clear strategies enabling you to understand buying patterns and generational expectations. Customer-Driven Disruption will inspire you to effectively plan for and stay ahead of your competition by focusing on your customers and what they want.

Renee Evenson, author of nine books including Powerful Phrases for Effective Customer Service and Powerful Phrases for Dealing with Difficult People

In Customer-Driven Disruption, Sarkar shows that technology isnt the real driver of disruption, and he unveils many more surprises that will challenge your assumptions and prepare you and your organization to stay ahead.

Steve Curtin, author of Delight Your Customers

CUSTOMER-DRIVEN
DISRUPTION

FIVE STRATEGIES TO STAY AHEAD OF THE CURVE

SUMAN SARKAR

AUTHOR OF THE SUPPLY CHAIN REVOLUTION

Customer-Driven Disruption

Copyright 2019 by Suman Sarkar

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions Coordinator, at the address below.

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First Edition

Hardcover print edition ISBN 978-1-5230-9975-7

PDF e-book ISBN 978-1-5230-9976-4

IDPF e-book ISBN 978-1-5230-9977-1

Digital audio ISBN 978-1-5230-9979-5

2019-1

Interior design and production: Seventeenth Street Studios

Cover design: The BookDesigners

Copyedit: Todd Manza

Index: Richard Evans

This book is dedicated to the memory
of my mother, Dipti Sarkar,
and my father, Ranjan Sarkar,
for their love, encouragement, and support.

I M A BUSINESS CONSULTANT , and my neighbor is the CFO of a Fortune 100 company; we talk about our work a lot. We once spent an entire barbecue talking about supply chains. So of course I told him about this book, and I was taken aback when he said, Why are you writing about customers? Every business leader knows customers are important. Its a clich. Youre talking motherhood and apple pie.

If you put it like that, yes. But knowing and doing are two different things.

This book is about the doing. Even executives who claim that customers are important dont always know what their customers needs are or how to deliver them. Some know but are afraid to try. And some wont even try. Over the years, Ive consulted with leaders at more than forty Fortune 500 companies, and meetings like the following are frustratingly common.

The CEO of a leading global delivery services company (lets call them Big D) knew that his retail customers wanted their local stores to provide home delivery; demand for that is increasing. But home delivery often costs more than the products! So Big D had another plan: convince people to pick up packages themselves until Big D had developed a drone or bot delivery system. Spending money on technology was fine with Big Ds board, but the CEO knew that getting the drones to work would take so long that a start-up or Amazon would come up with a better solution first. So Big Ds CEO was open to ideas, and after a conversation with someone on my teamFred, an ex-employee of Big D, whom he respected and trustedhe told one of his executives to meet with us.

Fred and I were excited about our idea when we went in to make our pitch to Barry, the head of innovation. Wed sent him the presentation beforehand, so after the niceties were over, I said, Hey, Barry, how do you want to do this? Weve shared the presentation with you already. Do you have questions, or do you want us to start from the beginning?

Ive read it, but start at the beginning.

So we showed him how Big D could provide same-day local delivery at half their current costs, using rented trucks and reusable packaging (another customer complaint was that people were fed up with the cardboard boxes). Barry let us go through it, but he was obviously bored. His comment was Were Big D. We have certain standards. Youre telling us to do this with chewing gum and toothpicks!

I wanted to say Does your customer care? When Im getting a pizza, I dont care if it comes on a tricycle as long as I get a hot pie! But I didnt say that; there was no point in antagonizing him. It was clear to me that he was only there because his bosss boss had told him to see us, and, like many people in the middle layer at large corporations, he would rather kill an idea than try anything that risked his position in the organizationespecially anything new.

Conversations like this are incredibly frustrating to me. The book was born out of that frustration, coupled with the knowledge that companies whose leaders focus on short-term investor returns, ignore customer needs, and kill new ideas will fail. The book is a plea for change and a guide to making it. Leaders with the courage to do things differently will disrupt their industries and topple the companies whose leaders cant or wont. I hope the book inspires you to become a disrupter and shows you how to address customer needs in new, innovative ways.