Excellence or Innovation?

Attended a talk by Don Peppers, a leading authority on customer-focused relationship management strategies for business, yesterday.

He spoke about why being customer-focused requires the company to be both innovative and flawless operations and how being better at your current business often makes it harder to be innovative and went on to present a "mental model" for how a company can use technology to:

- Harness the diverse ideas of both employees and customers to generate faster and better innovation;
- Tap the power of customer word-of-mouth and online social networks to improve satisfaction, loyalty, trust and referrals;
- Execute better by engaging and enabling employees to become a "self-organizing" force for creating genuine economic value.

He also had a couple of slides about "Path-dependence" and demonstrated it effectively within the audience by asking everyone to clap rhythmically. Within a split-second, the entire auditorium was clapping in unison.

Anyway, the talk made me think - everything we need to know is already out there! But old ideas can are rehashed convincingly with the support of new examples, and that's exactly what he did.

The world spins another day!