The Connected Company

This works for McDonald’s because they have narrowed customer expectations to match a factory-like service.

When in doubt, don’t look inside your company for answers. Turn around and face the market. Get back in touch with your customers.

To adapt, companies must operate not as machines but as learning organisms, purposefully interacting with their environment and continuously improving, based on experiments and feedback.

Focusing on customers doesn’t mean trying to please everyone. It’s about getting a deep sense of who your customers are and what they care about.

Learning is fundamentally different than training. Training is when a company teaches people how to do stuff that the company already knows how to do. Learning is a way to deal with new, uncertain, and ambiguous situations, a process of exploration by which you come to find and discover new things.

Customers have a tendency to resist standardization. The more you try to standardize their service requests, the more you will anger them. Not a good recipe for customer satisfaction or long-term business growth.

The best way to acquire new customers is to engage existing customers.

The complexity of the new networked, interdependent economy creates an ambiguous, uncertain, competitive landscape. Companies must be flexible enough to rapidly respond to changes in their environments, or risk extinction.

A company can’t create value on its own: value is only created through exchange. The customer must participate in defining and determining that value.

A system is not just the sum of its parts. What makes a system work is not the parts in isolation, but the interactions between them, and the inherent tradeoffs that must be made to achieve different kinds of system performance. Standardization is something you apply to the parts of a system, not a whole. A best practice from one company, or from o