Walmart dominates retail by relentlessly focusing on price-sensitive customers. Everything in Walmart’s culture is focused on squeezing one more penny of cost out of their operations, and sharing those cost savings with customers. Much smaller retailer Nordstrom has only 2% of Walmart’s revenue, but generates higher profits by focusing on customers

Customers not only compare your service to what you have done in the past, but they also compare it to their other alternatives, or even similar experiences in entirely different domains.

Connecting your company with customers will require ongoing, continuous feedback between your company and customers. Without that continuous dialogue, it’s inevitable that you will drift apart over time. If you want to stay close to your customers, you will need to become a connected company.

Our companies have all been optimized for a perfect one-way stream, the line of production, and these pesky customers are mucking about in our operations, and we have now a completely different problem to solve. We need to optimize not for the line of production but for the line of interaction, the front line — the edge of the organization — where

What is true in nature is also true in strategy. Strategies don’t evolve in a vacuum. They coevolve, as organizations interact with each other and with their environments.

Bad profits maximize transaction value, but they destroy relationships in the process.

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.

In product-dominant logic, production is the core of the value-creation process, while customer service is a cost to be minimized. But in service-dominant logic, products are the cost centers, and services become the core value-creation processes.

It is already shifting the balance of power. It is changing the way power is controlled and exercised. It will change the way companies are organized and the way they do business.