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.

A customer-focused company knows what its customers care about and builds capabilities and strategies that reinforce its advantages over time.

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

And with the rise of blogs, social networks and other peer-to-peer communication channels, every customer can have his own megaphone.

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.

A service is different. While processes are designed to be consistent and uniform, services are co-created with customers each and every time a service is rendered. This difference is not superficial but fundamental.

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.

But they weren’t connected to a global network with the potential to amplify their opinions and experiences to hurricane strength. And that little thing we call “linking” makes all the difference.

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