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.

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.

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

Services cannot be designed and manufactured in isolation, like products. They are co-created with customers and are interdependent with wider service networks and clusters.

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.

In the same way, a product can be considered to be a physical manifestation of a service or set of services: a service avatar. Products come with knowledge and services embedded within them.

Companies tend to lose touch with customers as they grow, for a variety of reasons. Companies must find ways to create, maintain, and develop deep connections as they grow.

The purpose of a company is what it does for 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.