Stratton Index

They Obsess Over the Metrics That Customers Value

RELX is a 200-year-old London-based company formerly known as Reed Elsevier.

CEO—Engstrom, who was a McKinsey consultant and an executive at two publishing houses before assuming leadership of RELX, did that by coaching every RELX employee to obsess over “customer value”—the benefit the customer realizes from using a product. He has been repeating the same questions for 20 years: How does the customer measure value? How do we know? How do we measure that? How does using this product improve the customer’s economics? How do we know how much better off the customer is with our product—and how do we know that it is better on that metric than the alternatives are?

All too often when companies talk about customer metrics, they look at numbers such as customer acquisition cost, customer retention, lifetime value, and average transaction size—metrics that reflect how a customer benefits the company. In contrast, the how-obsessed CEOs we’ve studied focus on metrics that reflect how the company benefits the customer.

Focusing deeply on how the company creates and delivers value for its customers was a cornerstone of the practices of the leaders we studied. According to our interviews, people in the organization don’t experience this specific kind of detail orientation as micromanaging. Rather, it creates mission clarity. When leaders show how much they personally care about what matters most to customers, attending to details becomes a shared norm for every employee—which expands the decision rights of those close to the front lines.

They are not inserting themselves into every decision or displacing their teams. Instead, they act as teachers and system builders: They're present in the work not to control it or make every decision themselves but to model standards, sharpen problem-solving, and establish behavioral norms that enable others to act with autonomy and discipline. They don't meddle-they coach. They don't override-they elevate. They don't hoard decision rights—they teach others how to make sound decisions on their own. Their involvement is not disempowering—it is energizing. And it is purposeful: to build a system that performs reliably even when they're not in the room.