Chapter 10

Leveraging Your Culture and Value Chain

To recap and connect our various discussions thus far, Level I customer focus (A) revolved around voice of the customer (VOC) activities and sought to measure, track, and improve the supplier’s ability to identify, or detect, and meet the customer’s unmet needs at the point of transaction. Level II customer focus (B) concentrated on teaming with the customer in ways that further differentiated the supplier’s ability to deliver value, developed a more complete view of customer value and unstated needs, and created barriers to entry at multiple touch points across the entire customer’s experience. (See Figure 10.1.)

Level III is all about building and leveraging a customer-centric culture (C); building a culture that is characterized by an ask, act, and align mindset in every aspect of the supplier’s business. It involves sustaining that culture with a system of internal management practices that support and drive the customer focus, and are aligned with each other. Finally, Level III is about leveraging that culture to continually improve the supplier organization’s internal effectiveness, extending the loyalty of the supplier’s customers and employees, and proactively engaging the rest of the supplier’s value chain to surface unknown opportunities to add value and optimize the mutual profitability of Level III relationships and practices.

This final chapter is about fully capitalizing on all of the capabilities and customer focus differentiators you’ve developed during the journey through Levels I, II, and III. It’s about increasing the impact of those capabilities and taking steps to leverage your culture into other parts of your value chain. The ultimate goal is to align the key players in that chain, and optimize their relationships and interactions for the mutual benefit of everyone involved.

There are four steps Level III suppliers take over time to further extend the reach, impact, and gains of its Level III capabilities and culture. Not all Level III organizations take all four steps, but some degree of progress in each step is essential for taking full advantage of related opportunities for revenue and profit growth. Those four steps are depicted in Figure 10.2. Each step builds on the prior step below it; and each successive step involves more advanced capabilities, as well as more economic return.

Leverage Existing Loyalty

Level III organizations take active steps to leverage the existing loyalty they’ve generated, at all three levels, into broader brand advocacy both outside and inside of the organization. This means they take existing loyal relationships and ensure they are translating or extending into advocacy and growth for their brand.

Helping Your Customers Extend Their Loyalty

One misconception supplier organizations often have is they assume their loyal customers will automatically, or naturally, behave or act like loyal customers in all situations. For example, you might be enjoying your desired share of wallet (SOW) with a given customer, and they might clearly prefer you to other suppliers, and buy from you instead of from other suppliers. Those benefits, however, are still limited to their immediate relationship with you. Their loyalty to you has not yet extended beyond that relationship into their relationships with others. While they might give you high marks on your surveys, they might be reluctant to provide you with testimonials. While they might prefer your brand, they aren’t necessarily advocating your brand to others, which is the type of leveraged loyalty you ultimately want in Level III. You gradually want more and more of your customers going out of their way to generate awareness, publicly promote your brand, and help create demand for your offerings.

Some customers will do this naturally as they become increasingly satisfied with and loyal to you. Others will not. That’s why many supplier organizations have an explicit approach or process to ensure a customer’s loyalty is leveraged as much as possible. (Recall that leveraging loyalty was actually a key pivot point in the customer’s experience map in Chapter 7.) They don’t assume it will happen without their prompting and driving it.

Customers often fail to take this important next step on their own either because they don’t want to, or because they just haven’t thought about it.

We find that some customer organizations try to avoid, or don’t like to discuss the notion of being loyal to a supplier, even though their preferences and decisions are clearly that of a loyal customer. They often avoid it because they don’t want other potential suppliers to be discouraged from approaching them with better deals, or they want to portray an image of spreading their spend across various suppliers—not just to their preferred ones. As a result, they are reluctant or slow to act when it comes to advocating one particular supplier. Other customers shy away from the loyalty label because they don’t really understand what loyalty means. They focus too much on the word, and lose sight of the positive behaviors you’re after.

For example, in one particular company, their customer satisfaction measurement (CSM) survey asked a question about how likely the customer would be to refer the supplier to others. Some responding customers who gave the supplier very high marks in all areas of the survey said they would not refer the supplier to others. The explanations they gave included such comments as:

• “Why would I let other companies know about my secret?!?!”
• “The more customers I send your way, the harder it will be to get your attention.”
• “You seem awfully slow to commit additional resources as you grow. Maybe if we saw a better job of you staffing up for growth, we’d be more willing to help you grow.”
• “We’ve got a good thing going right now—adding more players to the picture just confuses things.”
• “As a matter of company policy, we do not make those kinds of referrals.”

In many cases, where an otherwise loyal customer is hesitant about making a referral or providing a testimonial, it is often because they feel the supplier’s attention or service to them might be diluted as the supplier is spread thinner and thinner across a growing customer base. Interestingly, in several cases where a seemingly loyal survey respondent cited company policy as the obstacle, we found that there really was not any company policy prohibiting it. The individual respondent was actually using policy as an excuse to avoid surfacing other issues that were really bothering him. Still other customers, who may or may not be willing to provide the referrals or testimonials you seek, just don’t realize how important it might be to you, or just haven’t thought about it . . . yet.

You can’t assume a customer is going to naturally behave like a loyal customer outside of their immediate relationship with you. Oftentimes, you have to let them know that’s what you need or want from them. And in some cases, you’ll have to educate them about what it means and you may even have to help them script it or verbalize it in a way that both makes them comfortable and helps advance your interests and growth goals.

One final comment about this before we move on: Many supplier organizations don’t do a good job of closing the loop with or recognizing their customers who have provided testimonials or referrals. That’s why we like to see a supplier’s process include a specific step that circles back to and thanks a customer for having made a referral, or for having provided a testimonial that was used in a successful proposal or bid situation. Granted, closing the loop with them sounds like common sense, but it’s not a very common practice.

Helping Your Employees Extend Their Loyalty

Similarly, your employees won’t automatically or instinctively know their role in promoting your brand unless you tell them that’s what you expect and you show them how, or equip them to do so. We discussed earlier, in some detail, how the various parts of your talent management practices can support or frustrate various aspects of your customer focus. All of those practices help you attract, retain, and motivate the employees you need to fulfill your brand promise to your customers, thus improving and sustaining the loyalty of your customers. One other practice we find can be helpful in aligning your employees to your customer focus is helping everyone see a clear linkage between your external and internal brand promises (i.e., the linkage between your commercial and employer brands).

When we talk about an internal or employer brand, we mean the intellectual and emotional connection you create between your organization and all employees (current, past, and future employees). It is the experience people expect to have as an employee of your organization. It is very similar to a commercial brand that represents, generally, the experience customers expect to have with your organization. Accordingly, both your external and internal brands depend on a number of parallel factors, as is illustrated in Figure 10.3.

For example, are you investing your time and money on the employee segments that create the most value for your organization? Do you have an employee or talent value proposition that describes what employees can expect from you and what you, in turn, expect from them? Are you engaging your employees in a way that optimizes their performance and impact on your customer’s experience? Do you have a high retention rate for your high-performing employees? Do your employees advocate your organization as a place to work and encourage their friends and relatives to seek employment with you? Sound familiar? Can you see the linkage?

The importance of aligning your external and internal brands is all too often overlooked by organizations. In fact, most organizations don’t even recognize the need for or possibility of an internal brand. Others, however, not only recognize it, they seek to highlight and leverage it. A recent example of this recognition was with restaurant giant McDonald’s Corporation. McDonald’s employee satisfaction rating had been consistently above 80 percent—a very favorable rating by most standards. However, customer views of the company’s work environment consistently scored in the 30 to 40 percent range. While this disconnect was concern enough, the situation was punctuated when the word “McJob” was added to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as “a low-paying job that requires little skill and provides little opportunity for advancement.”

Realizing customers had a much lower opinion of the jobs at McDonald’s than their own employees did, the company knew they needed to get the real message about employment at the company out to the public. They defined a global Employee Value Proposition that they could pass onto the public through those who knew it best—their employees. Branded as the three F’s, they created and disseminated an employment brand based on an employee value proposition of Family & Friends, Flexibility, and Future. The initiative included educating employees on talking points they could use when talking to friends and customers about the quality of the company’s food, service, and employment. The McDonald’s story provides an excellent example of many of the customer–supplier connections and drivers we’ve been discussing in this book.1

The first step to increasing your Level III reach is to actively request, guide, and equip your loyal customers and employees to be advocates for your brand. Take specific steps that help leverage their loyalty beyond their own experience—beyond the customer’s sale transaction with you and beyond the employee’s hiring transaction with you—and extend their loyalty to favorably influence and attract others to your brand.

Increase Level II Teaming

Level III organizations replicate and leverage what they’ve learned and accomplished with an increasingly larger portion of their customer base. That is, they seek to increase, through teaming, the types and number of customers they’re engaging at various levels of maturity.

Applying Your Skills and Techniques to More Customers

We noted in Chapter 3 that launching a customer focus journey is not necessarily the same journey for every customer or customer segment. Some customer relationships are already strong enough that you might not need a VOC mechanism to help position the touch point dialogues you need to make Level II teaming advancements. It might just be a natural or logical extension of the things you’re already doing with that customer. For other customers, you might have effective dialogues already under way at some touch points, but just need to replicate them at other touch points of that customer’s experience. Or you might have various types of teaming going on with some of a given customer’s locations or business units, but not with all of their locations or units. Then there are other customers for whom you haven’t started to engage beyond your current Level I activities with them; and some you may not be engaging at all. They may be one of the customers, or in one of the customer segments, that were low on your priority target list when you were deciding which ones to focus on.

The key is that once you are comfortable that you have your priority customers or segments at the right level of focus, you should set your sights on increasing your Level II engagement or teaming with that next customer segment or group of customers. There are, however, some segments or customers that may never justify an effort from you beyond the sales transaction or perhaps beyond your VOC related activities. There are some customers where it just doesn’t make sense to invest anything more because an appropriate return isn’t likely to be realized.

Also note that, in time, new customers will come into the picture and you’ll need to slot them into your prioritization process. Conversely, customers will leave for various reasons. They go out of business. They’re bought by, or merge with, another company. They have an executive level change in control that ushers in a different (competing) vendor or a new approach or requirements for the procurement function or process. There might even be customers where you ended the relationship. Whatever the circumstances, there will be customers who leave. These additions and deletions to your customer base should cause you to periodically reevaluate your segments and related customer focus priorities.

Level III organizations continually reevaluate and reprioritize their customer focus target list and they continually widen their customer focus net so it covers an increasing number or types of customers. In essence, Level III organizations have a continual progression of customers moving into or through each level of the maturity model. The ultimate goal is to continue finding, improving, and capitalizing on those customer relationships that can be raised to Level III relationships and mutual profitability.

Applying Your Skills and Techniques Internally

There’s one other dimension of this discussion about increasing the number of Level II customers that we want to point out. Before a supplier organization can be highly effective at having touch point dialogues, joint problem solving, and other forms of teaming with an increasing number of its customers, it must be effective at teaming internally. A problem we have seen suppliers frequently encounter is where one member of or function within their organization is openly critical (to the customer) of another member of or function elsewhere within the supplier organization. Situations periodically arise where supplier personnel are talking with a customer and, for example, field sales blames something on inside sales, or customer service blames something on transportation, or where manufacturing blames something on engineering, and so on.

“Throwing your colleague under the bus” can happen for any number of reasons. The customer is complaining about another part of the supplier’s business and the supplier rep agrees with them just to appease them, or to try to diffuse the situation, or even to deflect the blame or problem elsewhere just to get the target off of their own back. Or the supplier rep acts like they agree with the customer’s criticism because the rep wants the customer to feel that he or she is on their side. Or the supplier rep may actually agree with the criticism and takes the opportunity to pile on with his or her own complaints, hoping it will somehow bubble up to someone in authority who will be forced to address it. The motives can vary, but the reality is that people are human and they will often take pot shots at people or processes in their own organization when they are confronted with an angry, frustrated, or strong-minded customer.

It’s because of these potential internal blame battles that we emphasized earlier the importance of training and tools to prepare the supplier’s people to effectively engage in these Level II customer activities. These same internal skirmishes are one of the reasons we spend substantive time prior to our Value Chain Labs® workouts preparing the supplier team for their lab meeting with their customer.

In fact, we have seen some supplier organizations actually use the workout process internally to resolve internal issues, break down silos and align goals, and correct process or communications disconnects or bottlenecks. One particular organization made Lab-type internal workouts a mandatory feature. Any department or team in the company that wanted to improve or fix a relationship with another department or team could request a Lab with that other department or team. All Lab requests had to be honored. That is, participation was mandatory once a workout was requested by any initiating department or team.

For example, if product development requested a Lab with manufacturing—both sides were obligated to participate. If the warehouse and inventory team requested a Lab with the field services team—both sides were required to engage in the process. The CEO of this organization wanted to do everything possible to identify and resolve internal process and relationship issues before embarking on any workouts with customers.

Internal workouts conducted between different internal functions, departments, and teams are vital to this process. They might include:

HQ and Division Personnel Faculty and Administration Line Managers and Staff Managers Marketing and Sales Staff Physicians and Nurses Field and Inside Sales Teams Regional Managers and Product Managers Engineering and Manufacturing Personnel

QA Testers and Production Supervisors Customer Service and Account Execs Sales Managers and Sales Teams Finance and Operations Personnel Call Center and Accounting Teams Software Engineers and Desk Top Support Staff

The number of possible lab match-ups in a given organization is wide-ranging and depends on how dysfunctional, functional, or optimal the various internal relationships and connections are. In sum, Level III organizations take a number of steps to continually develop and apply their teaming skills and techniques in a way that helps extend the impact of their loyal customers and employees, and related capabilities.

Elevate Teaming to Partnering

The third step that Level III organizations take to increase their reach or impact is to go beyond the teaming of Level II and elevate it to a “partnering” relationship with a selected group of key customers.

Partnering Generates Mutual Success

Customer–supplier partnerships mean different things to different people, but for our purposes here, we view it as a shared realization that both parties have entered into their arrangement or relationship to make money. It’s a mutual mindset that says: my side wins when both sides win. In essence, we define Level III partnering as follows:

A business “partnership” is one in which each side is as interested in the other side’s success as they are in their own success.

This level of partnership can only exist after a customer and supplier relationship has withstood the test of time, has endured various business up and down cycles together, and, as a result, they have established a mutual sense of confidence and trust. It is a feeling that develops over time that says we’re both in this together, there’s no problem we shouldn’t be able to resolve, and there’s nothing we shouldn’t be able to talk about as long as it’s legal and ethical.

Level III partnering can only occur when a supplier has consistently demonstrated its ability to deliver value, where the customer has been a regular advocate for the supplier, and where both organizations have demonstrated their willingness and ability to deal with tough issues and pursue mutual success. Only then will both sides be comfortable enough and interested enough to look forward together and anticipate what unknowns might be around the next corner. What might the next disruptive technology be in the customer’s industry or in the supplier’s industry? What trends, threats, or opportunities might be emerging in their respective markets and businesses that might have implications for both sides? What other opportunities for saving costs, increasing revenues, improving productivity, or reducing cycle time have they left untapped? Lastly, what skills and processes do they need to help them continually explore and address these questions together?

As an example, GE’s Aircraft Engine Division (now called GE Aviation) made jet engines that were bought by Boeing and installed on Boeing aircraft. They had a good relationship with Boeing—and both companies wanted to win. According to a presentation made about GE’s customer–supplier workouts by Dave Ulrich to Coopers & Lybrand, GE wanted to sell, and Boeing wanted to buy, good engines. Both sides had cost pressures. During their partnering efforts, they learned that before GE shipped an engine, it had to pass a 1,000-point quality checklist. And before Boeing installed that same engine on a plane, Boeing put it through its own 1,000- point checklist. Some of those check points overlapped. Although some overlap is good, too much can be wasteful. Even if 25 percent of it could be done only once, both sides would save substantial time and money. They discovered they both could win if they managed the quality review process together.2

But Customers Don’t Want “Partners”!

The push back we most often get from companies who are at the brink of Level III is the claim: But our customers don’t want “partners.” They just want a product that meets their specs and price, gets to them on time, and is still working after our truck leaves their loading docks. They aren’t looking for their suppliers or vendors to be their partners. It’s all about the transaction. They want to get what they pay for and nothing more. Deliver it, bill me, and then leave me alone unless I call you with problems. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

As realistic and practical as that sounds, we don’t believe it! Our experience shows otherwise. It’s very similar to the common perception that price drives the majority of sales. When we ask customers to list the various factors that they consider before choosing a product or a supplier, price is always one of the factors. But surprisingly, price is not always the most important factor. In fact many customers can cite multiple examples where they paid a higher price because of their relationship with the seller, the value they got for the higher price, the convenience they were willing to pay more to get, and others. The point is—the customer will always tell you price is the key—but their behaviors and decisions often say otherwise.

In a similar vein, they will usually tell you they don’t want a “partner,” but experience says otherwise. In our consulting work, we survey, interview, or simply meet with hundreds of customers a year who buy products and services from our various clients. One of the things we frequently do in those surveys or interviews is ask them to complete this sentence:

“The added value I look for my supplier or vendor to bring to the table is . . .”

The resultant answers we get are quite telling, and while they cover a broad range of ideas, the answers we get most often are:

• “Know how we use your products and how they impact our results.”
• “Bring me new ideas and opportunities for reducing my TCO [total cost of ownership].”
• “Understand my company’s competitive and economic drivers.”
• “Show me how to get the most value out of the products you sell me.”
• “Help me anticipate and exploit new trends in my industry and products.”

So while customers may say they don’t want partners, they do want and value results that go beyond the transaction—results that create an added benefit unique to and for them, results they get only from their value-add suppliers. Call it partnering, call it advising, call it collaborating, educating, or just consulting—whatever you call it, it represents a real opportunity to take your customer focus, your customer’s experience, and your mutual profitability to a higher level.

As we’ve cautioned several times before, Level III partnering is not for all of your customers, and will never be the right focus for many of them. In addition, this type of partnering takes a lot of time not only to discuss, evaluate, and work through your mutual interests, but also to maintain the open relationship or communications channels and processes you have in place to support it. You simply won’t have the resources, time, and capacity to partner like this with all of your customers. But for those you do, the favorable outcomes can be substantial.

In sum, Level III is characterized by a forward-looking relationship, a shared lens into the future that requires a mutual interest so deep and transparent that both sides work together to anticipate, plan for, define, and ultimately succeed in, their future together.

Extend Level III Efforts Across the Value Chain

We talked in the second step about increasing the numbers or types of customers you are engaging in Level II activities. In this final step, we seek to replicate and leverage what you’ve learned and accomplished—not just at Level II, but at all three levels—with more and more of your customers, as well as with your suppliers, alliance partners, and literally any organization in your value chain. The kinds of productivity, revenue, and costs improvements a supplier organization can achieve by engaging its key customer segments can also be achieved with many other players across the supplier’s entire value chain. When an organization can leverage these types of mutually beneficial encounters across their broader value chain, they can multiply the gains they make in terms of cycle time (productivity), innovative ideas (revenue streams), and efficiencies (costs), among others.

In effect, this step involves the organization using any combination of the ideas, techniques, and practices discussed at all three levels in an effort to influence and improve the effectiveness of its broader value chain. This step goes beyond organizations just trying to improve the economics and loyalty of their customer accounts. It includes organizations reaching out to their respective suppliers for similar improvements and competitive advantages.

For example, one company with whom we are currently working was recently contacted by one of their key customers who is assembling an Innovation Task Force. That customer organization is inviting selected value chain members to meet with organization members in a series of sessions and engage in environmental scanning, forward-looking thought leadership, and ideation conversations.

Level III value chain initiatives might involve the supplier organization reaching out to collaborate or work more closely with the suppliers or customers of their respective suppliers and customers. An example of this was demonstrated by United Missouri Banks (UMB).3 UMB is a large regional bank, which, because of its size, is able to negotiate favorable pricing terms with many of its suppliers—suppliers who provide the bank with tangible products ranging from paper to furniture. UMB supplies many small local banks with a variety of financial products, as well as certain lending and back-office services. These small banks buy many of the same tangible products from the same suppliers as UMB but at higher prices.

As a result of collaborative partnering between UMB and the smaller banks, UMB created an Internet-based system through which it deals with its suppliers, and it allows its small bank customers to use the system to do the same. Everyone wins with this partnering. Suppliers are assured larger market share and do not have to issue bills directly to the small banks anymore. Instead, they send a consolidated invoice to UMB, which pays on its own behalf as well as that of the small banks. UMB then bundles the supplier charges with its other service fees to the small banks. UMB benefits in many ways: It receives a settlement fee for paying on behalf of the small banks; its purchasing volumes go up, and in turn its costs go down; and it holds its small bank customers even closer by providing an additional service. The small banks in turn benefit from lower prices and a simplified purchasing process.

Such value chain engagement or teaming might even include an organization collaborating with a totally unrelated player. A good example can be found in a situation that developed between General Mills and Land O’Lakes.4 Prior to this, the two companies did not work together and were of no interest to each other. At the time, General Mills was looking to cut costs out of its supply chain, and realized that when its refrigerated trucks laden with Yoplait Yogurt left its General Mills warehouses, the trucks oftentimes were not full. Quite often, the truck was carrying yogurt destined for multiple supermarkets or grocery stores—meaning the truck would have multiple stops to make. If there were any traffic, mechanical, or receiving-related delays along the delivery route, the result could be, and often was, frustrated store managers waiting for their late yogurt deliveries.

General Mills realized it could address this problem by working with another company not in its product space—the butter and margarine maker Land O’Lakes. Instead of each company operating its own semiproductive distribution system, the two decided to operate their distribution networks together. They began storing Yoplait Yogurt and Land O’Lakes butter in the same warehouses, and transporting them in the same trucks to the same supermarkets and grocery stores. This resulted in their “shared” trucks leaving the warehouses with larger (fuller) loads. Since each truck was delivering more products to each store, it would have fewer stops to make, thus increasing the likelihood of on-time delivery. Both companies enjoyed the benefits of reduced distribution costs and more satisfied customers (i.e., the grocery store managers). It was to their mutual advantage to find ways to work together.

An interesting footnote to this example is that one of General Mills’ principles regarding such business-to-business collaboration is that you can’t collaborate with other companies until you can collaborate internally. Get different parts of your own company working well together first—then, you can extend the idea to outside parties.

In conclusion, the overarching purpose or objective of Level III is to use the capabilities you’ve developed, and the culture shaped by those capabilities, to accomplish the following objectives:

• Nurture and reinforce loyalty and brand advocacy within and outside of your organization.
• Use effective teaming skills and techniques within and outside of your organization.
• Engage in forward-looking partnering to anticipate future opportunities and threats.
• Apply the above steps not just with your customers, but also across your broader value chain.

To Summarize . . .

As we noted at the outset, an effective business strategy must first and foremost inspire your customers to act in a way that grows your business. Therefore, at the heart of any strategy that’s going to succeed must be a clear and compelling plan to drive customers and potential customers to make decisions that favor you over your competitors. We hope you can now see how a customer focus can drive, sustain, and optimize the multiple decisions your current, prospective, and former customers make each day about their suppliers and potential suppliers.

Customer focus can only translate into the kind of business gains you seek if it is based on both a proven plan and the capabilities needed to effectively implement that plan. As we’ve shown throughout this book, there are 10 key elements required for an effective customer focus plan:

The amount of success any organization will have with its customer-centric business strategy will depend on two factors: the time it takes the organization to see the value of and effectively develop and implement each of these 10 elements; and, the degree to which all 10 elements are aligned with each other and aligned with the rest of the business. We have shown you many of the reasons why each of these elements is important and the critical role they play in the organization’s success. We have also spent considerable time explaining steps and techniques used to align these key elements with each other and with the rest of the business priorities, practices, and processes.

The key question is: How long will it take a given organization to understand, implement, and align each of these elements? The answer is infinitely varied. Each organization morphs or evolves over time as determined by the dynamics of its business model, competitive landscape, customer base, and culture. As a result, the pace of each organization’s customer focus journey or maturation is different. Regardless of their unique rates of progress, most organizations embarking on a customer focus journey will travel through three main stages or maturity levels of their implementation.

We use the Customer Focus Maturity Model® (CFMM) to illustrate that implementation journey. (See Figure 10.4 for the complete model.)

The model is used to portray and discuss the drivers, opportunities, and techniques needed to increasingly optimize an organization’s customer-centric strategy by continually progressing or maturing until they reach Level III—the level that represents optimal profitability for both customer and supplier.

The ultimate goal is to advance to and through, as much as is possible and practical, a Level III customer focus. A level where your organization operates as an end-to-end process that exists for one sole purpose: to anticipate, deliver, and profit from creating customer value. A process that aligns everyone in every function, from the executive level to the entry level, from employees who face the customer to employees whose faces you never see, around that one common purpose: a culture that continually improves and connects the things going on inside your organization to the opportunities going on outside—both with your customers and your suppliers—to create a new way of viewing and leveraging your entire value chain.

1 Kristen Morgan, “McDonald’s—Building Reputation through a Global Employee Value Proposition,” HRM Today, March 4, 2011, www.hrmtoday.com/featured-stories/mcdonald%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%93-building-reputation-through-a-global-employee-value-proposition/.

2 Note: At the time of this presentation (1995), Dave Ulrich was providing consulting services to the senior leaders at Coopers & Lybrand.

3 Michael Hammer, The Agenda: What Every Business Must Do to Dominate the Decade (New York: Crown Business, 2001), 191.

4 Hammer, The Agenda (2001), 190.