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Aligning the Organization with the Market: Focusing on 'The Customer's Total Experience'

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Aligning the Organization with the Market: Focusing on 'The Customer's Total Experience'

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/index.cfm?fa=viewfeature&id=1486

When Lou Gerstner became chief executive of IBM in the early 1990s, Big Blue was on a course to be broken up into smaller companies, each responsible for separate IBM business units such as PCs, software and the like. But Gerstner concluded the strategy was "wrong-headed" because it was contrary to the wishes of customers, according to Wharton marketing professor George Day. Rather than assemble their computer systems from a variety of vendors, customers wanted help putting everything together. So IBM embarked on a multi-year journey to align its organization with the marketplace. For IBM, the experiment was successful. But in a forthcoming paper titled, "Aligning the Organization with the Market," Day reports on a survey that found only mixed results among 347 medium- to large-size firms that attempted customer-focused reorganizations.

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