Delivering Profitable Value

Most business enterprises entering the 21st century are searching for breakthroughs in achieving and sustaining profitable growth. But in this quest, many companies find themselves focusing on only half of the equation, relentlessly improving their own products and processes, or attempting to please customers at any cost — without a strategy for linking the organization's capabilities and goals with the real needs of its customers. In Delivering Profitable Value, Michael Lanning draws on over 25 years' experience and groundbreaking thinking to offer a fundamentally new approach to strategy and performance, showing how any business can transform itself into a value delivery system that consistently and profitably delivers superior experiences to customers.

After clearly describing the philosophy of and framework for delivering profitable value, the book presents a comprehensive and practical methodology for its application, illustrated through the success and failures of such companies as Hewlett-Packard, Glaxo-Wellcome, Southwest Airlines, Chevron, Sony, Microsoft, Weyerhaeuser, Kodak, and Procter & Gamble. Adapting the "DPV" approach will result in subtle, but profound, changes in the way managers define their business, establish success criteria, explore new markets, study and interact with customers, analyze competition, deploy resources and develop processes and functions.

Managers who employ the principles and tools outlined in Delivering Profitable Value will help their organizations:

• Stop making and selling products and services and start delivering deeply understood and carefully chosen customer experiences
• Abandon the internally-driven and customer-compelled mindsets and adopt the paradigm of superior value delivery
• Avoid the temptation to focus on the most immediate and easily attracted customers and commit to delivering superior value to the most profitable customers
• Give up on confusing, unactionable market segmentation and learn to identify the best strategic options in the relevant markets
• Cease listening to customers and master the process of becoming the customer

At its core, Delivering Profitable Value is about the creative relationship between an organization and its customers. Michaek Lanning's landmark book provides a tested method for establishing and nurturing those relationships, and capturing the profitable growth that results.

• A Brief Overview of Delivering Profitable Value
• Introduction — Beyond the looking glass
• Part One: Understand the Heart of Business: What Delivering Profitable Value is
1. Internally-Driven and Customer-Compelled Management Aren't Delivering Profitable Value
2. Customers' Resulting Experiences: Essence of a Real Value Proposition
3. The Good, the Bad and the Unintended: Every Business Delivers a Value Proposition
4. To Choose or Not to Choose a Complete Value Proposition, That Is Management's Question
5. Some of What a Real Value Proposition Isn't
6. Playing to Win: Choose Good Value Propositions
7. Provide and Communicate: Delivering Is More Than Lip Service
8. Design a Business Forwards: the Value Delivery System
9. Staying Alive: Adjust and Recreate Your VDS
10. and Now… Will the Real Customer Please Stand Up? The Value Delivery Chain
11. Primary and Supporting VDSs: Control the Chain Reaction
12. Don't Sell to Business-Customers: Improve Their VDSs Instead
13. Define the Firm's VDSs: Key Task of Corporate Strategy
14. Define VDSs Within the Context of their Market-Space
• Part Two: How to Deliver Profitable Value
15. Formulate Strategy by Identifying and Choosing Value Delivery Options
16. Stop Listening: Become Customers to Discover What They Really Want
17. Virtual Videos of the Customer's Life: Structured Method for Becoming the Customer
18. What's Competition Got to Do with It? Understanding Customers' Alternatives
19. Make Disciplined Choices: Implement VDS-Structured Business Plans
20. What to Do Monday Morning?
• Conclusion: Beyond a Few Improvements, Build a Great Company: Institutionalize DPV

Interesting and thoughprovoking. Unfortunately, is also is an ad book for the DPV Group that Lanning created.