"value is maximized at the front lines"

"Understanding competition as something that happens around individual customers at the front line rather than as a war between organizations upends much of what managers assume, consciously or not, about mission, strategy, culture, organization, and decision-making. As I’ll argue in the following pages, leading businesses needs to be seen less as a challenge of managing organizational complexity and more about making sure that value is maximized at the front lines. This calls for an approach that is less inspired by hierarchy and more by respect for the insights of the people in direct contact with customers, structured and motivated not around optimizing the use of their existing resources and capabilities but rather around identifying what’s needed to deliver value right in front of the customer. In this environment, leadership must be focused squarely on figuring out how the organization can mobilize its assets and resources to deliver the biggest bang at the front line.

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But in business, where competition is between products rather than companies, the line of sight between a CEO’s decisions and whether a customer will buy a product at any given time is much less clear. The individual outcomes of customers’ decisions are far from easy for executives, removed from the front line, to predict and control. This changes the power dynamics inside the corporation—who determines what is and isn’t valuable and how the rest of the organization relates to the businesses directly engaged with the company’s products and services."

Trechos retirados de "A New Way to Think" de Roger Martin.