Introduction: Balancing What Customers Value with What Businesses Value

Every sound business is built around a simple proposition: It makes or does something so well that customers will pay for the value being created. Peter Drucker, perhaps the most significant management scholar of our time, reduces this proposition to two basic axioms: A business has to make money, and a business has to make customers.

It's not an either/or—the two are opposite faces of the same coin. If a business doesn't make customers, it won't survive to make money. If it doesn't make money, it won't survive to make customers. One form of value must connect with the other.

Although many people in business will find this proposition familiar, fewer have extended its reasoning ...

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