The Winning Manager’s Playbook

Create an operations process to serve your right customers

Once you have described your right customers, created generic and specific strategies to achieve success, and designed a sales process to acquire those right customers, you will turn to the internal day-to-day operations. Your objective here is to design your operations to best serve your right customers.

Although this seems like an obvious objective, the operations of many firms have evolved into a basket of activities that spring from bureaucracy, internal convenience, and habit. The customer has simply been left out of the design process.

The operations process is somewhat similar in concept to the sales process. It is a collection of best practices. But in this case it is a collection ...