In this fifth post, based on Nick Anderson's book, Focusing Change to Win, we highlight contributions from 1072 Business Leaders on The Why and What of Change. This post gives some of the key findings on how change can be used to foster competitive success, including some useful tips from the book. 

Even after 30 years, the connections between change management and gaining competitive advantage are not well articulated. Disconnects between commitments to change and actual competitive behavior are a major factor in change failure.  Successful change, that which contributes to competitive advantage,  relies on understanding and measuring behavior that distinguishes competitive behavior from other activities.

One of our respondents made it clear where he wants his change initiatives to focus:

“Learning keeps us ahead of the competition by getting us closer to selected customers to gather competitive intelligence.”

The seriousness of these ratings is underscored by the fact that it costs 6 to 7 times more to obtain customers than to retain them, according to Bain & Company.  Acquiring new customers is not only costly, but in many cases, the money earned on the first sale doesn’t even cover the acquisition costs.

Looking at the first four questions in the table, it’s apparent that customer focus is not the driving force it should be:

• Only 70% of survey respondents say they measure customer satisfaction effectively
• Only 12% consider the customer in measuring change success and of those, only one in four had customers who  perceived the benefits of the change initiative

These findings should make us all uncomfortable with the lack of customer focus. Change itself appears to be driving these leaders, while customers and competitive advantage are apparent afterthoughts.

We conclude that there are practical ways to avoid these pitfalls.

Contributors to our survey recommend five ways to improve competitive advantage through change:

To attend a webinar on this topic or other topics covered in Focusing Change to Win go to http://focusingchangetowin.com/webinar/ .  Use the comment form below or email us directly at admin@tbointl.com to ask a question or to open a dialogue with the author or one of our other team members.