The Agenda:
What Every Business Must Do to Dominate the Decade

• Make life easy for your customers. Your customers' biggest gripe is not that your products are bad, but that it is too tough to order, receive, and pay for them. In short, you are a royal pain to do business with. You need totake a hard look at how you operate from your customers' point of view and redesign how you work to save them time, money, and frustration. In other words, run your business for their convenience, not yours.
• Become a process fanatic. Process is the Clark Kent of business ideas. Seemingly mild and unassuming, process is a revolutionary way of thinking about work in customer terms. It blows away overhead and cost, confusion and delay. It is the discipline that makes outstanding performance a matter ofdesign rather than luck. Process is the way to make both customers and shareholders happy and to keep them that way on a sustained basis.
• Measure like you mean it. Most business measurements are worthless. They tell you what happened in the past (sort of), but offer few if any clues about how to make things better in the future. To come up with useful measurements, you need to create a model of your business that ties overall goals to the things you actually control. You need to measure these (and only these) things carefully and base your actions on what you learn. Measure to improve, not just to measure.
• Don't just talk teamwork–live it. You expect teamwork and cooperation from the front lines, and you need to demand the same from yourself and your colleagues. The days of the proudly independent business manager running a sharply defined unit are over.
• Link companies together through the Internet. Break down the walls that separate you from other companies, walls that create huge amounts of inefficiency and overhead. Change your distribution channel from a series of resellers into a community that works together to serve the final customer. Redesign your operations in tandem with those of your suppliers and customers. Stop seeing yourself as a self-contained unit that creates a product on its own, and get used to the idea of virtually integrating with others.