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Alignment A Living Case Study

The following is a live example of how CUSTOMER INTIMACY is being implemented by a Group of accountants. The first step they took was to profile their people. The Chart below shows the profiles of the 30 accountants within the Group.

As can be seen the Accounting Group was highly weighted towards quadrants A and B which is the wrong shape for Customer Intimacy.

When the managers first saw their profile they became concerned about whether their choice of Customer Intimacy was still appropriate. In the end they reconfirmed their earlier decision to become Customer Intimate, partly because the Value Proposition of their organisation overall was clearly Customer Intimate and partly because they realised that world-class relationships for a group of accountants is different than it would be for say nurses.

It's important to understand how important this decision was. It lead to a significant change in their Culture, Brand, Service Delivery and Leadership style. The steps they took to become more Customer Intimate included:

1. Everyone was trained in Herrmann's Thinking Preferences so they could recognise and respond more appropriately to different types and in creative thinking
2. They made better use of the scarce C and D thinking people in teams and projects
3. They used of external people such as customers, suppliers and consultants (me!!)
4. They modified all systems and processes to make them more customer friendly, streamlined and faster
5. They increased the recruitment of Cs and Ds over time.

The other really useful chart that Herrmann produces is the Rank Order of Work Elements which shows clearly the deficiency in creative abilities and innovating abilities.

To go back to Alignment Product.