Editor's letter

Citation

Randall, R.M. (2006), "Editor's letter", Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 34 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/sl.2006.26134baa.001

Editor's letter

In a recent interview in Strategy & Leadership, Clayton Christensen, the authority on disruptive innovation, suggested that organizations segment their markets by “customer jobs to be done” in order to identify new growth opportunities. This contrasts with the traditional practice of market segmentation that is based on customer characteristics or product type, which can mislead managers, causing them to innovate on dimensions of product performance that are irrelevant to the reasons why customers use the product. His famous example: customers don’t really want to buy drills. They buy drills because they really want the holes drills make.

The four articles in this special issue take that idea a bit further, suggesting that companies need to learn to:

• •

  Adopt the revolutionary thinking involved in co-creating unique value with customers;

• •

  Develop unique value propositions based on six new imperatives for nurturing customer relationships;

• •

  Use new tools to explore the discrepancy between what customers say and what they do; and

• •

  Monitor market and customer opportunities and continuously update their technology strategy.

Other tips

The manifesto “Profiting from evidence-based management” by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton is an education for thoughtful managers, newbies and veterans alike. The authors submit that companies that practice evidence-based management routinely trump the competition, and show how.

And to learn about building successful new businesses within established firms don’t miss Brian Leavy’s book review of 10 Rules for Strategic Innovators by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble.

Mislabeling corrected

In Strategy & Leadership Vol. 33 No. 6, in the article “Pricing strategy and execution: an overlooked way to increase revenues and profits” by Alistair Davidson and Mike Simonetto, Figure 1: “Pricing Waterfall Analysis” was inadvertently mislabeled as a Deloitte Consulting LLP graphic. As the endnote in the article correctly indicated, the chart should be credited to a September 1992 Harvard Business Review article by Michael Marn and Robert Rosiello.

Special thanks

S&L Contributing Editor Professor Brian Leavy deserves to be singled out and applauded for his contributions to this issue. Three highlights: the interview he and Deependra Moitra did with C.K. Prahalad; his book review, which is actually a fine essay on the challenges of disruptive innovation, an emerging practice area; and when he was working behind the scenes, his wise editing and suggestions were invaluable.

Robert M. RandallEditor