The Agenda

About the Author

Michael Hammer is an internationally renowned consultant and lecturer, recognized as the originator of the business reengineering concept. He is also the author of the seminal work, Reengineering the Corporation. Hammer's contributions have significantly influenced modern business practices, particularly through his advocacy for process-oriented thinking and his insights into the evolving dynamics of customer-supplier relationships.

Main Idea

The central theme of The Agenda: What Every Business Must Do to Dominate the Decade by Michael Hammer revolves around the transformation from supplier-dominated economies to customer-centric ones. Hammer argues that businesses must adopt new strategies to thrive in this customer-dominated era. He outlines nine critical agenda items that companies should focus on to ensure success, ranging from becoming easy to do business with (ETDBW) to fostering creative collaboration with external partners. Hammer's framework emphasizes the importance of process integration, value addition, and dynamic organizational structures to meet the evolving needs of customers.

Table of Contents

1. Run Your Business for Your Customers
2. Give Your Customers What They Really Want
3. Put Process First
4. Create Order Where Chaos Reigns
5. Measure Like You Mean It
6. Manage Without Structure
7. Focus on the Final Customer
8. Knock Down Your Outer Wall
9. Extend Your Enterprise
10. Prepare for a Future You Cannot Predict

Run Your Business for Your Customers

To succeed, you must become ETDBW, or easy-to-do-business-with. Being ETDBW means that from the customer's standpoint, interacting with you is as inexpensive and effortless as possible. It means you accept orders when and by whatever means your customer wants to use, you make it painless for him to check the order, you send a simple bill, and your customer service representatives actually provide service.

"For customers, price is only part of the cost of doing business with you. In some cases, the overhead involved in doing business with you may rival what you charge." — Michael Hammer

Becoming ETDBW requires adopting six practices:

• Present a single face to your customer: Create an integrated team that deals with customers across all products and functions.
• Work in different ways for different classes of customers: Customize your approach for various customer segments to enhance their experience.
• Know what your customers will ask for before they do: Predict customer needs and be prepared to meet them proactively.
• Make your customers' experience a seamless one: Ensure that every employee can access relevant customer information to provide consistent service.
• Let customers do more for themselves: Empower customers to manage their own orders and interactions with your business.
• Measure the things that customers really care about: Focus on metrics that matter to customers, such as satisfaction and ease of use.

Give Your Customers What They Really Want

Your customers have no interest in you or your company and only a little more in your products or services. You are merely a bit player in their lives. What your customers care about is themselves and your only excuse for existing is your ability to improve their lives. You must go beyond giving them your products and services; you need to help them solve the problems that motivated them to ask for those products or services in the first place.

"You must control as much of the ladder as possible so that the solution is an integrated one." — Michael Hammer

This approach involves providing more value-added (MVA) services. Visualize MVA as a ladder with your product at the bottom and the solution to your customer's problem at the top. The more help you provide your customer to fill that gap, the more value you add to them, which differentiates you from your competitors.