Customer-Driven Disruption: Five Strategies to Stay Ahead of the Curve

Businesses worry about new technologies, but customers are the ultimate disruptors--Suman Sarkar offers bold strategies for making sure you understand your customers and keep up with their ever-changing needs. Businesses worry about new technologies, but customers are the ultimate disruptors-Suman Sarkar offers bold strategies for making sure you understand your customers and keep up with their ever-changing needs. Disruption-the brutal roiling of markets, the decline of long-established brands and products, and the rise of new upstarts-drives business failure and success. Most people think technology causes disruption, but technology merely enables it. Changing customer needs cause disruptions, and too many businesses get caught unaware. Suman Sarkar offers proven strategies that will enable any business to stay radically close to its customers and address their evolving needs. He argues that businesses need to focus on existing customers first-research shows they're likely to spend more and are more profitable than new customers. Personalization is becoming important for the newer generations in both developed and developing markets, so Sarkar describes approaches to make them cost-effective. In our era of instant gratification, customers want what they want now-Sarkar explains how you can develop and deliver products and services faster than ever. And since a few bad Yelp reviews, social media posts, or angry tweets from customers can ruin you, Sarkar shows how to proactively make sure the quality of your products and services stays better than that of your competitors. The key to survival in this era of changing customer needs is to focus on and address them quickly so customers don't switch to the competition. Drawing on his experiences with leading companies worldwide, Sarkar offers five strategies and techniques that will keep you ahead of the curve.

About the Author :
Suman Sarkar is a partner with Three S Consulting, located in San Francisco. He has worked with clients in financial services, pharmaceuticals, technology, consumer goods, retail, outsourcing, and government. Before launching his consulting practice, he was a management consultant at A.T. Kearney and worked at Procter & Gamble. He holds a master's in industrial engineering from NITIE, Mumbai, India, and an MBA from UCLA in strategy and finance. He is the author of The Supply Chain Revolution.

Review :
“Suman Sarkar’s Customer-Driven Disruption is not just another book preaching customer focus to business executives. Rather than restrict himself to homilies, Suman lays down five strategies that can help bring the C into business planning. He illustrates each strategy with a rationale backed by numbers and specific steps to bring it to life with examples from across industries. The book ends with a set of guiding questions that can be used by thoughtful executives either by themselves or in a team setting to develop an action plan for their organizations.” —Milind Yedkar, General Manager, Asia Pacific & Japan, Cloud Client Computing, Dell   “There’s no use building a bridge if your customers don’t want to go there. This book shows you new ways to prioritize your customers. How can you engage with changing customer needs—not just push old products at new needs? How can you win by helping your customers win?” —Bob Johansen, Distinguished Fellow, Institute for the Future, and author of The New Leadership Literacies   “This book disrupts disruption! It redefines what causes disruption and what you can do about it. It accomplishes this with an elegant paradigm shift that’s profound and yet simple. Suman’s conclusions are based on powerful insights from research, case studies of leading companies, and decades of business experience. You will never think of disruption in the same way again.” —Praveen Madan, CEO, Kepler’s Books   “Suman Sarkar does a great job discussing five effective customer focus strategies for companies to proactively navigate the increasingly disruptive business environment. The substantial cases demonstrate the power of being customer focused quite well, and this book will be a great resource for executives and managers to quickly shape strategies for disruption.” —Dr. Richard Peng, Assistant Professor of Project and Supply Chain Management, Black School of Business, Penn State Behrend   “Suman Sarkar redirects the focus back to what made your business a business: its customers. With many case studies and concise takeaways, this book is a handy guide to shaking up your innovation strategy.”  —Crystal Kadakia, author of The Millennial Myth   “Suman Sarkar is a strategist after my own heart—like me, he believes that real change and innovation come from customers’ actual needs and wants, not from researchers in lab coats. Customers will tell you how to make your business thrive and win the future—if you learn how to listen. This book explains how to open your ears.”  —Jeanne Bliss, President, CustomerBliss, and author of Chief Customer Officer 2.0   “Sarkar puts forth new, actionable definitions of customer focus, personalization, and quality along with a road map that your team can use to think creatively and be more willing to take intelligent risks.” —John A. Goodman, Vice Chairman, Customer Care Measurement & Consulting   “This is an excellent, thought-provoking book that offers clear strategies enabling you to understand buying patterns and generational expectations. Customer-Driven Disruption will inspire you to effectively plan for and stay ahead of your competition by focusing on your customers and what they want.” —Renee Evenson, author of nine books including Powerful Phrases for Effective Customer Service and Powerful Phrases for Dealing with Difficult People   “In Customer-Driven Disruption, Sarkar shows that technology isn’t the real driver of disruption, and he unveils many more surprises that will challenge your assumptions and prepare you and your organization to stay ahead.” —Steve Curtin, author of Delight Your Customers