Product Description

Award-winning entrepreneurs Jeffrey Shuman and Janice Twombly outline methods every company can use to develop and measure 'win-win' collaborative relationships versus 'win-lose' transaction-based relationships. Readers will learn how to create new value and improve company performance.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1319433 in Books
• Published on: 2002-08-07
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

From the Inside Flap
Every Single Name in Your Rolodex Represents Potential Income

In today’s business relationships, the balance of power has shifted to the customer. This is not news. But in Everyone Is a Customer, the "customer" has been redefined.

Everyone with whom a business interacts—internally and externally—is a customer. However, companies need to effectively allocate resources to those relationships that create the greatest strategic value in order to improve performance and increase profits.

Traditional customer relationship management (CRM) and partner relationship management (PRM) strategies and technologies recognize that organizations need to interact with customers and alliance partners in a more meaningful way. But they do not take into account relationship currencies. According to award-winning entrepreneurs Jeffrey Shuman and Janice Twombly, collaboration is the key to success in today’s networked economy. Successful collaboration, say Shuman and Twombly, comes through effectively trading in relationship currencies.

Built on the revolutionary concepts from their last book, Collaborative Communities, Shuman and Twombly outline methods every company and businessperson can use to develop and measure win-win collaborative relationships.

Managers, leaders, and business owners will learn how to:

*Redefine every business relationship as a "customer" relationship.

*Value, measure, and manage relationship currencies.

*Realize value through both cash and non-cash currencies.

*Work toward Purposeful Collaboration, that is, the allocation of resources toward the most valuable relationships.

*Determine a company’s value from a new perspective by putting a tangible value on an intangible, such as customer relationships.

In the age of collaborative business, you must think from the perspective that everyone is a customer, that there is quantifiable and significant value in non-cash relationship currencies, and that the intricacies of all forms of business relationships can be objectively measured and managed. By thinking about business from these new perspectives, you can accomplish your goals and achieve success.

About the Authors

Jeffrey Shuman, Ph.D., and Janice Twombly, CPA, are founders of The Rhythm of Business, Inc., a firm that helps businesspeople and organizations measure and manage the value in their business relationships for strategic benefit. Shuman is also professor and director of entrepreneurial studies at Bentley College, Waltham, Massachusetts, and in 1999 received an Ernst & Young New England Entrepreneur Of The Year Award. David Rottenberg is an editor at Shuman and Twombly’s company and has written for several regional and national publications. Together, they are the authors of Collaborative Communities: Partnering for Profit in the Networked Economy.

Advance Praise for Everyone Is a Customer:

"Many companies are realizing that the relentless forces driving collaborative business—customer-driven markets, smarter applications of business technology, and a relentless drive for innovation—are too powerful to ignore, and they’re trying to jump in, any way they can. Shuman and Twombly’s book can give those companies—as well as those that have yet to take the plunge—not only the broad perspectives they’ll need to make it work but also a set of tactical and tangible tools that’ll help them measure their progress against their objectives."
—Bob Evans, Editor-in-Chief, InformationWeek, and Senior Vice President, CMP Media

"Just when I was beginning to think ‘business book’ was an oxymoron, Everyone Is a Customer lands on my desk. This is the real thing: a substantive, useful guide to rethinking the true value of business relationships. Chapter 3—exploring how to monetize all of your company's relationships—is worth the price of admission by itself."
—George Gendron, Editor-in-Chief, Inc.Magazine

"As the web of the extended enterprise increases in complexity, managers and entrepreneurs need more than good instinct to conduct business relationships profitably. Everyone Is a Customer provides a smart, practical framework and tools that we can use today for measuring and extracting fair value from the relationships we rely on to meet our business goals."
—Gregory K. Ericksen, Global Director, Entrepreneur Of The Year, Ernst & Young

"In an era of uncertainty, economic turmoil, and global unrest, the greatest asset of any business or businessperson is the relationship. Rich in ideas, tactics, and actions, Everyone Is a Customer delivers a clear and crisp framework for understanding and leveraging every business relationship to its fullest. Jan and Jeff have become masters of effectively communicating the essentials of business success and choreographing the road map to business opportunity."
—Thomas M. Koulopoulos, President, Delphi Group, and Author of X-economy

About the Author
Jeffrey Shuman, Ph.D., and Janice Twombly, CPA, are founders of The Rhythm of Business, Inc., a firm that helps businesspeople and organizations measure and manage the value in their business relationships for strategic benefit. Shuman is also professor and director of entrepreneurial studies at Bentley College, Waltham, Massachusetts, and in 1999 received an Ernst & Young New England Entrepreneur Of The Year Award. David Rottenberg is an editor at Shuman and Twombly’s company and has written for several regional and national publications. Together, they are the authors of Collaborative Communities: Partnering for Profit in the Networked Economy. Contact the authors at info@rhythmofbusiness.com.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Collaboration may be the most important concept in business ttoday. A recent search for the term on the Internet turned up thousands and thousands of business-related references. Yet in March 2000, while researching our last book, Collaborative Communities: Partnering for Profit in the Networked Economy, a similar online search came up with just a few references, and they mainly related to cooperative housing and academic or intellectual collaboration.

So why the sudden attention to collaboration? The answer is simple.

Collaboration is important because we live our lives and conduct our business in an increasingly connected and interdependent world. Collaboration is how work gets done when we can’t get it done alone. In our personal lives as consumers, whenever we have the financial wherewithal, we rely on an increasing number of specialists to help us with our needs. In war, we form alliances for very specific advantages. In business, more and more companies understand that to truly succeed in our global and networked economy, growth and profits come through true partnerships with all our varied constituencies.

Indeed, many businesspeople are realizing that significant financial benefits accrue through collaborative relationships with other businesses. And increasingly companies are finding that the best strategy is to collaborate with their customers in the design, development, and delivery of their market basket of goods and services.

So not surprisingly, many businesses have essentially made collaboration their new corporate mandate. It’s as if all you need to do is implement software that allows you to conduct "collaborative commerce" and you’re on the road to success. However, it is our view that to be effective, collaboration requires both a mindset nurtured and developed by an entrepreneurial focus on the customer and the support of technology that provides realtime information and measurements. Collaboration must have a clearly defined purpose. Collaboration driven just by the ability of tools or by the management concept du jour results only in costly failures. Unfortunately, based on what we see and hear, in too many instances it is the superficial approach that is being taken.

Since writing Collaborative Communities, we have worked with dozens of companies to develop collaborative business models, all the while building our own Collaborative Community. And whether using the entrepreneurial clean sheet of paper to start a new business or iterating an xisting business model, we have observed and experienced firsthand the myriad challenges to building a collaborative business.

Lately, we’ve stepped back from all the details to think about what we’ve learned. More than anything else, we realize that what separates the successful from the unsuccessful is the ability to build trusting, purposeful, mutually beneficial relationships. Of course, like you, We’ve always known that relationships are important in business. What we hadn’t appreciated is that in addition to requiring a lot of hard work, successful collaborative relationships require an analytical and disciplined approach.

Like many things in life, some people have an in-born, intuitive ability to build trusting, win-win relationships both in business and in their personal life. However, for the majority of us, this ability isn’t programmed into our DNA. For us, the ability to build trusting relationships requires understanding and practice. With understanding and practice, we, too, can develop this ability.

And that’s fortunate because now, more than ever, we need to work collaboratively to better understand our customers’ changing needs and take aggressive action to profitably meet those needs. Indeed, the necessity to work across traditional boundaries with like-minded people to achieve shared goals and the benefit from doing so have never been greater. But how do you truly evaluate which relationships are the right relationships to develop and nurture?

This book identifies and describes how you build, measure, and manage successful collaborative relationships. We call this skill Purposeful Collaboration and have methodically spelled out the step-by-step process it follows. Further, we have used the detailed description of that process to develop several analog and digital tools that, when coupled with your growing understanding, empower you to successfully build and maintain collaborative relationships.

Once you have developed the ability to trade in relationship currencies, you can focus your limited resources on those relationships that provide you the greatest benefit and offer the fastest return. Very simply, it’s how you do business in the era of collaborative business.

Customer Reviews

Business rules are now changing for the better!
Finally, an innovative method for entrepreneurs and business professionals alike. It's about time someone has come up with a method that makes sense.
Shuman and Twombly have developed and innovative method for measuring and managing the value in your business relationships. It sounds obvious at first however; their methodology shows you how to systematically work towards making each interaction a win-win situation.
This method is of significant value for entrepreneurs. In today's economy start-ups are having a hard time obtaining funding. Everyone Is A Customer show how entrepreneurs can start-up a business with less money than one would expect.
Business professionals will also receive value from this as the traditional way of doing business has died. More companies need to be customer focused and this can only be achieve by win-win relationships between your company's community and their customers.
I highly recommend reading this book, as it will open your eyes to a different yet common sense way of doing business.

Breakthrough Perspectives on "The Customer"
Two of the most celebrated teams were comprised of the animators at the Disney Studies who produced the first feature-length animated film (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs) and the team of physicists at Los Alamos who designed the first atomic bomb (dropped above Hiroshima and then Nagasaki). Most other teams receive no publicity although what they contribute is of great importance to their respective organizations. With the assistance of David Rottenberg, Jeffrey Shuman wrote The Rhythm of Business in which he asserts that each organization evolves in often unpredictable ways and to an extent takes on a life of its own. The challenge for decision-makers is to recognize that "rhythm" and then ensure that everyone involved is in "harmony" with it. Later, again assisted by Rottenberg, Shuman co-authored Collaborative Communities with Janice Twombley. In it, they correctly explain why and how communication, cooperation, and collaboration are essential to the effectiveness of teamwork. No news there. What differentiates their book from so many others is that they define "community" so as to include literally anyone who is directly and even indirectly associated with a given organization.

In this volume, Shuman and Twombley develop in much greater depth several of the ideas which were introduced in the previous book. For example, they explain how and why an organization's effective communication, cooperation, and collaboration can nourish and indeed strengthen its relations with customers. In fact, according to them, literally anyone associated directly or even indirectly with that organization must be viewed -- and treated -- as a customer. Moreover, they introduce and then explain a proven method for measuring the value of every relationship, both within and beyond the organization.

Shuman and Twombley carefully organize their material within three Parts: The Era of Collaborative Business, Purposeful Collaboration, and Choreographing Your Success. They agree with Drucker's admonition that "you increasingly have to think through what relationships make the most sense -- the customer is the most important relationship." The challenge is to identify all customers, classify them according to the nature of their relationship with the given organization, and then determine with meticulous care their relative importance to the organization's own objectives. This is an on-going process, requiring both rigorous vigilance and absolute precision, because the relative value of customers can increase or diminish and do so suddenly and unexpectedly. Shuman and Twombley explain HOW to design, implement, and then monitor this process by guiding their reader through it (literally) step-by-step. Throughout the book, they also provide dozens of "Figures" which graphically support key points. For example, Figure 8.2 illustrates the "Relationship Scenario Matrix" whereas Figure 10.1 illustrates the "Purposeful Collaboration Process." Shuman and Twombley are well aware of all the risks involved. They identify them and then suggest how to avoid them or at least minimize their impact on the value measurement process.

Obviously I think highly of this book. I also have a healthy respect for the difficulty of applying Shuman and Twombley's ideas. My own rather experience suggests that most people do not fear change; rather, they fear the unknown. Hence the importance of effective communications and the even greater importance of getting everyone actively involved in the process, but only after they fully understand what the objectives are as well as why those objectives are important, not only to the organization but also to every individual within that organization. I also agree with Drucker about customer relationships while presuming to suggest that the value of those relationships is almost entirely dependent on those employees (or if you prefer, associates) within the organization who interact with customers.

Near the end of the film Spartacus, the Roman general Marcus Licinius Crassus (played by Laurence Olivier) and his slave master Lentulus Batiatus (played by Peter Ustinov) walk among the survivors of the defeated gladiator army looking for Spartacus. They are told that unless they identify him or his body, they will be crucified. One by one, they stand up proclaiming "I am Spartacus!" I recalled that scene as I finished reading this book. It is not enough merely to measure the value of customers. That value must also be sustained, preferably increased. When a corporation (let's call it OmniGlobal InternationaI) achieves both, every one of its people can proudly proclaim "I am OGI!"

In fact, from a customer's perspective, anyone with whom she or he interacts in an organization IS that organization, for better or worse.

Reshaping A Business To Meet Customer Needs
"Everyone Is A Customer"(2002) is a companion book to last year's "Collaborative Communities"(2001), which taken together, present a realistic roadmap for companies interested in changing with the times. They build on Peter Drucker's insight that when a business thinks through the relationships that make the most sense, it is the customer they should focus on to increase sales and profits. According to authors Jeffrey Shuman and Janice Twombly with David Rottenberg, This well written and insightful book, takes the reader step-by-step through an understanding of what it takes for a business owner to survive, innovate and prosper in the new era of collaborative business that relies so heavily on the networking of relationships to succeed.

The authors urge business owners to recognize the natural process of change that takes place once a business is started, resulting in the unforseen development of new products,new service, and new customers. They call this process the "rhythm of business." For companies and business owners interested in better understanding the expectations of their customres and what it takes to succeed in today's economy, this book is highly recommended.