The only profit center of a business is a customer whose check hasn’t bounced.
Strategy has to be based on information about markets, customers, and noncustomers, about technology in one’s own industry and others’, about worldwide finance, and about the changing world economy. For that is where the results are. Inside an organization there are only cost centers.
Major changes always start outside an organization. A retailer may know a great deal about the people who shop at its stores. But no matter how successful, no retailer ever has more than a small fraction of the market as its customers; the great majority are noncustomers. It is always with noncustomers that basic changes begin and become significant. At least half of the important new technologies that have transformed an industry in the past fifty years came from outside the industry itself.
ACTION POINT: Set up a system for your organization to collect and organize relevant information on the environment, including information about markets, customers, noncustomers, and technology in and outside of your industry.
Management Challenges for the 21st Century
* Source: The Daily Drucker by Peter F. Drucker