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The articles are a collection of recent work. You can access more complete thought and commentary in the various books listed below. All the articles remain (c) Steve Towers however do feel free to distribute and circulate to friends and colleagues within your own company. If you have a specific requirement please get in touch here. The articles and much more are syndicated through BP Group (www.bpgroup.org) and other partners from this link.
At the foot of the page there's a list of Steve's preferred sources of information in terms of news, magazines and business references.
Steve's work is featured in several journals and is noted for his pragmatic and sometimes outspoken style.
He keynotes, speaks and workshops at leading Conferences and seminars around the world - this is a sample listing from 2007 (pdf)
| BOOKS |
Steve has authored and collaborated on more then a dozen books since 1993 including these below.
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Thrive
The world's leading companies now look outward to emphasize a deep understanding of their customers, and what it takes to make their customers successful. They have come to realize that only when their customers are successful, will they be successful. These leading companies are intent on achieving Successful Customer Outcomes - everywhere, all the time.
Buy Here Now
Similar books from a non business perspective that we can heartily recommend (and are inspiring many of our great business and political leaders) include:
Blink - Malcolm Gladwell
A Whole New Mind - Daniel Pink |
A short book featuring a series of mini case studies. |
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-- Five unstoppable drivers transforming competition -- Sixteen new realities of business -- Thirteen concrete strategies you'll want to consider as you chart your future |
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Extreme Competition
Peter Fingar researched and brought many of us together to review the emerging 'Outside-In' world.
A wake-up call before it is too late.
"Extreme Competition shows in concrete detail how old assumptions and business models are being rapidly obliterated by the rise of India and China and the negation of time and distance by the Internet and global supply chain management. This is the definitive guide to business success in the new age of total global competition".
Clyde Prestowitz, President, Economic Strategy Institute,and author of Three Billion New Capitalists
Buy Here Now
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MAGAZINES
Steve's writing his featured in many journals and magazines. You can link to a sample here including Features in Business Management, Harvard Review, EA Magazine, Finance Today and CXO.
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The latest book - Customer Expectation Management
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Seemingly simple ideas are often the most powerful, and the hardest to uncover. In the 20th century, it was Peter Drucker's Management by Objectives. In the 21st century, it's Management by Expectation. Authors Terry Schurter & Steve Towers reveal the simple, yet powerful, idea of defining your business, not in terms of the goods and services you provide, but in terms of "customer expectations."
Buy Here Now
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Business Process Reengineering - A Practical Handbook for Executives (1994)
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This was Steve's first book, published in 1994 and helped to introduce the world to the concept of Business Process Management
Now a 'special print' (Amazon) however available on Special Order to educational establishments
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ARTICLES
The articles are syndicated and appear in a number of websites and publications. BP Group (www.bpgroup.org) have syndicated rights and you can visit pieces from Steve and other thought leaders at BP Group (www.bpgroup.org)
Listed here are some recent work:
Gilead Systems Wins the Triple Crown - April 10, 2008
Gilead Systems wins the Triple Crown – simultaneously improving revenues, reducing costs and enhancing service.
As Business Week puts it in the prelude to this years review of the top 50 performers in Standard and Poors 500 stock index “for many years pharmaceutical companies viewed the development of HIV treatments as a necessary – but unprofitable – public service. There was some logic to that view, given that the majority of victims lived in developing nations and were unable to pay what drug makers could earn from selling other products. But Gilead Systems had a different perspective". . {...}
HerculesX Part 2 of 3 - March 25, 2008
In PartOne of this three part article we reviewed the factors driving transformational change and how the old ‘inside-out’ approach to business is about as useful as a steam engine in getting to the moon. In Part two we’ll look at how some of the world leading trend setter companies are embracing the new outside-in challenge and creating new powerful business models driven by advanced forms of BPM such as the Customer Expectation Management Method (CEMM). . {...}
HerculesX Part 1 of 3 - March 8, 2008
The world of business is undergoing dramatic change. Driven by a number of factors organizations are needing to realign themselves to adapt and evolve. This transformation is global and reaches into every business sector impacting how companies create, deliver and sustain their products and services. {...}
CEMM, Lean & Six Sigma - February 21, 2008
It’s a confusing world out there. At the last count there were over 6,000 improvement methodologies (Wikipedia) all geared to helping organizations get better at business. So at least there’s always been plenty of choice depending on your particular flavor of the month however one has to ask the question why so many and why do even the better ones fail to help our companies adapt and change?. {...} |
Emirates to optimize critical Moment of Truth - - February 13, 2008
By 2011, according to the International Air Traffic Association (IATA) there will be 4.75 billion airline passengers a year. In other words that’s the equivalent of 3 out of every 4 people on the planet taking a flight in one year, and everyone of those trips involves an average of 1.6 bags per person – that is 7.6 billion bags a year. {...} |
Breakthrough in Creating the Management & Enterprise system - February 6, 2008
Best in class processes won’t lead to success without the right strategic objectives. And yet creating strategic objectives has largely been the work of management teams often distant from the scene of real work, where the organization actually touches the customer, at the place where the products and services create the value that translates into revenue and profit. Having strategic objectives and best in class processes {...} |
Business Transformation - Are you onboard? - February 1, 2008
The world of business is undergoing dramatic change. Driven by a number of factors organizations are needing to realign themselves to adapt and evolve. This transformation is global and reaches into every business sector impacting how companies create, deliver and sustain their products and services. {...} |
Don't give the Customer what they think they want - January 11, 2008
It is pretty much accepted wisdom these days that companies should be customer focused. It is however unfortunate that most companies go the wrong way about this by asking their customers what they want. Customers describe their requirements in terms of products and services which when the company builds and delivers them are not desired or bought. Henry Ford put it very well {...} |
The Evolution of Business Process Excellence - November 23,, 2007
| A theme of recent global conferences has been the mix of different approaches to improving business performance. This quest for business performance improvement as measured by reducing costs, improving revenues and enhanced service (also known as ‘the triple crown’) is a worldwide phenomena brought on by increasing competition, greater customer promiscuity, chaotic business cycles and more generally ‘globalization’. [...] |
The Causes of Work - October 20th, 2007
| For Every Customer Interaction is a Moment of Truth (MOT). Whether it’s person to person, person to system, system to person, system to system or person to product they are all Causes of Work. [...] |
Lord Nelson and the Successful Outcome - September 24, 2007
Horatio Nelson is one of the greatest heros in British history, an honor he earned by defeating Napoleon’s fleet in the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar. His victory at sea over the French fleet ultimately proved to be the start of the end of the Napoleon era, which finished with another famous battle at Waterloo in 1815.
So what has Lord Nelson got to do with SCO’s? To answer that question we need to understand ... more |
Simply Magic - August 22, 2007
The article last week 'The World of Magic' resulted in a series of questions around ‘what is the SCO?¨. Well as it is so often said it isn’t rocket science. In fact it has to be one of the simplest concepts available in business today – and yet so often missed. It is often so simple it is elegant, so let’s review what Disneys SCO might just be...
Most of us have been there. A car full of screaming kids eager to start their Disney vacation however trouble is you’ve driven six hours |
The Customer is the Only boss - (Featured in Change Jobs - thanks to Anthony Madigan - page 18-19) August 20th, 2007
| There is only one boss - the customer [...] |
Successful Customer Outcomes (SCO's) and the world of magic - August 10th, 2007
For many of us talking and acting the SCO way has become second nature.That means if you are eating and breathing the alignment of your processes towards SCO’s then progressively the original focus begins to shift and in fact we refine and sharpen our ability both to meet and subsequently exceed customer expectations. That’s precisely what is happening in the magic kingdom [...] |
What is it about the Chief Strategy Officer? - August 6th, 2007
| There seems to be a pattern emerging whereby the veterans of business process management are jumping ship. A few weeks ago we saw Gartners leading light and some say inspiration Jim Sinur joining Global360, noted BPM software company as Chief Strategy Officer. Interesting that as Jon Pyke [...] |
Put on Your Running Shoes - the launch of the Nipple?
Achieving Successful Customer Outcomes (SCO’s) is not just an internal exercise. Powerful SCO’s may be created through partnerships with otherwise completely different industries. Look at your services and products through the customers eyes and powerful market winning solutions emerge. Such is the tie up between Nike and Apple recently. A combination of products - the Apple [...] |
Mastering the SCO Mindset - Part 2
The second generation of "Mastering the SCO Mindset" share many things in common with those mentioned in our first article. They are all believers in their cause, they know how to communicate those beliefs in such a way as to inspire others and they are great leaders. The difference is that the second generation did [...] |
How low flying airlines can reach a new service altitude
Reach a New Service Altitude In recent times I have talked about Successful Customer Outcomes (SCOs), those things that we should seek out on behalf of our customers to ensure we deliver and exceed their expectations. If we align our organizations to SCOs (rather than industrial age silos) we become slicker, more agile, and indeed more [...] |
Mastering the SCO Mindset
Our earlier articles around Successful Customer Outcomes and Next Practice talked about the importance of understanding what customers want, aligning the organization to these objectives, and delivering consistently. Here we want to concentrate on another element, one that is at least as important because it is one of the key enablers for making the changes [...] |
Three Steps to Heaven
Successful Customer Outcomes - Three Steps to Heaven? Take the Lift Just the other day I was standing in the lobby of a hotel waiting for the elavator to arrive. I had plenty of thinking time while I waited, and I was reminded of a great recent example of customer-focused innovation. I don't know whether your [...] |
New Answers to Old Questions
In the first article in this mini-series I talked about how the most successful organizations of the moment are using new thinking to take the lead in their industries. In this second article I want to look at how other organizations can start to make the changes they need to keep up. One of the key [...] |
Successful Customer Outcomes - New Thinking for a New Age
Two items of business news have caught my eye recently: Tesco's latest results, cementing their place as the number one online retailer in the world and number one food retailer in the UK; and the start of the latest Stelios venture, easyCruise. Now there may not seem to be much to connect these two stories [...] |
Delivering Customer Service to reduce costs, improve revenue and enhance Service
"There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else". Sam Walton, founder Walmart. And never has there been a time when this is more true. Competition, globalization, conformance, complexity are all things forcing us to look at how work [...] |
Customer Age thinking - the changing face of Public Service
In many countries, the phrase public service is considered something of an anachronism. At all levels of government and government led services, customers perceive that overall they get a raw deal when compared to the levels of service they now regularly expect from privately held organizations. In this article we will explore how Customer Age [...] |
A very old question, a very new Answer
| At a recent senior executive seminar we were discussing the theme of Successful Customer Outcomes (SCO) and one question which cut to the quick deserves more after thought. Picture a dark, dingy Victorian meeting room in central London, the sleet slapping against the windows and it is late on a winter's afternoon. The bright spot? [...] |
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And here are some published articles from earlier this decade
Management Fads
Some dumb stuff from Harvard? Never.
Silicon Valley Management Style
A review of amongst other things HP's approach
The Process Management Office
Co-ordinating those big hairy projects?
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Steve’s favourite business related
RESOURCES
Review some of the clients Here
If you would like to know get in touch here Contact
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