The Difference Between Customer and Business Excellence

Gary Whitehair, over at High Performance Business, offered a tip about this article on View from the Mountain, titled "Finding the right balance in the workplace."

The essence:

• Building a great company is not an easy challenge.
• The balance that a leader has to strike is the real challenge in creating a great company.

At Six Disciplines, our research shows that to build a great company -- one that will lead, learn and last -- you need to understand the difference between customer excellence and business excellence.

• Customer excellence looks at attributes that the qualities that are important to customers (e.g., taste, finish, response time, quality, price, atmosphere, service, etc.)
• Business excellence looks at a different set of attributes (e.g., sales growth, profitability, predictability, leadership, etc.)

BOTTOMLINE: Your organization puts into place a number of processes to ensure a degree of customer excellence (great products or services.) For lasting business excellence, you need to make the transition to building an organization that learns how to make great products or services. It's what we call "business-building" - that's what Six Disciplines is all about.