Strategic planning, in many companies, consists of annual treks to resorts for two days of planning and one day of golf. These strategy "retreats" often produce impressive, bound plans, which tend to collect dust on the bookshelves of managers throughout the company. The net impact on the business is obviously nil. Despite this annual performance gap, developing a dynamic operating strategy is essential to the survival and success of every enterprise. It's also critical for companies to develop a viable strategy by creating customer-driven plans, focused on consistently delivering value to the customer in every aspect of a company's operation. Customer-Driven Strategy takes you beyond the traditional approaches to planning and strategy implementation. It brings the reality of delivering value to your customers into the essential aspects of your business. It helps you to create, implement, and manage a flexible, dynamic plan that's committed to your customer. Tom Wallace shows how to develop this customer-driven perspective by implementing a holistic, fully integrated strategic approach in the following areas: initiating a customer-driven planning process; leveraging continuous-improvement initiatives; developing innovative approaches in high performance work teams; creating a learning environment that fosters constant innovation; maximizing the market impact of new products; using planning and control systems to their greatest potential; sustaining new partnerships with suppliers for competitive advantage; developing accurate, effective performance measures; and implementing customer-driven strategies for the maximum benefit of the business - and your customers. Packed with practicaladvice and guidelines, Customer-Driven Strategy gives you the proven tools and techniques to realize significant improvements in your company's operations - today. In addition, you can learn how Hewlett Packard, Steelcase, Tellabs, and other companies dramatically improved their performance through customer-focused strategic planning.