What will be different about the firm of the future?
Some companies become synonymous with an era and help to define its characteristics. General Motors—the first company to create a multidivisional structure—exemplified the “professional management” era. GE, with its stock price rising nearly forty-fold under Jack Welch, typified the shareholder primacy era. Today, it is tech-based disrupters such as Google, Facebook, Tencent, Tesla, Alibaba and Amazon—as well more established companies like Vanguard, Starbucks, Haier and LEGO—that symbolize the emerging era. In their own ways, they each exemplify a new firm objective: to compete using the benefits of scale and the benefits of customer intimacy.
This is a change from the past. A long-held central belief of strategy has been that you can be big and low cost, or you can be focused and differentiated—but not both. Studies of dozens of industries have shown practically no correlation between scale leadership and leadership in customer advocacy. In fact, sometimes it’s an inverse relationship—that is, the bigger the firm is in its industry, the less likely it is to be the customer advocacy leader. But what if you could drive scale and experience and, at the same time, learn quickly what customers want and react to their changing preferences? Today, new technologies and analytic techniques are making it possible to minimize or eliminate the traditional trade-off.
Although it is enabled by technology, this change is not just about the tech sector. Nordstrom, the $14 billion apparel retailer long famous for its strong customer advocacy, has grown its revenue by 50% over the past five years in part through a series of investments to get even closer to customers. These include software that allows store associates to communicate with customers via texts and the purchase of Trunk Club, a personal shopping service. Starbucks delivers intimacy through the baristas at the front line while investing in a superior mobile experience, personalization and value based on loyalty program insights. Vanguard, the mutual fund giant, has combined large scale with technology and a focused, repeatable business model to drive down the cost of direct and advised investing. Its industry-leading Net Promoter Score® is based on a rigorous customer insights system and increased investments in frontline service. Figure 1 shows three more examples of firms that enjoy high relative market share and high rates of customer advocacy. Green shoots such as these show that even established companies are learning to transcend the traditional split between scale and intimacy—and to master both.
Underlying the historic trade-off between scale and intimacy is another very real tension—this one between size and speed. A seemingly constant truism for corporations has been that scale matters —particularly scale relative to your competition. Relative market share, properly defined, has been highly correlated with profitability and return on capital in most industries.
For firms of the future, scale will still offer potential benefits. But the dynamics of scale are changing. First, it is now possible even for small firms to access the benefits of scale without owning assets or capabilities themselves. Amazon Web Services, Salesforce, Workday and ServiceNow are at the forefront of a new wave of cloud-based capabilities that others can rent for a price. Second, the importance of speed relative to scale has increased across multiple fronts: time to market, time to gather and learn from feedback, time to make and execute decisions. Speed is now essential to customer intimacy. If people in customer-facing roles can make quick decisions and continuously improve their products and services, they will outstrip competitors. Third, just as digital technology and changing consumer expectations are pushing organizations to raise their metabolic rate, size often gets in the way. Bain & Company studies of organizational fitness reveal that companies with more than $25 billion in sales are more likely to be slower at decision making than their smaller competitors.
The experience curve was an essential tool for realizing the benefits of size: With more scale and experience comes the opportunity to decrease your costs. But firms of the future will have to develop a new kind of experience curve, one that takes speed as well as scale into account. They will need metrics that track their metabolic rate. They will need systems of operation that allow teams to work quickly on a specific problem, solve it and move on, rather than staying trapped inside annual planning and activity cycles. One sign of the pressure companies already feel to speed up is the rapid spread of Agile methods from IT departments to other parts of organizations. For example, National Public Radio now employs Agile tools to create new programming, John Deere to develop new machines and Saab to produce new fighter jets. Agile burndown charts are a rough-and-ready metric that lets teams see how fast they are working. One John Deere unit using Agile techniques compressed innovation cycle times for its next-generation tractors by as much as 75%.
Achieving full potential from such methods requires robust organizational learning systems, and some of the best ones are peer-to-peer. At Enterprise Rent-A-Car, the branch makes most of the key decisions that affect customer satisfaction; branch managers have great discretion to add or change features to improve the service experience, and they have the responsibility to follow up with dissatisfied customers. High-impact ideas are shared from branch to branch: Famously, a complimentary cold bottle of water in the shuttle bus, implemented independently by a driver in one airport branch, led to significant improvements in customer advocacy. News spread quickly via an all-branch phone call, and within 72 hours, every branch had made water bottles part of its service.
What this could look like in 2027: Firms will combine big data, which will be pervasive, with human intelligence from frontline interactions with customers, and the resulting information will all be instantly visible throughout the company. Transactional activity will be almost entirely automated; algorithms and machine learning will simultaneously reduce the need for routine interactions while opening up new avenues for customer engagement. Cloud-based service firms will become the default providers of back- and middle-office functions, dramatically shrinking the size of the average firm. Some firms will create enormous variety, with each offering carefully tailored to target customers—who may not even know they are dealing with the same large company. Products, services and experiences will blur.