“It helps to be as helpful as you can be”
Rolls-Royce now earns MORE from tasks such as managing clients’ overall procurement strategies and maintaining aerospace engines it sells than it does from making them.
Thus the quintessential lumpy object producer, akin to yesteryear’s IBM, principally becomes a services-added company that also happens to make lumpy objects.
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Twenty years ago, IDEO sat atop or near the top of the list of product design firms. Their creativity was so high that clients begged them to teach “the IDEO” way of design. IDEO did just that. But as their clients viewed IDEO’s continuing string of successes and ever-higher profile, they became interested in a higher order issue – IDEO’s fundamental approach to innovating. Next thing you knew, IDEO was doing systematic, strategic, culture change work giant enterprises on the overall process of innovation.
Climb that services-added ladder…
Tom Peters – the Excellence Dividend