Sunday, June 05, 2005

"The World Is Flat" 2 - the "self-directed consumer"

I wrapped up my reading of this powerful "brief history of the twenty-first century"; there's just so much I could report to you. But one thought from Thomas L. Friedman is on my mind today, largely because so much of our current work is web-related.

In the Part 2 section, the chapter "How Companies Cope," Friedman identifies his "Rule #3: And the big shall act small... One way that big companies learn to flourish in the flat world is by learning how to act really small by enabling their customers to act really big."

Companies that collaborate with their customers - Friedman identifies Starbucks, E*Trade and others - compete better because they make "their busienss, as much as possible into a buffet. These companies create a platform that allows individual customers to serve themselves in their own way, at their own pace, in their own time, according to their own tastes. They are actually making their customers their employees and having them pay the company for that pleasure at the same time!"

This is my favorite: "Companies that were paying attention understood they were witnessing the birth of the 'self-directed consumer,' because the Internet...[has] created a means for every consumer to customize exactly the price, experience, and service he or she wanted."

I'm thinking of PerryGolf and the way PG's "Plan Your Own Tour" allows the customer to do his own trip, from courses to hotels to pricing. Cool. In fact, I noticed that Gordon Dalgleish, one of the PerryGolf founders, also wrote about Friedman's book on his latest blog. Gordon writes about his company's lack of legacy systems, which might have kept Perry from doing all it does now in the area of customer service.

Drop your legacy systems. Read this book.

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