Aligning the Organization with the Market: Focusing on ’The Customer’s Total Experience’

When Lou Gerstner became chief executive of IBM in the early 1990s Big Blue was on a course to be broken up into smaller companies each responsible for separate IBM business units such as PCs software and the like. But Gerstner concluded the strategy was ”wrong-headed” because it was contrary to the wishes of customers according to Wharton marketing professor George Day. Rather than assemble their computer systems from a variety of vendors customers wanted help putting everything together. So IBM embarked on a multi-year journey to align its organization with the marketplace. For IBM the experiment was successful. But in a forthcoming paper titled ”Aligning the Organization with the Market ” Day reports on a survey that found only mixed results among 347 medium- to large-size firms that attempted customer-focused reorganizations.

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